The Blazing World

  One evening, however, while I was watching the footage from a day’s filming, I found myself scrutinizing a pile of rags beside Esperanza’s mattress. I noticed that there were objects carefully tucked in among the fraying bits of colored cloth: rows of pencils, stones, matchbooks, business cards. It was this sighting that led to the “explanation.” She was keenly aware that the world at large disapproved of her “lifestyle,” and that there was little room left for her in the apartment, but when I asked her about the objects among the rags, she said that she wanted to “keep them safe and sound.” The rags were beds for the things. “Both the beds and the ones that lay down on them,” she told me, “are nice and comfy.”

  It turned out that Esperanza felt for each and every thing she saved, as if the tags and torn sweaters and dishes and postcards and newspapers and toys and rags were imbued with thoughts and feelings. After she saw the film, my mother said that Esperanza appeared to believe in a form of “panpsychism.” Mother said this meant that mind is a fundamental feature of the universe and exists in everything, from stones to people. She said Spinoza subscribed to this view, and “it was a perfectly legitimate philosophical position.” Esperanza didn’t know anything about Spinoza. I’m aware that my film is a tangent, but I’m talking about it because I think it’s important. My mother believed and I believe in really looking hard at things because, after a while, what you see isn’t at all what you thought you were seeing just a short time before. Looking at any person or object carefully means that it will become increasingly strange, and you will see more and more. I wanted my film about this lonely woman to break down visual and cultural clichés, to be an intimate portrait, not a piece of leering voyeurism about a woman’s horrible accumulations.

  My parents first saw Esperanza at a screening in 1991. Father was polite, but I think the images of the woman’s squalor pained him. He found the subject matter “difficult.” He also said he was glad celluloid didn’t smell. He had a point. Esperanza’s apartment stank. My mother loved the film, and although she routinely cheered on my ventures, I knew her enthusiasm was real. My father’s reticence hurt me, and I suppose bringing up Esperanza again at the dinner amounted to a challenge. I wanted to show him that I had known what I was doing, that I had an aesthetic point of view. Oscar talked about hoarding, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and my father noted with some amusement that two years after he had seen my film, he saw Anselm Kiefer’s Twenty Years of Solitude, a work that included stacks of books and papers stained with the artist’s semen, and he had thought of my film. Kiefer’s masturbatory remnants had been mostly met with embarrassment or silence in the art world. Father offered that the woman’s piles of junk were no more disturbing than Keifer’s “private ejaculations.”

  My parents disagreed about the semen stains. My mother wondered why the personal theme of the work should be shunned, why a man’s masturbation, his loneliness and sadness were somehow outside “art.” She was emphatic. She said you had to make a distinction between what you saw—stains—and its identification as human waste. My father found the stain business self-indulgent and repugnant. Oscar, who is usually pretty phlegmatic, said the work sounded stupid, really stupid. I said I wasn’t sure, I hadn’t seen the show. This meant that my mother was alone defending semen against two men, who had been producing it regularly over the years. I remember thinking it was fortunate that their emissions had hit the mark at least a couple of times. Mother worked herself up, becoming both more articulate and more irritated. My father’s age-old technique was simply to change the subject, which would further infuriate my mother, who would then cry out, “Why don’t you answer me?”

  I was twenty-six years old, married and pregnant, and still I found the tension between my parents intolerable. My mother hung on to her passionate defense while my father, embarrassed, glanced around the room and wished she would stop. A thousand times I had witnessed the same scene, and each one of those times, I had felt my own anxiety mount until it felt as if I would break into pieces. Anselm Kiefer’s semen wasn’t really the issue, of course. After all the years of their marriage, my parents continued to misread each other. My father didn’t like conflict in any form, and so, when my mother came out swinging, he ducked. My mother, in turn, interpreted his avoidance as condescension, and it drove her to punch harder. I understood them both. My father could be maddeningly evasive and my mother annoyingly persistent.

  Their verbal brawl ended when I yelled, “Stop it!” My mother apologized by kissing my cheek and neck, and we all recovered pretty quickly from the dried-semen debate, but I did notice that my father’s face was drawn and tired, and that the age difference between my parents had begun to show. Mother looked robust and still young, and Father a bit wizened and white. After dinner, he smoked a cigarette as always and then another and another. I had given up nagging him to quit. The smoking Dunhill was part of his body, his posture, two fingers aloft, smoke circling in the vicinity of his face. It was also the only sign that my father was nervous. Nothing else about him was nervous. He didn’t jiggle or tap or tic. He was calm and contained always, but he smoked, as they say, like a chimney.

  After dinner, we went into the other room for a brandy, which my mother and I did not drink, but Oscar and my father did. My mother was silent then, as she often was, weary, I think, from her heated defense of sperm art and content to listen. There were candles and a vase with peach-colored roses on the low table and some chocolates. I remember these details because it was the last time I saw my father alive. Every moment during that evening has become magnified by his death. I didn’t expect to lose him. I thought he would be a grandfather to my child, and I believed my parents would fight on, would annoy each other for many more years and grow old and crotchety together. Isn’t it funny how we just think things will go on as they are?

  I can’t remember how we strayed onto ghosts and magic, but it wasn’t very far from our earlier themes: my Lower East Side panpsychist’s collection and an artist’s peculiar habit of saving bodily fluids on paper, as if the marks that remained had some mysterious value or power. My mother said that when she was a girl, she used to look at her dolls in the morning to see if they had moved at night. She had half hoped and half feared they would come alive. Then my father brought up Uncle and his spirits. Uncle had worked for my great-grandparents in Chiang Mai, a skinny but muscular old man, covered from his neck to his feet with tattoos that had wrinkled along with his thin brown skin, and whose teeth had turned black from chewing betel nuts. I had heard about Uncle since I was a child. I had seen pictures of my great-grandparents’ beautiful old house, which rose up from stilts with its gabled roof and curving eaves, and the spacious grounds Uncle had tended.

  My father’s eyes narrowed as he told the story. He was ten years old and living with his grandparents in Chiang Mai while his mother and father “traveled.” He had never known why they left him. Neither of his parents had ever given him a straight answer, but his childhood had always involved traveling and multiple nannies, all of whom had dropped hints about his mother’s “adventures” and given him pitying looks.

  My father’s big room had a view of the garden and was visited regularly by small gray lizards, and a boy, Arthit, who worked for the family, had slept on a palette at the foot of my father’s bed, for company, because Thais never slept in a room alone. My father had followed Uncle around without being able to converse much with him, but as his Thai improved, he began to understand the old animist’s stories. Uncle told him about a beautiful girl whose fiancé had drowned in the Mekong River. Distraught with grief, she hanged herself, and after that her spirit haunted a tree. Uncle had seen her, a floating head only—dangling entrails from the neck. He also told my father about a ghost his mother had heard and seen, a fetal ghost that cried out in the forest from the place where his mother had miscarried him, a half-formed little monster that sought revenge for his early end by harassing the living.

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; One day, Uncle drove my father home to his village north of Chiang Mai. He remembered that when he arrived, children had come running and that they chattered and laughed about his light hair, which reminded them of phee, the spirits.

  He said that the people he met had been kind to him, but he had felt like a curiosity, a thing on display, and that, most disturbingly, Uncle had turned into another man. All his obsequious mannerisms, his smiles and bows, vanished. He retired to a corner of his sister’s house, poured himself a glass of whiskey, and waved my father away from him. It was still daylight when Uncle’s sister took him to a thatched hut on poles near the river. Men drummed and played instruments, and then the women began to dance, slowly, rhythmically. He was told the ghosts were on their shoulders, riding them like horses. A very old woman with a cigar in her mouth was waving her arms over her head and puffing out smoke as her eyes rolled upward into her head, and then she moved in on my father, her mouth open, and blew smoke right into his face. He had the feeling he couldn’t breathe, gasped for air, and after that, his memory went to pieces.

  All he was certain of, he said, was that, at some point, he came down with a high fever that lasted two days. He remembered screams, rolling around on a floor, choking terror, and what he thought was a whip hitting him or someone else, and then the sun through a windshield, tires jolting over a road, clouds of ochre dust. He must have hallucinated the body of a child burning next to his bed and dark birds streaming through the window. He thought he remembered a man beside him, and lying in a cold bath. On the third day, he came out of it. He was in his own room in Chiang Mai. An amulet of the Buddha was hanging around his neck, but he had no idea how it had gotten there.

  He never saw Uncle again. When he asked his grandmother what had happened to him, she said he had retired. Mai pen rai. It doesn’t matter. Father wondered if he had been drugged or whether he had simply fallen ill. He had been suspicious, worried that the grown-ups had hidden something from him. He checked his whole body for signs of a beating, but there was nothing. “It must all have been a fever dream,” he said, “but it frightened me. I couldn’t decide what was real and what wasn’t, and no one would tell me.” Then he said, “Secrets and silences and more secrets and more silences.”

  “You never told me,” my mother said in a low voice. Her face was all squashed with sympathy. Watching her, I realized how that same look, when it was directed at me, drove me crazy. Too much empathy is annoying, but I’ve never understood why. You’d think it would be nice. Maybe it’s just mothers. You don’t want them that close. At the same time, I wondered if Khun Ya had ever looked at my father like that. I had the sudden thought that she might have preferred him as a grown-up.

  What had he meant about more secrets and more silences? Why didn’t I ask him? Have I thought about this more since I’ve known about my father’s erotic life? He had secrets, too, secrets and silences. Why had he never told my mother that story? I sometimes wonder if I really knew him at all.

  Oscar thinks my parents were both odd people. Once he used the word decadent to describe my father and neurotic for my mother. He thinks Ethan is very smart but “falls into the high autistic spectrum somewhere,” and he likes to call me the “fairly well-adjusted” one. He married the “fairly well-adjusted” one in the family. He thinks Father’s money protected us from the “real world,” that if we had been poor, our lives would have been very different. He is right about that. Still, he knows that real is not my favorite word. It’s all real—wealth, poverty, livers, hearts, thoughts, and art. (My mother used to say: Beware of naïve realism. Who knows what real is?) And then Oscar always looks at me and says, “Do my job for a day, and you’ll see what I mean.” He does his therapy with kids in foster care in a miserable little office in Brooklyn with a broken desk. The kids he sees are not adjusted at all, because their lives have been bollixed up, often from the very beginning. I fell in love with Oscar because he is devoted to his work, and he has lots of stories to tell. Oscar doesn’t care much about art. Maybe that’s my rebellion. I married a man who doesn’t give a hoot about paintings or sculptures and goes to the movies to be entertained.

  Sweet Autumn Pinkney

  (edited transcript)

  I haven’t seen Anton for years, and I don’t know where he is or what he’s up to now, but we had a moment of true balance when I was an assistant working on History of Art. My friend Bunny told me that this book was going to happen, and I thought I ought to tell my story. First, I’d like to say that, whatever other people might think, Anton was definitely not a dumb person. He read books, and he thought about big ideas. When I met him, he had this book called Anti-Octopus by two French guys that had something to do with how Freud was wrong, and it was very intellectual. But Anton was a spiritual person mostly, striving for the higher consciousness, even though he had just started making baby steps, if you know what I mean. I was at the beginning of my journey then, too. I was a follower of Peter Deunov, or Beinsa Douno, the Bulgarian master, and I was starting my work with chakras and healing crystals, and Anton and I talked a lot about cosmic rhythms, energy, and astrological signs. Not everybody puts all these knowledges together, but I think they’re all related in the big universal picture of things. Anton was kind of doubtful in the beginning, but then I think he realized that I had it—the power to read auras. I’ve always had it since I was a little kid. I just didn’t know what it was. Sometimes the energy fields, sounds, and colors I felt coming from people were so strong, I almost fell over, or I felt blockages in them, like they were in me, and I’d feel sick, kind of dizzy and faint. Training and meditation helped me to get my gift under control and use it for healing others. I have a practice now, and people from all over the greater Northeast come to me for help.

  Right from the first day, I felt there was something out of whack in the studio—weird energy. There were already two assistants on the job, Edgar and Steve. The sculpture part was done, so we were helping put all the pictures on the sleeping woman. (I liked her better naked and plain, to tell the truth.) Anton had his plans—great big sheets with all kinds of writing and notes on them. He seemed anxious and was always leaning over and squinting at them. His aura was bluish, yellow, greenish, but some stoppage, too. I could see and feel how tense he was, so I put my hand on his arm and just left it there. In less than a minute, his aura got more and more blue; it was pretty cool. Anton smiled at me, and I remember thinking he might have died as a little child in a previous life—there was something so young in him, so unformed but full of spiritual potential. Probably the second or third day, Harry came in.

  I felt her like a red scream. I had to back up. I mean, I wasn’t even close to her, and I had to step backwards because she was emitting so much all at once, racing, multicolored, and churning, but too much red and orange. Harry had a lot of power, passion, and ambition, but there was some black in her, something blacked out, blotted out, and I saw that, too. It can be a sign of night—grief, some kind of harshness. Anton wilted a little when he saw her, but I could feel their closeness. It was hard for him to match her energy, but he tried. It might have been good if I had just put my hands on her, too, but I didn’t dare. Too much voltage. I didn’t really get the Venus sculpture, what its greater meaning was supposed to be, but I caught the vibrations between Anton and Harry like sparks.

  I hardly remember Steve now except that his aura was a very light pink, and he had long hair. Edgar radiated green most of the time, a pulsing yellow-green, partly because he had his music on all the time in his ears, so he wasn’t responding to much around him, just the techno beats in his ears, while his chin bobbed up and down, up and down, like one of those carnival dolls with its head on springs. I can’t remember when the story boxes came in, but I saw Edgar look at them, and he seemed excited for the first time and turned a little orange. Anton said he had done them at home because they were small. They arrived all finished. I don’t think I would be upset now, but I was at a
much earlier phase of my enlightenment then, and the boxes made me kind of low. They were sad—the little children in there, the man’s arm, the lady who couldn’t fit in her own bathroom, the writing. They made me think of gloomy colors and whining sounds, and I said to myself, I’ve got to let Anton know, and that’s how the story between us really got started.

  I worked late one night and told him about the boxes, and he looked upset. When I put my hands on his, he said, “What is it about you? You calm me down. I didn’t used to be like this. Things used to be cool.” Then he waved his hands around the studio and said, “Things were good, but now it’s changing.” I told him it was something about Harry, and he looked a little funny, but he didn’t tell me anything then, so I gave him a back rub, and he told me I was magic, and I said no, just psychic. I had learned some Tantric sexual practices from a teacher, Rami Elderbeer, who was dispensing his personal wisdom in NYC at the time, techniques that lead to higher minglings and ecstatic oneness, the dissolution of our bodily differences into the higher states where there are no boundaries. Rami knew I had the power from the start—he saw the indigo in me—an indigo child, he said.