What does a life depend upon? And from whom do I beg forgiveness so quietly I’m never heard? With its remarkable colors and aftertastes, the wine, dry as wit, urges me to forgive myself. I try.
Life’s aim, Freud thought, was death. I can’t know this, but maybe it’s death I want, since living comes with its own exigencies, like terror. In dreams, nothing dies, but birth can’t be trusted, either. I remember terrible dreams and not just my own. Memory is what everyone talks about these days. Will we remember, and what will we remember, who will be written out, ignored, or obliterated. Someone could say: They never existed. It’s a singular terror.
The names of the dead have to be repeated daily. To forget them has a meaning no one understands, but there comes a time when the fierce pain of their absence dulls and their voices become so faint they can’t be heard.
And then what do the living mean by being alive, how dare we? The year changes, the millennium, and from one day to the next, something must have been discarded, or neglected, something was abandoned, left to wither or ruin. You didn’t decide to forget. People make lists, take vitamins, and they exercise. I bend over, over and over.
I’m not good at being a pawn of history.
The news reports that brain cells don’t die. I never believed they did. The tenaciousness of memory, its viciousness really — witness the desire over history for revenge — has forever been a sign that the brain recovers. But it’s unclear what it recovers.
Try to hang on to what you can. It’s all really going. So am I. Someone else’s biography seems like my life. I read it and confuse it with my own. I watch a movie, convinced it happened to me. I suppose it did happen to me. I don’t know what I think anymore. I don’t know what I don’t think. I’m someone who tells things.
Once, I wanted to locate movie footage of tidal waves. They occurred in typical dreams. But an oceanographer told me that a tidal wave was a tsunami, it moved under the ocean and couldn’t be seen. This bothered me for a long time. I wondered what it was that destroyed whole villages, just washed them away. In dreams, I’m forced to rescue myself. This morning’s decision: let life rush over me. The recurring tidal wave is not about sexual thralldom, not the spectacular orgasm, not the threat of dissolution and loss of control through sex — that, too — but a wish to be overcome by life rather than to run it. To be overrun.
I don’t believe any response, like invention, is sad. The world is made up of imagining. I imagine this, too. Things circle, all is flutter. Things fall down and rise up. Hope and remorse, beauty and viciousness, and imagination, wherever it doggedly hides, unveil petulant realities. I live in my mind, and I don’t. There’s scant privacy for bitterness or farting or the inexpressible; historically, there was an illusion of privacy. Illusions are necessary. The wretched inherit what no one wants.
What separates me from the world? Secret thoughts?
What Americans fear is the inability to have a world different from their fathers’ and mothers’. That’s why we move so much, to escape history.
Margaret Fuller said: I accept the universe. I try to embrace it. But I leave it to others to imagine the world in ways I can’t.
I leave it to others.
Out of nothing comes language and out of language comes nothing and everything. I know there will be stories. Certainly, there will always be stories.
Publication History
“Chartreuse” in Cabinet 12 Fall/Winter 2003, Brooklyn, NY
“Give Us Some Dirt,” in Bald Ego, Vol 1, #2, Fall 2003, New York, NY pp. 52-3
“The Original Impulse,” in Electric Literature #6, Dec. 2010
“A Greek Story,” in Crowd, Vol 7 # 1, ed. Samantha Hunt, Brooklyn NY, Fall 2006, pp. 14–15.
“That’s How Wrong My Love Is,” in The Happy Hypocrite: Hunting and Gathering, Issue 2, ed. Maria Fusco, fall 2008, Bookworks, London, pp. 49–52.
“Playing Hurt,” in Conjunctions #47, Bard College, Annandale on Hudson, NY, 2006, pp. 341-5.
“Lunacies,” in Luna Luna in the Sky, Will you make me Laugh or Cry? Ed.
Steven Hull, Nothingmoments Press, Los Angeles, 2009, pp. 109–111.
“The Way We Are,” Black Warrior Review, Vol. 33 Num. 2, Spring/Summer 2007, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, pp. 127-9.
“Madame Realism’s Conscience,” Mr. President (catalogue), exhibition,
The University Art Museum, The University at Albany, Spring 2007, pp. 7-13.
“Impressions of An Artist, with Haiku: A Portrait of Peter Dreher,” PETER DREHER: Tag Um Tag Guter Tag (Every day is a good day), modo Verlag GmbH, Freiburg, 2008, pp. 54–55.
“Love Sentence” (novella), American Imago, 50-3, Fall 1993, pp. 255–275; revised and reprinted, LOVE SENTENCE (chapbook), drawings: TamiDemaree, design: Emily CM Anderson, Nothing Moments Press, 2007.
“More Sex,” in Black Clock, ed. Steve Erickson, #7, fall 2007, California Institute of the Arts, 2 pages (unnumbered).
“Other Movies,” Binational catalogue, Boston: ICA and Museum of Fine Art, October 1988; reprinted, in LIFE AS WE SHOW IT: Writing on Film, ed. Masha Tupitsyn and Brian Pera, San Francisco, City Lights Books, 2009, pp.13–22.
“A Simple Idea,” in The Literary Review, ed. Rene Steinke, Spring 2002, Fairleigh Dickinson University, NJ, vol. 45, 3, pp. 453-6.
“Save Me from the Pious and the Vengeful,” in New York Writes After September 11, ed. Ulrich Baer, New York University Press, New York and London, 2002, pp. 294-6; reprinted, in PEN America, “Fear Itself,” issue # 10, ed. M. Mark, New York 2009, pp. 193-4.
“Letter” (“Letter to Ollie”), in McSweeney’s 8, ed. Paul Maliszewski, New York, 2002, pp. 17–19.
“The Substitute,” in Strictly Casual, ed. Amy Prior, Serpent’s Tail, London, 2003, pp.
“Later,” in Black Clock 2, ed. Steve Erickson, published by California Institute of Art, Fall 2004, pp. 106-7.
“The Recipe,” in Orit Raff: Insatiable (monograph), Daniella De-Nur-Publishers, Tel Aviv, Spring 2005, pp. 69–76; revised and reprinted,
“The Recipe,” in This Is Not Chick Lit, ed. Elizabeth Merrick, Random House, NY, 2006, pp. 298–309.
“The Shadow of Doubt,” in Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology, and the Paranormal, eds. Mark Alice Durant and Jane D. Marsching, in Cultural Theory 9, published by the Center for Art and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, UMBC, 2006.
“But There’s A Family Resemblance,” in Shoot the Family, ed. Ralph Rugoff, ICI, New York, 2006, pp. 54–61.
“The Unconscious is Also Ridiculous,” in Black Clock #12, ed. Steve Erickson, California Institute of the Arts, November 2010, 2 pages (unnumbered).
About the Author
Lynne Tillman is the author of five novels, three collections of short stories, one collection of essays, and two other nonfiction books. She collaborates often with artists and writes regularly on culture, and her fiction is anthologized widely. Her last collection of short stories, This Is Not It, included twenty-three stories based on the work of twenty-two contemporary artists. Her novels include American Genius, A Comedy (2006), No Lease on Life (1998), which was a New York Times Notable Book of 1998 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Cast in Doubt (1992), Motion Sickness (1991), and Haunted Houses (1987). The Broad Picture (1997) collected Tillman’s essays, which were published in literary and art periodicals. She is the fiction editor at Fence Magazine, professor and writer-in-residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany, and a recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.