Oh, of course. I know, you must be on your way.
I have tried your patience much too long in the name of our eloquent friendship. And there I was, I see it now, daring to encroach on grounds that should be wholly yours. But you know how an old man—or even one not so old—can babble on. You must be off?
So must I. So must I. The evening performance is at hand.
What?
You plan soon to send your students again to see us, just as you did last spring? Oh, you are too kind to an aging artist! You say it is their most pleasurable assignment? Really, you say too much.
But let me repeat it: I’ve known you for a while, and you have done this before, so this is not a complete surprise. Thus, I have something of a—though not a complete—surprise for you! We’re preparing a new skit, back at the wagons, largely under my direction. Certainly it will be ready by the time your students troop down to join our common audience.
In it, they will see students like themselves, idiots, actors, barmaids, businessmen, teachers, tradesmen, harness menders, housewives, philosophers, philanderers, prostitutes, and princesses—all of them pursuing each other with mayhem and hilarity, song and dance, now through the halls of a school out in Sallese, now through the Old Market of the city. You can be sure that on our platform each of them will have more to say to, and more to do with, each other than any of them ever might be expected to in life. Oh, you have no idea how carefully I have been observing. Their eloquence will be unbelievable! Their significance will be overpowering! You have no notion what wonders I shall give voices to! The plot, I think, will turn on the theft of something magical, smuggled away before dawn—something, anyway, of incomparable worth. We know, of course, who is hired to carry it off at the bottom of his grain cart. But who was the original perpetrator of the crime?
Now that is the mystery!
It’s the part, of course, I haven’t figured out. But all my spectators, even you (deny it, now, I dare you), love to see a mystery solved, the hero applauded, the villain flogged—
To the bridge?
Oh, you can go the short way that turns onto the quay. It’s right through there. That will take you to it. But I’m going down here, as I want to get back to the other side of the market as quickly as I can. Oh, forgive me if I laugh a little now.
But was my tale this afternoon so powerful as that? Well, it’s good for an old reprobate like me to know that even a young man as high-minded as you can consider looking in that common lane for some loud and hearty wench just up from the country, some rude and boisterous boy just down from the hills—
But you frown more deeply. Oh, forgive me, young master! I certainly did not mean—
It was only a joke!
We are old friends!
But see, I have transgressed some limit of politeness I never dreamed would offend you.
When I was off in that provincial wilderness, beset with all temptation, would I appropriate your noble name? (The nameless gods alone can hear what voice in you I’ve momentarily called up to contest your usually most decorous behavior!) Could you then suspect—?
Might I even think that this afternoon’s performance would lead you to appropriate my own low practices and preferences, grown from an evil upbringing and a licentious existence on the periphery of all society, in the wilderness between far provinces, at the sordid center of our city?
Please, do not take offense at an aging actor’s jest!
I merely meant to say that it lies there, on the way from the Spur to Sallese—a bit of madness one must cross to get from here to there.
—New York
February 1984
The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals, or: Some Informal Remarks Towards the Modular Calculus, Part Five
Ours, too, is an age of allegoresis…
—ALLEN MANDELBAUM
Inferno, Introduction
‘If you believe that,’ the tutor remarked, ‘you’d believe anything! No, it wasn’t like that at all!…
—JOANNA RUSS,
Extra(ordinary) People
Does this amount to saying that the master’s place remains empty, it is not so much the result of his own passing as that of a growing obliteration of the meaning of his work? To convince ourselves of this we have only to ascertain what is going on in the place he vacated.
—JACQUES LACAN
The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis
1. On —th Street, just beyond Ninth Avenue, the bridge runs across sunken tracks. Really, it’s just an extension of the street. (In a car, you might not notice you’d crossed an overpass.) The stone walls are a little higher than my waist. Slouching comfortably, you can lean back against them, an elbow either side, or you can hoist yourself up to sit.
There’s no real walkways.
The paving is potholed.
The walls are cracked here, broken there. At least three places the concrete has crumbled from iron supports: rust has washed down over the pebbled exterior. Except for this twentieth-century detail, it has the air of a prehistoric structure.
At various times over the last half-dozen years, I’ve walked across it, now in the day, now at night. Somehow I never remember passing another person on it.
It’s the proper width.
You’d have to double its length, though.
Give it the pedestrians you get a few blocks over on Eighth Avenue, just above what a musician friend of mine used to call ‘Forty-Douche’ Street: kids selling their black beauties, their Valiums, their loose joints, the prostitutes and hustlers, the working men and women. Then put the market I saw on the Italian trip Ted and I took to L’Aquila at one end, and any East Side business district on the other, and you have a contemporary Bridge of Lost Desire.
It’s the bridge Joey told me he was under that sweltering night in July when, beside the towering garbage pile beneath it, he smelled the first of the corpses.
2.1 She pushed her old hands into the dough, which pulled away, still too moist, leaving yeasty bits inside the crock. Outside the high kitchen window, one of the maids was beating a rug. The thwacking echoed over some garden bird’s complaint.
Just then the new kitchen girl, whose name was Larla, swept down the steps and through the arch, wiping her hands on a brown cloth, moving toward the open fire on whose slate hearth the morning rolls, hot and gilded, waited on a brazen tray.
‘Should I take these up to Lord Vanar?’
‘He’s not going to eat them,’ the woman said. Her face was deeply seamed. ‘Bring some water with them. His stool’s too loose for milk, though he’ll ask you for it. Give it to him only if he insists. He won’t take much of that either.’
The rolls were up, out the arch, and gone.
The servant woman fell again to her kneading.
2.2 Diseases should not become social metaphors, Sontag informed us in Illness as Metaphor. (I’ve already seen her analysis of cancer-as-social-model quoted in a discussion of AIDS [Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome].) When diseases generate such metaphors, the host of misconceptions and downright superstitions that come from taking them literally (misconceptions that, indeed, often determine the metaphors themselves in a system of reciprocal stabilization) makes it impossible, both psychologically and socially—both in terms of how you feel and how others, with their feelings, treat you—to ‘have the disease’ in a ‘healthy’ manner.
‘Dis-ease.’ Non-easiness. Difficulty.
‘Health.’ Via the Old English ‘hælp,’ from the Old High German, ‘heilida’: whole, or complete.
Metaphors fight each other. They also adjust one another.
Can a person who is ‘whole’ also be ‘dis-eased?’
The answer, ‘Yes,’ would seem to be what modern medicine is all about.
But consider a variant of the same question: ‘Can a whole person be diseased?’
To answer, ‘Yes,’ is to give one answer to two questions with nearly diametric meanings. That the common form of the question can be deconstru
cted in this manner is the sign of our dis-ease before anything that might bear ‘disease’ as its proper designation.
2.3 Sitting in his ground-floor study at his school in Sallese, just back from seeing Toplin in the rooms set aside for the school infirmary, the Master looked at the dusty bars of light slanting through the shutters to put their evening grill on the pale stone. He fingered the wooden chair arm. There was no hope for it. The boy would have to be returned to his mother.
These things spread.
An interesting boy, he mused.
A troublesome boy upon occasion.
A bright boy and a fine athlete, also: Toplin, bosom friend of students, Quetti and Bozar, of teachers, Kenton and Gisnik. Always talking, Toplin, with those two shy, brilliant girls just up to study from the Avila, Larni and Callee.
Toplin had a spirit, the Master had said, which, when he bridles it and learns to ride, will take him far.
But now he was feverish, with swellings in his neck, groin, and armpits. Infirmities that announced themselves with such symptoms, the Master knew, could kill.
A handsome boy, the Master mused…
The previous term there had been that embarrassing incident. Someone had told someone who’d mentioned it to someone else who’d whispered it to the Master: Toplin had been seen selling himself to men in the city! The Master was not an unworldly man. He was aware of the sexual play that went with adolescence; he could even see its healthy side as long as it did not go too far. But this was not a rumor the school could tolerate.
He’d called Toplin in.
On presentation of the accusation—delicately enough, the Master felt—the youngster had been embarrassed, seemed confused, and denied such a thing had occurred; yet his distress spoke not only of embarrassment but of guilt. Thus it had gone till the Master said: ‘If you need money, you must talk to your mother. She’s a sensible woman, and I’m sure she will arrange an adequate allowance. But we cannot have our students running about the Bridge of Lost Desire like a bunch of barbarian ragamuffins, doing things even a barbarian would hesitate over!’
At that point, something had seemed to lift itself from the boy’s confusion. Standing red-faced before the Master’s chair, Toplin had drawn himself up and declared: ‘If I were going to sell myself, why would I go there? Look, I don’t sell myself! And don’t you know that there are other markets for such things in this licentious city?’
It was a brazen answer, and so out of keeping with what he’d expected, so at odds with the way the boy had been acting thus far into the interview, that, indeed, it was easier to ignore. (When he thought of it later, he would mutter: ‘…spirit.’) ‘This is only a rumor, Top. And rumors must not be confused with truth. That would demean me as well as you. Still, I must not hear anything like this again!’ he had declared. ‘Or you will be in serious trouble!’
‘Well, you won’t hear anything like it!’ Toplin had declared, surprisingly, back.
Thus it had ended.
The Master sat in the darkening room. There were student voices on the lawn, and little light. Laughter surged by in the hall. Pondering questions of magic, disease, and power, the Master sat alone.2.4 Without a virus, in a sense AIDS is not a disease. It’s a mysterious and so far (23 February 1984) microbically unagented failure to fight disease. It is connected with sex—‘perverted’ sex. It is connected with blood—‘blood products,’ as they say. Suddenly the body gives up, refuses to heal, will not become whole. This is the aspect of the ‘illness’ that is ravenous for metaphors to stifle its unsettled shift, its insistent uneasiness, its conceptual turbulence.
2.5 This past summer, when one of the aging street people was suspected of having AIDS (because he’d lost perhaps forty pounds in a month) and the hustlers and dope dealers rallied to get the man to the hospital, Joey, talking about it with me in the Fiesta, said: ‘AIDS, that’s where your body just stops healing, and even an infection from a little cut, or a cold, can kill you…?’ There was the faintest interrogation at the end of his pronouncement that a question mark distorts. Still, he seemed to be waiting for my confirmation.
How do I explain that this questioning is what we share—not what either of us can relieve for the other.
This is the absence that will be filled, one way or the other, by metaphors, his, mine, or someone else’s.
The man, of course, turned out not to have AIDS, but lung cancer.
3. Perhaps the job is to find a better metaphor and elaborate it well enough to help stabilize those thoughts, images, or patterns that, in the long run, are useful—useful to those with the disease, to those who care for them, or even to those who only know about them. (Needless to say, what is useful in the long run is not, necessarily, in the short.) What is most useful in the long run is what destabilizes short-run strategies, the quick glyphs, the clichés, the easy responses history has sedimented.
3.1 AIDS is like unto a flower in the sunlight, beautiful to all graced creatures, a glory and a wonder. (Most recently, I think it was: ‘We must consider AIDS an opportunity for consciousness raising, rather than a disease.’) ‘Bull,’ answers a person with AIDS. ‘Communication, fellow support, and shared insights may provide a little consciousness about AIDS. But AIDS itself provides you with shit. Expensive, painful, mortal shit!’
AIDS is like unto a Scourge of Satan, the Wrath of Khan, and the most awfullest thing that can happen not only to the sniveling faggot (whose unthinking phrase was that…?), who, doubtless, deserves it, but to the whole lax, doomed, and immoral nation, which, evil as it is, doesn’t deserve a fatal disease just yet! (Over how many radio talk shows have I heard that one?) A frustrated voice takes another breath and says in the levelest tone it can muster: ‘Since it obviously isn’t, why say it is?’
But that’s why metaphors stuck on his good-bad scale won’t do. What is needed is a metaphor or metaphor system in which restraint of judgment as well as a certain order of complexity are part of what is metaphorically suggested.
AIDS is the sparkplug in a social machine of which we are all—people with, and people without, AIDS—a part, including the metaphor maker.
A step in the right direction? It only turns out to be so if you’re willing to step much further.
The criticism of this one is harder but just as real: engines break down into their parts, basic and superfluous, central and peripheral, whole and diseased, good and bad. And in this kind of engine, the parts are simple metaphors, on that old scale; the ‘complexity’ of the metaphor masks a notion of structuralist simplicity. But I am truly interested to discover—and am as willing to accept no as I am yes for an answer—if there is anything among these fancies that might be useful in thinking about what was first dubbed ‘the gay plague.’3.2 A new illness, AIDS, began to infiltrate the larger cities. Some saw it as a metaphor for the license, corruption, and decay that is the general urban condition. (Well, after all, ‘metaphor’—a transfer, something that carries something else after it—is as much a metaphor as is ‘disease.’) More interesting to the more interested citizens were, however, the strategies people used to avoid thinking about the illness. Certainly the relation between the facts of the infirmity and these strategies—as many noticed and several said—was anything but metaphorical.
4. She fled between counters piled with leather, counters piled with cloth, sunlight striking between awnings at her, the news bubbling behind her eyes, bursting her ears from within as the vendors’ shouts and halloos battered them from without. Half a sentence squirmed on her tongue, fighting toward completion, as the words bumping one another between her running breaths awaited her voice.
He caught her shoulders before she saw him—‘Nari…!’—and swung her around in sun, not meaning to hurt her arms with his fingers, while he grinned at her with his bronze, barbaric grin, above his rough brown beard, below his rough yellow hair.
Shoulders drawn up between his hands, Nari blurted: ‘Oh, Zadyuk, he’s so sick! I didn’t know…We didn’t know…!
’ And where was the rest of it? She watched Zadyuk’s smile fall apart, leaving bewilderment.
He said:
‘…Pheron?’
‘You asked about him this morning…? We hadn’t seen him this week, and the last time, he said he was feeling so tired, and looked so…awful? After you left today, I went by his workshop. It was all closed up, and the man in the shop next door said no one had seen him in Crescent Alley for days! So then I went to his room—he couldn’t even answer the door, Zadyuk!’
Bewilderment crumbled, leaving fragmentary expressions moving among Zadyuk’s features, impossible to say where, among hurt, anger, and fear, they would settle.
One hand dropped from her arm.
The other’s grip, in three stages, loosened, before it fell.
‘He’s so thin—he must weigh only half of what he did when we last saw him! His joints and his neck are all swollen. There’re terrible sores on his leg and his side! His eyes are red and runny. And he’s…sick! He can’t even put his arms down. Underneath hurts too much!’
‘But what’s wrong with—?’
Nari looked aside.
Zadyuk blinked, then looked too.
She’d been speaking excitedly, and the two men passing arm in arm watched with the curiosity one gives to any street encounter. The older man’s head was shaved. Both had dark wings of paint around their eyes, which emphasized astonishingly the pale lashes and gray irises of the younger. As they turned away, walked away, Nari looked back at Zadyuk, knowing he, too, remembered how Pheron would fasten on the colorful swatches he wove and dyed himself in his workshop and, in the same eyepaint, with a cider jar hooked on his forefinger, and already a bit tipsy, would visit their rooms after work. ‘Parading about the streets like that!’ Zadyuk would declare. ‘People will think you’re some prostitute from the Bridge of Lost Desire!’ and Pheron would mime a show of great surprise, and exclaim, ‘But, my dear, I never go anywhere near it! There’re too many other places in the city to get what I’m after!’ Then he would show Nari the hard, bright colors and the metallic threads he’d worked into his fabrics, while at the table Zadyuk would pry the cork from the jar with his sandal knife.