The Blazing World

  Rune had it. Whatever it is, it’s something you can feel in a room, an animal verve, a slink with some sex in it, but it wasn’t personal sex. He was not seducing anyone. He was seducing everyone, and there’s a big difference. I am a student of personal presentation, and it is wildly important to appear careless if not indifferent to the opinions of other people. Even a hint of desperation is ugly, and we must avoid it at all costs. Misery sucks up energy in the person who feels it and in all those who are forced to look at it, and then we’re all stuck in the mud. Desire functions best when it’s directed at a beautiful blank—the boys and girls into whom we toss all our pathetic hopes for happiness. In many ways, Rune was a perfect third candidate for Harry. He arrived with ready-made aura, that mysterious quality that infects our eyes so we can’t tell what we’re looking at anymore. Is the emperor naked or am I a fool? Some hated Rune’s work and others loved it, but no one disputed his power to sway. I don’t know how Harry talked him into becoming a front. He had all the markers of success, a palace-size apartment on Greenwich Street, a house in the Hamptons, and legions of women running marathons after him. Maybe he was bored. Maybe something happened to him after September 11 that made him want what Harry had—her passion, her seriousness, her capacity for joy. I don’t know.

  I have a clear memory of Harry and Rune, heads together in the gallery, talking. They were about the same height. I studied him from behind—short blond hair, big shoulders and upper back, narrow hips and a small, hard, slightly flat posterior, long legs in jeans, black boots with heels. And when I moved around to see his face, I noticed he had some wrinkles around his eyes, not so young anymore, but handsome, photogenic. He had a beautiful young woman with him. The two of them looked more like movie stars than movie stars look when you actually see them. She had that slick shine to her that comes from knowing everybody’s looking at you all the time, the pose held for a camera that isn’t there.

  What had they talked about? In the cab on the way back to the lodge, Harry said their big subject had been Bill Wechsler. Harry loved Wechsler’s work. She counted him as an influence, although he was born after her. He had died suddenly a few months earlier. I remember she held my hand in the taxi and kissed it several times in a fit of sudden affection, saying, “Dear, dear Phinny.” Then, after we got home, we lounged about with a cognac, getting tipsy. Harry confided she found Rune’s crosses boring, but she liked some of his earlier works, the plastic-surgery screens, which were genuinely creepy. Maybe she’d buy one—a good investment. If it didn’t hold up, she could always turn around and sell it to some hungry collector eager for the name.

  After bussing me in the taxi, Harry turned prickly, irritable, and sour. She had drunk too much, and I could feel the self-pity mounting as she rolled off the names of women artists suppressed, dismissed, or forgotten. She jumped up from the sofa and stomped back and forth across the room. Artemisia Gentileschi, treated with contempt by posterity, her best work attributed to her father. Judith Leyster, admired in her day, then erased. Her work handed over to Frans Hals. Camille Claudel’s reputation swallowed whole by Rodin’s. Dora Maar’s big mistake: She screwed Picasso, a fact that had obliterated her brilliant Surrealist photographs. Fathers, teachers, and lovers suffocate women’s reputations. These are three I remember. Harry had an endless supply. “With women,” Harry said, “it’s always personal, love and muck, whom they fuck.” And a favorite theme of Harry’s, women treated like children by paternal critics, who refer to them by their first names: Artemisia, Judith, Camille, Dora.

  I crossed my legs, looked askance at Harry, and began to whistle. It was not the first time I had taken this approach. “I am not the enemy,” I said. “Remember me, Mr. Feminist Phineas Q., your friend and ally, black gay man or gay black man with slave ancestors, hence original name, Whittier? You may recall that black people were both feminized and infantilized by racism, dark bodies and dark continents, honey child. Seventy-year-old men were called boys by twenty-year-old white ladies.”

  Harry sat down. Whistling, along with a few caustic verbal darts, usually brought her up short. She gave me that oh-Phinny-I’ve-gotten-carried-away-and-am-embarrassed-but-still-fiercely-attached-to-my-opinion look. Much later, I looked back at the evening and saw further ironies. If Harry knew that art history had steadily sunk the reputations of women artists by assigning their work to the dad, the husband, or the mentor, then she should have known that borrowing a big name like Rune might sting her in the end. And yet, what Harry took for granted was that she moved as a collector in circles where money and celebrity mingled, white circles with the rare black and brown face. I know because I had been that face.

  Rune was smart, and he was gifted, but I doubt anyone can actually separate talent from reputation when it comes down to it. Celebrity works its own miracle, and after a while it lights up the art. I am curious about the man’s death, but I suspect he was one of those people who could never feel enough, and as time went on he had to push himself to further extremes to get any kind of a rush from life. I don’t really know what happened between him and Harry. I know she cared about him. I know he fascinated her. But I had fallen for Marcelo and moved away by the time it went wrong. All the gossip, all the lying and posturing billowing up like smoke around the whole story, have made me bilious. There was plenty of pain to go around.

  A small plastic-surgery work popped up at the lodge a couple of months later. Most of “the collection” Felix Lord had accumulated was in storage, but she had Rune’s screen mounted on the wall upstairs, and we could all watch the artist’s little film: The New Me. It began with multiple versions of “before and after” ads, including the old drawings of a scrawny wimp on the beach transformed into a muscleman. We saw the fat, sagging, lumpy, and drooping metamorphosed into the slender, tight, smooth, and lifted. Rune, however, included “during” as well—films from facial surgery with blood-soaked gauze, knives slicing cheeks, skin flayed open, as well as flashes from an instructional video in which a row of practicing physicians bent over heads that had been severed from cadavers. The movie had a music video feel to it but played in silence, with fast cuts, clever edits that juxtaposed gore and loveliness. After about five minutes, the transformations became fantastical, a visual science fiction journey with animated bits of molded, airbrushed, robotic body-beautifuls. Rune himself was all over it in brief stills, close-ups, and long shots, some flattering, some not.

  I liked it.

  When Ethan saw it, he told to his mother that the work was a side effect of celebrity culture. He called it “life in the third person,” a phrase I liked. He said that’s what people want, to lose their insides and become pure surfaces. He told Harry she had wasted her money. She could have written out a check for the homeless. (We could always give it to the homeless or the environment or disease research.) Harry defended Rune. Ethan called it a pandering piece of shit for the stupid class. He didn’t raise his voice, but he argued steadily. He reminded me of my hero Levolor, that pious adolescent crusader, bumping along on his high horse. Ethan’s brand of Puritanism had a left-wing coloring, but that didn’t soften it any. Harry muttered that it was all right for the two of them to disagree, but her voice had turned husky. She reached out for him with her long fingers, but hesitated when they neared his shoulders. He stepped backward and blurted out, “Felix would have hated it.”

  Harry flinched. Then she closed her eyes, inhaled loudly through her nose, and her mouth stretched flat and tight in preparation for tears, which did not come. She nodded as she tried to hold her face still. She put her fingers to her mouth and just kept nodding. I wanted to vanish in a puff of purple smoke. Ethan had a paralyzed look about him. Say something, I thought, come on, say something. He was speechless, but he flushed to his ears, and his eyes had lost their focus. Soon after, Ethan left, and Harry sequestered herself in the studio. The scene had made me sad, and I knew I would be on my way before too long. The lodge was transitional, a
temporary hideout, one of the strange turns in a strange life.

  There is one other story I have to tell. There are times when I’ve thought to myself, Phinny, you must have dreamed it, but I didn’t. One night, I came home from the club. It was about five in the morning, maybe a little later. The night was cold, and before I went inside, I stood by the water and looked up at a skinny little moon with some thin clouds over it. When I walked into the hallway, I immediately knew something was wrong. I heard a retching sound, a cry, then loud cracks and thuds. The acoustics were strange in that building and tracing noises wasn’t easy. I checked on the Barometer, but he was in his sleeping bag. Burglars are quiet, I thought. I heard gasps, more choking sounds. They’re coming from Harry’s studio, I thought. I rushed to the door, opened it, and at the far end of the room, about twenty-five yards away, I saw Harry kneeling on the floor. She had a big kitchen cleaver in her fist and was ripping open one of her metamorphs. I couldn’t tell which one. The huge space was dark except for a single light that shone down on her. She didn’t hear me, because she groaned each time she thrust the knife into the padded body. There were also broken fragments of wood around her, and I guessed she had torn apart one of her little rooms or boxes.

  I closed the door as quietly as I could and tiptoed to my room. I’m sure there are scads of artists over the centuries who have kicked, beaten, and mangled their own works in despair and frustration—it was no crime. Looking at her through the door frightened me, though. I told myself I was a queasy oaf—oh-so-sensitive Phinny. The figure wasn’t a person. It was no more than a stuffed doll. It felt no pain. That was all true. The police were not going to come around and make an arrest for metamorph murder. Later, I realized that, despite all that, what scared me had been real. Harry’s rage had been real.

  An Alphabet Toward Several Meanings of Art and Generation

  Ethan Lord

  1. Artist A generates artwork B. An idea that is part of the body of A becomes a thing that is B. B is not identical to A. B does not even resemble A. What is the relation between A and B?

  2. A does not equal B, but B would be impossible without A, therefore B is dependent on A for its existence, while at the same time B is distinct from A. If A vanishes, B does not necessarily disappear. The object B can outlive the body of A.

  3. C is the third element. C is the body that observes B. C is not responsible for B and knows that A is B’s creator. When C looks at B, C does not view A. A is not present as a body, but as an idea that is part of the body of C. C can use A as a word to describe B. A has become one of the signs to designate B. A remains A, a body, but A is also a shared verbal tag that belongs to both A and C. B cannot use symbols.

  4. What happens when A makes B, but A vanishes as both body and sign from B? Instead of A, D becomes attached to B. C observes B created by A, but the idea of D has replaced A. Has B changed? Yes. B has changed because the idea in the body of C when observing B is now D rather than A. D does not equal A. They are two different bodies, and they are two different symbols. If the bodies of D and A are no longer there, B, the thing that cannot use signs, is not changed. Nevertheless, B’s meaning lives only in the body of C, the third element. Without C, B has no significance in itself. C now understands B through the sign D, all that remains of D after D’s body no longer exists.

  5. D is not the generator of B, but this ceases to matter. A is lost. A’s body is gone, and A does not circulate as a collective sign for B. Where is the idea that was in A’s body that created B? Is it in B? Can C observe the idea that was once in the body of A in the object B? Can A’s idea be found somewhere in B, despite the fact that C does not know A was there and believes in D?

  6. B’s value is also an idea, an idea that is transformed into a number. After observing the thing, C wants to own B. A number is attached to B, and those numbers are dependent on the name connected to its genesis, which is D. D = $. C buys B because the idea of D enhances C’s idea, not about B or D, but about C. B is now a circulating thing, which also inspires ideas about C and D, but which once was an idea inside the body of A, now burned to a fine powder that was put into a box and buried in the ground.

  7. There were many ideas that were part of A’s body when it was alive, but they did not begin with A. They were part of other bodies—too many others to be listed. They were in other living bodies that A knew, and they were in signs that had been inscribed by living bodies that had stopped living generations before A was born: E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z. Had A not taken these other ideas into the body that was A, B would not exist. B now circulates as an object known as D’s B. A is underground. A is the sign of ABSENCE.

  Harriet Burden

  Notebook B

  January 15, 2000

  Self-examination results in confabulation.

  Confabulation is the falsification of episodic memory in clear consciousness, often in association with amnesia, in other words, paramnesias related as true events.I

  But the neurologists are wrong; we all confabulate, brain lesions or not.

  I wonder if I am explaining things away now, remembering my life all wrong. I look at Dr. F. I try to remember. I can’t remember. So much has disappeared from the past or appears altered to me now. Remembering is like dreaming unless it was yesterday. Dreams are memories, too, anyway, hallucinatory memories. And the doctor is himself and others at the same time.

  When you don’t remember, you repeat.

  But in reality I would not know that I possess a true idea if my memory did not enable me to relate what is now evident with what was evident a moment ago, and through the medium of words, correlate my evidence with that of others, so that the Spinozist conception of the self-evident presupposes that of memory and perception.II

  That is all there is—perception and memory. But it’s ragged.

  Why do you always walk with your head down?

  Elsie Feingold said this to me on the telephone.

  I didn’t know I walked with my head down.

  Why do you always say you’re sorry? I’m sorry this, I’m sorry that. Why do you do that? It’s so annoying. You’re so annoying. That’s why the other kids don’t like you, Harriet. I’m telling you this as your friend.

  This happened, words very close to these were spoken. Lung constriction. Pain in vicinity of ribs. I remember I had pulled the telephone into my room and am lying on the floor just inside the door. I say nothing. I listen. A litany of crimes—my clothes, my hair. I use too many big words. I am always answering in class, brown-nosing Harriet. As your friend . . .

  You must be quiet. Your father is reading. I am so quiet and so good. I hardly breathe.

  What are you doing in here, Harriet?

  I am smelling the books, Mother.

  She is laughing, letting out her high chiming sounds. She leans over and kisses me. Does she kiss me? I see myself as small. Observer memory.

  Do I remember this or is it because Mother told me? Her laughter was a balm, always, but this may be her story of little Harriet smelling her father’s books, and she laughs when she tells me the story. I was four. I may have stolen the little tale from her and given it an image, a memory that is mine by proxy. I see the study with its big desk, and I smell the pipe. Why did all philosophy professors smoke pipes? An affectation. His students, too, all young men, smoked pipes, every single one of them. The graduate students all grew beards, and they smoked pipes on the seventh floor of Philosophy Hall. The Analyticals. Frege. The logic is out there.III

  Felix is standing in the doorway. He is looking through me again, as if I am not there. The note to Felix the Cat from the couple in Berlin is in my pocket. I have carried it with me for a week. Practicing what to say, learning it by heart, so simple.

  Before you leave, I say, I would like to return this to you, a note from friends. It was in your blue suit, the one you wore to the opening last
week.

  I can see the surprise in his face, can see his embarrassment, not shame. He has become negligent, flippant about it all.

  He takes the note and slips it into his pocket.

  But you know, he says, it has nothing to do with you, my love. It has nothing to do with my love for you.

  I am erased.

  Dr. F. says, I don’t think you understood how angry you were.

  No, I did not understand how angry I was.

  Last night. This I remember, don’t I? Yes, it is clear still, parts are clear enough, although there are peripheries never seen. Too many voices to distinguish any single voice except now and again—a soprano squeal or squawk. The throng in the well-lit white room, the paintings—so little on them—but a few hazy body parts, underpants, garters, bottles of nail polish and perfume. Mildly interesting. The artist smiling. He has a stiff smile, but who can blame him? Long, convoluted essay in the catalogue, quoting that buffoon Virilio.IV Phinny has put his arm around my waist. I can feel his hand. I do remember this warm gesture, this little goodness. In that instant, I worry over Bruno’s refusal to come with us. Maybe it is Phinny’s hand that makes me think of Bruno, my mauling lover. I am back to life under his hands, his rumbling voice, his jokes, but he said, I hate that art world shit. It’s worse than the poetry world, and that’s pretty bad, but there’s no money in poems. Just egos.