But was I interested in experimenting with my own body, strapping down my boobs and packing my pants? Did I want to live as a man? No. What interested me were perceptions and their mutability, the fact that we mostly see what we expect to see. Didn’t the Harry I saw in the mirror change enough as it was? I often wondered if I could truly see myself at all. One day I found myself all-right-looking and relatively slim — for me, that is — and the next day I saw a sagging, bulbous grotesque. How could one account for the change except with the thought that self-image is unreliable at best? No, I wanted to leave my body out of it and take artistic excursions behind other names, and I wanted more than a “George Eliot” as cover. I wanted my own indirect communications à la Kierkegaard, whose masks clashed and fought, works in which the ironies were thick and thin and nearly invisible. Where would I find a Victor Eremita, an A and a B, a Judge William, a Johannes de Silentio, a Constantin Constantius, a Vigilius Haufniensis, a Nicolaus Notabene, a Hilarius Bookbinder, an Inter et Inter, a Johannes Climacus, and an Anti-Climacus all my own?V How such transformations could be achieved in my case was fuzzy at best: no more than mental doodles, but I found them fertile.
Hadn’t S.K., under his pseudonym Notabene, written a series of prefaces that were followed by no text?VI What if I invented an artist who was all art criticism, all catalogue copy, and no work? How many artists, after all, had been catapulted into importance by drivel written by all those hacks who had taken the linguistic turn? Ah, écriture! The artist would have to be a young man, an enfant terrible whose emptiness generates page after page after page of text. Oh, the fun of it! I gave it a shot:
The aporia in the work of X is achieved through the processes of auto-induction into absence. The implied, hence invisible, autoerotic acts with a sexual origin facilitate an abysmal collapse, the phantasms of rupture and the withdrawal of the object of desire.
Dead end. I knew that manufacturing this pretentious, hackneyed prose would kill me.
I, Harriet Burden, hereby confess that my diverse fantasies were driven:
1. by a general desire for revenge against twits, dunderheads, and fools,
2. by an ongoing, wrenching intellectual isolation that resulted in loneliness because I roamed in too many books that no one could talk to me about,
3. by a growing sense that I had always been misunderstood and was madly begging to be seen, truly seen, but nothing I did made any difference.
In my frustration and misery I would wind myself up every day as if I were my old toy monkey with the cymbals, listen to myself crash them, and then, nota bene, I would cry and, when I cried, I would long for my mother, not the small dying mother in the hospital but the big mother of my childhood, who had held and rocked me and tutted and stroked and taken my temperature and read to me. Mommy’s girl, except Mommy was not oversized but short and curvy and wore high heels. Your father likes my legs in heels, you know. But then, after I had wailed for a while, I would remember the wet shine of two fallen tears on my mother’s shrunken cheeks and the IV in her blue-veined hand many years later. I did not say, You’ll get well, Mommy, because she would not get well. Who knows how long I’ll last? Not long. And yet in hospice, my mother fussed about the food, the sheets, her pajamas, the nurses. A week before she died, she asked me to open her purse and apply a little lipstick because she was too weak to do it herself, and when she lapsed into a morphine haze at the very end, I took out the gold tube and dabbed her thin mouth with the rose-colored stick.
Orphaned.
What I am trying to articulate is that my self-imposed exile in Red Hook was not uneventful from an internal point of view. Time was forever collapsing in on me. Dead and imaginary people played a larger part in my quotidian reality than the living did. I lurched backward to recover shreds of memory and forward to fashion an imaginary future. As for the actual breathing people in my life, I faithfully kept my weekly appointment with Dr. Fertig, with whom I was making “progress,” after which I would meet Rachel for tea or a glass of wine somewhere near her office on Park Avenue and Ninety-First, and the old intimacy between us never seemed to lessen even when we bickered and she accused me of being “obsessive.” Maisie worried about me. I could see it in her eyes, and she worried aloud about Aven and about Oscar, and I worried in turn that she would give up too much for the family and her own work would suffer, and Ethan wrote stories in cafés and ran his very small magazine, The Neo-Situationist Bugle, with Leonard Rudnitzky, his good friend from Oberlin. My son talked a lot about commodification and the spectacle and alienation and the visionary Guy Debord, who served as his Romantic hero.VII Ethan didn’t seem to understand the man’s hyperbole, only that his thought had come true on the Internet: Everything that was directly lived has moved into representation. What about a stomachache?
My son, the revolutionary, was secretive about his private life (girls) and, I feared, a little angry at me for taking on a new life at my age, which I suspected he viewed as vaguely indecent and something of a betrayal of his father’s memory, although he could not say it. He was, I’m afraid, alienated from himself. The little boy who used to hide in the closet with his stiff little figures and narrate their battles and truces had grown up. He could not remember his baby self and how his mother had walked him back and forth and jiggled and rocked him for hour after hour and had sung in his ear very softly because it had been so hard for him to settle into sleep. But then, none of us remembers infancy, that archaic age in the land of the mother giant.
Anton Tisch looked right. He was tall, almost my height, a skinny kid in loose jeans with a significant nose and searching eyes that seemed unable to fix on anything for long, which gave him a distracted air that could be interpreted as restless intelligence under the right circumstances. And he was an artist. I met him at Sunny’s in early ’97 on a very cold night. There was snow. I remember the rhythmic presence of cold air as the door opened and closed, the pounding of boots, and lamp-lit white beyond the window. I had the Barometer with me, ambulatory weather vane and exquisite draftsman, whom I had harbored for some weeks. Not only did the Barometer register every incremental rise and drop in air pressure through his bodily instrument — his preternaturally sensitive head — at some juncture he had actually gained control over this aspect of the environment and would lower or raise it by a hectopascal or two. I knew nothing of hectopascals until the Barometer entered my life, but I loved the term, named after Blaise, that genius of the much and the many. The Barometer and I got along rather well, although the man lived in a cocoon of his own making, and dialogue — true back-and-forth exchanges — was nearly impossible.
By then I had become a Sunny’s regular. In gratitude for services rendered and reliable camaraderie, I had presented the establishment with a framed ink drawing of the bar and some of its lurid and not-so-lurid characters, and the gift had been mounted on a wall. I mention this because Anton Tisch had paused in front of it. The vanity of the artist is such that I knew the identities of those who had even glanced at the small work in my presence — they were few indeed — and my happiness at the sight of the angular young man with short brown curls inspecting my rendition of Sunny’s knew no bounds, well, perhaps a few bounds, but it definitely swelled.