Which I may or may not have painted myself, incidentally, if I have not said.
Actually I have no recollection whatsoever of having painted that painting.
Still, ever since it turned up missing I have had the curious impression that I just could have.
Or at least that I certainly once imagined it as a painting that I might possibly paint but then did not.
Which is the sort of thing that a painter will now and again do, of course.
Or not do, rather.
But in which instance there could have scarcely been a painting for me to have lost after all, obviously.
Or would that have to mean that there might have been no life of Brahms and no atlas either, then?
Except that if there had not been any atlas how could I have once looked up Lititz, Pennsylvania, in it, on an occasion when I happened to be curious about Lititz, Pennsylvania?
And if there had not been any life of Brahms how could I have once lighted some torn-out pages from it on the beach and then tossed them into the air to see if the breeze might make them fly?
When I was trying to simulate seagulls?
Even if most of the pages happened to fall right next to me, as a matter of fact.
Because of having been printed on extraordinarily cheap paper, doubtless.
But so that there must have unquestionably once been a life of Brahms in this house.
And in which a part I always liked was when Clara Hepburn gave Ludwig Wittgenstein some sugar.
Although what I would really like to find even more than I would like to find the painting is my missing cat, to tell the truth.
Even if it is not really a cat and is not really missing, actually.
Well, being only Magritte, who used to be Vincent.
Which is to say that the tape would appear to have blown away from the outside of that broken window, being all.
Still, one had gotten to be quite fond of that frisky scratching.
Although even just to see some floating ash again would be agreeable, too.
Even if one would hardly go to the trouble to name some floating ash, on the other hand.
There is a numeral on the back of the soccer shirt, by the way.
Possibly it is a nine. Or a nineteen.
In fact it is two zeros.
Have I mentioned that I have taken to building fires down near the water, after my sunsets, incidentally?
I have taken to building fires down near the water, after my sunsets.
Now and again, too, looking at them from a distance, what I have done is to make believe for a little while that I am back at Hisarlik.
By which I really mean when Hisarlik was Troy, of course, and all of those years and years ago.
So that what I am more truthfully making believe is that the fires are Greek watchfires, where they have been lighted along the shore.
Well, that certainly being a harmless enough thing to make believe.
Oh. And I have been hearing The Alto Rhapsodyagain also, these days.
Which is to say the real Alto Rhapsodythis time, what with all of that having finally been sorted out.
Even if it is still hardly the real one either, naturally, being still only in my head.
But still.
And at any rate it is far too chilly this morning to be fretting about inconsequential perplexities of that sort.
In fact it is far too chilly to be typing here to begin with, actually.
Unless I might wish to move the typewriter closer to my potbellied stove, some way.
Although what I really ought to do before doing that is to go out to the spring again, to tell the truth.
Having completely forgotten about the rest of my laundry, which is spread across various bushes.
So that by now there could very well be some new skirt sculptures out there, even.
Even if Michelangelo would not think them that, but I think them that.
And even if I will more probably leave the rest of the laundry where it is until I am feeling less tired, on the other hand.
Doubtless I will not trouble to move the typewriter, either, when one comes down to that.
Once, I had a dream of fame.
Generally, even then, I was lonely.
To the castle, a sign must have said.
Somebody is living on this beach.
AFTERWORD
THE EXTRAORDINARY NOVEL you have presumably just finished reading almost didn't see the light of day. The sorry state of contemporary publishing emerges from this conversation between David Markson and critic Joseph Tabbi (from the Review of Contemporary Fiction'sspecial issue on Markson, summer 1990, from which the second half of this afterword is adapted). With self-deprecating humor — where sputtering outrage would have been fully justified — Markson tells Tabbi that he suspects Wittgenstein's Mistressset a record for the number of rejections it received:
For years, the highest number of turndowns I'd ever heard of was thirty-six, on The Ginger Man.Then I read in that Deirdre Bair biography that Murphyhad about forty-two. Ironweedhad a dozen, as I recall, and I once jokingly told Bill Kennedy while Wittgensteinwas going around that if rejections were any sign of quality, then mine was already twice as good as his. But then I left Donleavy and Beckett in the dust also.
JT: What sort of figure are we finally talking about?
DM: I almost hate to announce it. Fifty-four.
JT: For a novel that well thought of since? Wasn't one editor in fifty-four capable of seeing somethingin it?
DM: Obviously it wasn't all black and white. Oh, about a third of them didn't like it at all, and perhaps another third made it inadvertently evident that they didn't understand a word. And OK, you can't fault the totally negative responses — or the vapid ones either, since they pretty much correspond with the percentage of editors you know are C students to begin with. But it's the other third that really cause grief. I mean when the letters practically sound like Nobel Prize citations—"brilliant," "twenty years ahead of its time," "we're honored that you thought of us"..
JT: And?
DM: The predictable kicker, of course. It won't sell. Or worse, we couldn't get it past the salespeople. Actually acknowledging that those semiliterates don't simply participate in the editorial process, but dictate its decisions. God almighty.
I began corresponding with Markson in 1984, met him shortly after, and in the autumn of 1987 was allowed to read the manuscript of the novel. I loved it, and since I was just then talking with John O'Brien about joining his Dalkey Archive Press, I suggested that Markson send it there. That he did and, with no aesthetic obtuseness or commercial considerations hindering the process, the novel was immediately accepted and published the following May. It was widely and favorably reviewed, went through two printings in hardcover, then several more in paperback, and was published in England and (in translation) in Spain and France. The novel has been the subject of several scholarly essays and has become a staple of college classes in contemporary fiction (and even the occasional philosophy class). Fifty-four rejections.
At first glance, Wittgenstein's Mistressseems to have little in common with Markson's previous work — or anyone else's, for that matter. (The nearest precedent for it might be Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 story "The Yellow Wallpaper," also narrated in short paragraphs by a woman seesawing between sanity and madness, with a fertile if disordered imagination.) It has the least amount of dramatic activity of all of his novels, being (at the simplest level) the rambling meditations of a woman named Kate who seems to be the last person on earth. And yet it has the greatest amount of intellectual activity, being (at this level) one of the most profound investigations of episte-mology in literature and the best fictional illustration I know of Wittgenstein's proposition that "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."