We sit at the kitchen table and argue about the Meininger nude.
Outside in my bathrobe and slippers, I was contemplating my ruined weed patch. I was turning to go back inside. Across the street in the ill woman’s house, from the corner of my eye, a crack in a venetian blind snapped shut.
I was not aware it was happening, I would have resisted had I been aware, and now it has happened: a routine has been established. We have fallen into daily habits that have solidified and become inflexible, like an old married couple. We have regular mealtimes. Even the menus are predictable: sausage and sauerkraut on Tuesdays, pancakes on Sunday.
On the refrigerator, in her small, neat script:
Empty-handed I entered the world,
Barefoot I leave it.
My coming, my going—
two simple happenings
that got entangled.
I ask her what I am supposed to do with this, and she shrugs.
The period when I went regularly to cafés and parties, especially gallery parties, when I was an inveterate socializer and art hound, I think of as the Meininger period, even though he was not here for the larger part of it. He was here, physically in this house, for just over three years, and the period endured eleven, perhaps twelve years, so he actually was here for only a fraction of it.
I was leading a thoroughly aimless life before he came. I was constantly on the go. The hysterical energy I brought to socializing, combined with my nearly pathological infatuation with all things artistic, made me a minor art-movement figure, I thought, when in fact I was a pathological attention seeker, I see now.
The Meininger period, strictly considered, lasted thirty-eight months, but its effect on my life extended forward and backward from that time. As long as he was in this house, whether physically dwelling here for thirty-eight months or being spiritually present for years afterward by virtue of his relentless psychological grip, I was able to look back on the chaos of my previous life, on the active flailing about that was the chief feature of that life, and see it as waiting for Meininger. As if all my life I had been searching for the Meininger period.
Almost my entire collection dates from that period. In the process of collecting the paintings I gradually came to think of myself as having instinctive good judgment in matters of art. Instead of hesitating and fumbling about as I had been accustomed to doing, I placed my art bets with the arrogance of infallibility, though the truth of the matter is I was buying whatever Meininger happened to favor, from artists who were part of his entourage.
She rings a bell when it is time to eat. The same bell my mother would use to summon the cook from the kitchen.
Meininger was my friend; for a time he was my best friend. He was not, when it came to investments in art objects, my adviser. He would scrupulously refrain from saying things like, Nivenson (he would always call me Nivenson), I suggest you buy X or Y. Still, I took my cues from him. I would search his conversation, his facial expressions, even his body language (how close did he stand to the painting? was he tense or relaxed? what was behind that smile?). An offhand remark about a canvas, a nod of approval to the painter, and ten minutes later would find me slapping down thousands of dollars. In time, after spending a lot of money in this way, I confidently dispensed with his tutelage, purchasing paintings he had never seen. As if I could see with his eyes.
He worked by contagion. I walked like Meininger (a swaying, ever-so-casual amble), I dressed like Meininger (white trousers, open-collared pastel shirts, floppy wide-brimmed hat in summer). I picked up as many as I could of his elegant minimalist gestures (slight tilting back of the head to indicate assent, a small slicing movement of an index finger to express negation). He was not tall, but he gave an impression of tallness. His restrained gestures, his handsome, haughty features, his even-toned, methodical mode of speaking (never tumbling excitedly as I did), made him seem an imposing figure. In social situations he was affable, charming, amusing, and at the same time he seemed thoroughly in command. I thought of us as pals. Walking down the street or arriving at a party together we were the two musketeers, I thought. It never dawned on me that I was practically his creation.
It was Meininger the painter and Nivenson the critic and collector.
The life of a dilettante: a floating, empty life. The dilettante’s antics are sincere, without self-mockery or any sense of how absurd he is. He lacks the reflective sadness of a true clown. As a result he often looks like a hopeless bumbler.
There was a long moment between the ages of twenty-nine and thirty-three when I managed to deceive myself so thoroughly that I was almost happy.
She is pushing me in a wheelbarrow. I am in shorts or in my underwear, my naked legs hanging out over the front of the barrow. The ride is extremely comfortable, the barrow sways pleasantly from side to side. She wheels me through a town of narrow streets and half-timbered buildings. I notice the names of the streets: Avenue of the Revolution, Street of Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow, Avenue of Martyrs. We halt in front of a huge domed building with columns. “This is the planetarium,” she says. She upends the barrow and dumps me. I am afraid that I will miss my train, and I begin crawling up the steps of the building, crawling as slow as a snail, I am thinking as I climb. I have almost reached the top when I feel myself being dragged back down by my feet, my head banging against the steps, which I now notice are slimy, moss covered. I hear someone say, “He tried to escape.” A different voice says, “His shell is completely crushed.” I want to see who is speaking but discover that I am physically unable to turn my head. I wake up to find that I am lying cattycorner across the bed, my head hanging off the edge. It is nowhere near morning.
On the refrigerator:
Chao Chou was asked,
“When a man comes to you with nothing,
what would you say to him?”
And he replied, “Throw it away!”
She helps me up the steps, pushing from behind. She waits in her room until I call, then she helps me out of the bath. I stand there, dripping, while she towels me dry. I look at myself in the mirror: a creature of swollen belly, withered scrotum, retracted penis, pendulous breasts like an old woman’s, emaciated arms and blue-gray legs, whites of eyes red-veined and yellow, gaze watery, hair thin and arid, skin splotchy, dry, and scaling, nose sharp, bent, bigger than before, a beak. We face each other while she buttons my shirt, a fat old woman and a bone contraption. She follows me down the steps holding on to my shirttails.
Day after day, no trace of bitterness.
All the while I was jotting things down. I would say, “Hold on,” interrupting a conversation to jot something down in the little notebook I carried always. I was ostentatiously jotting things down. The little notebooks came first. After a while I abandoned them for index cards. The cards were an affectation, I knew even then that I had taken them up for show: pulling from a pocket my little stack of cards, removing the rubber band, sorting through to find the right card, and jotting something down. For years I was constantly interrupting to scribble on an index card. I imagine that a person looking to sum me up at that epoch for someone who has forgotten might say, “You remember Nivenson, the inveterate card scribbler.”
It became a habit and then a necessity. It is a necessity now. Not for any literary reason, but because it is a habit.
Everything I write on my cards, or on my slips of torn paper, is the working out of a physiological impulse (a habit) and has no literary significance.
The habit of jotting everything down, sitting in coffee shops and bars, or stopping in the middle of a crowded sidewalk to jot something down, made me look demented.
“He was,” they will say, “a flash in the pan. He had genius, probably, but it was in fits and starts.”
In fits, in spasms. I had regular throes of creativity—piercings I called them at the time—when I scribbled furiously. Now, now, I would say to myself, it has come, it is here at last. But it hadn’t, it wasn’t. A line or two, half a page, som
etimes only two or three words. It is a beginning, I would console myself, but it wasn’t that either, wasn’t even that. It was nothing.
It was not nothing. It was a little something. A fragment, a scrap.
The deep metaphysical appeal of jigsaw puzzles: by connecting the pieces one forms a whole. One discovers a whole that was there all along.
At the end of everything—the flailing about, the bafflement, the completely crazy suffering—would stand an impossible artwork. It would show itself as the justification, the point, the actual covert destination of the divagations and evasions of my life. Under the influence of the final impossible artwork the twists and turns would appear in their true shape as the normal meanders of an artistic life path. Once I had enough cards, once I had enough of the right cards, I thought, I had only to assemble it.
The idea that the index cards, which were actually pieces of my life, would ever fit together was completely crazy.
Imagine an expanse of ruins. A vast field on which are scattered thousands of bits and pieces of wood, glass, and masonry. As if a large building had been demolished there, broken into pieces so small and shattered they cannot be identified as window, door, plank, as if the building had disintegrated, though in fact they are not the remains of any building that has ever stood in the field. The debris was dumped there. Hundreds of tons of debris were brought in and dumped for use as building material. But no one has built anything, though the material has lain there for decades, and the people no longer think of the field of rubble as a building site. To them it is just a dumpsite in a barren field.
One day an elderly man comes to the field. He carries a megaphone. He stands in the middle of the field and shouts through the megaphone. The people living in the houses that surround the field come out and stand in the rubble to listen to him. He talks a long time. He tells the people there will not be a building there. He apologizes for not having constructed the building and for having covered a lovely meadow in trash. He ought to stop there. The people have accepted his apology and he ought to stop. But he doesn’t stop. He wants to justify himself by describing the impossible building he wanted to put there. He strives to make them see its incredible, heartbreaking beauty. He talks a long time, he is carrying on about it. In his enthusiasm for the imaginary building he fails to notice that the people are becoming bored and restless. They are not interested in imaginary buildings and are beginning to wander off. He continues to talk, but the crowd has drifted away and he is alone in the field.
Attempting to pick a pencil up from the floor I make it roll under the bed.
Diamond has written eleven novels, in addition to teaching. Eleven long novels, eleven multigenerational sagas, and a volume of literary criticism. The newspaper calls her a literary powerhouse. She is a literary industrial-scale waste producer. Obviously she is using some kind of trick, you can’t write that many novels unless you have a trick. For example, the same novel is being written over and over. That is what most of them do. They find a scheme, a trick really, and then use it over and over.
People like Diamond, the so-called literary powerhouses, are the number one preventers. Their example, and the malice and envy it stirs up, has been the biggest prevention and barrier of them all, absolutely destroying the aloofness and aesthetic calm I struggled to attain, essentially and repeatedly wiping out the equanimous mental state in which I might have worked with complete indifference. Instead I was forced to abandon that Apollonian indifference, was forced constantly to peer around me, to keep track of what people were saying about me, or what I thought they were saying, to figure out what they were thinking. I constantly had to prick up my ears in order to eavesdrop on what they were saying, and be consumed by rancor on discovering they had not even noticed.
A state of Apollonian indifference—that is the exact opposite of the one in which Meininger worked at the end. Meininger at the end had turned his creative impulse into an exact response mechanism to the vulgar tastes of his affluent public. He didn’t have to peer around to discover what they were thinking, because he was thinking the same thing.
“The barrel of a pistol is for me at the moment a source of relatively agreeable thoughts,” Nietzsche wrote in a letter.
Roy was part schnauzer and had a moustache like Nietzsche’s.
I once put the barrel in my mouth to see what it felt like.
Hemingway also.
When I have the pistol in my hand, I just wave it around.
There was once a story as big as the world. It had a beginning, middle, and end. Everyone recognized himself as a character in that story, knew his place in the plot. It gave meaning to life, though no one thought of it in that way, as having that role, because no one could get outside of the story and look at it. They couldn’t know that it was just a story.
“The total character of the world is for all eternity chaos,” Nietzsche also said. A consequence of the failure of that enormous story.
The world today is everything that is the case. It is the sum of all facts. A story is a counterfact.
There are no stories in the world.
The goal, Moll says, is inner peace.
Some things are becoming clear. It is becoming clear that I have to make a stand, for one. Or take a stand, or both. It is becoming clear that I must make a statement, for two. Lacking a statement, it is impossible to take (or make) a stand. Without a statement people have no idea what you are doing. Your statement is designed to clarify that, shed fresh light on it, situate it in relation to its origins, to what you hope to accomplish by it, and so forth. Without a statement your stand will appear arbitrary and stupid. On the other hand, statements minus stands are the sure marks of a blowhard. For me now to make a statement and then fail to take a stand is out of the question.
It was easy when all one had to do when making a statement was offend against good taste, when just making a statement provoked a stand. That was possible when there was still good taste, a code of aristocratic honor and after that a code of bourgeois correctness that could be violated. Now they are all louts from the outset. Especially the so-called educated classes, including the local middle class, are complete louts incapable of being offended. They cannot be offended even by good taste. At best they are puzzled, at worst they are amused.
There was once a young woman painter. A young struggling painter, impoverished, rejected by galleries, ridiculed by other painters, exploited by men. She kept a diary in which she described the minutiae of her daily life, and it was practically a book of suffering. She had made up her mind to kill herself. This was, as she phrased it in the diary, an irrevocable decision. There was no imaginable circumstance that would cause her to change her mind. She had even decided on the method: she planned to throw herself from the roof of her ten-story building. The only element of the decision that she left open was the exact moment at which she would do this, that alone had still to be decided. Meanwhile she went on painting, in fact she noticed that she was painting with a new vigor and radicalness. Her paintings, which had been rather conventional and dull, became exciting, even daring. She did only self-portraits now. People who came to view these portraits found them frightening and appalling. They looked at the painter with fresh eyes. Some people thought the suffering faces in the paintings looked doomed. They looked in the artist’s face and thought they recognized the doomed faces in her paintings. Her complete indifference to public opinion impressed a few people whose judgment was respected, and gradually her reputation grew. She sold paintings to important private collectors. Finally a huge show was planned, where she would exhibit nearly a hundred paintings and drawings she had done during the many years in which she suffered in obscurity. Facing the prospect of this important show, she realized that it was a bridge and that if she crossed it she would inevitably return to being the dull, conventional painter she had been before. She saw that she had to choose between her talent and her life. The night before the opening of the show she jumped from the roof of her building.
The show opened on schedule and was a great success. All ninety-six paintings and drawings were sold.
I make a statement, and then I stop. An artistic statement that will make everything clear. As clear as the essential obscurity of the matter permits. A statement about the forest, the denseness of the forest and the impenetrable undergrowth, the absence of paths, the presence of deceptive paths that just stop or circle back on themselves. A statement about wandering off and becoming lost, about thickets. By describing the absolute obscurity, it will make all that comprehensible. An entertaining statement in black and white that will send the audience into paroxysms of tears and laughter and bring down the curtain on the farce.
I never came close to true art.
I was on the sidewalk near my house and preparing to cross the street, when the man backed his car out of the drive and onto the roadway in front of me, blocking my path. He stopped the car, rolled down the window and looked at me with raised eyebrows. I was not sure of the expression, if it was questioning or mocking. The sons had stopped banging their basketball. They sauntered over to the car. One of them seemed to be working his way around behind me. They are behaving like this because they know that I consider his wife, their mother, to be completely insane, I thought. “I am going to my house,” I said. The father and the boys exchanged glances. The father said, “Sure, go ahead.” I was walking around the front of the car, to get across the street, when he leaned from the window and said, “Do you need something?” but I kept on walking. I have never spoken to any of them, not two words, but they can tell by the way I look at their wife and mother that I think she is insane.
Writing up the circumstances preceding my demise, as I have begun to do, though of course not the circumstances of the demise itself, which I must leave to others, I have discovered to my surprise that I am enjoying myself. At the end of a row of gloomy sentences, which I expect will actually depress my readers, I notice that I am smiling.