The Blazing World

  I felt Richard again, felt his desire to smack the cowering girl silly. Without his pedestrian speeches, my figment seemed to grow in stature. But as the final seconds rolled around again, I wondered who exactly was laughing at the end. Was it Rune or Ruina? I had thought that Rune had burst out of character, that he had broken the fourth wall, but now I wasn’t sure. It seemed to me that she, Ruina, was laughing inside the game, which added another layer of pretense or, at the very least, complicated the imaginary realm. I felt disoriented.

  I said to him, Who was laughing?

  Rune gave me a puzzled look.

  I pressed him. I said again, Who was laughing? You or Ruina? He just stared at me. I spoke to him sharply. I said, Tell me.

  He leaned back in the sofa and folded his arms. Are you being Richard now?

  No, I said, I’m Harry. I could feel anger tighten my chest and throat.

  Tom, Dick, and . . . he said to me.

  I lowered my voice and said I was serious.

  He joked and said, “The mask made me do it. The mask made me do it.” Then he accused me of being too serious. I had started it, hadn’t I? Games were meant to be fun. Was I worried about which of us had won, for Christ’s sake? It hadn’t been scripted. What came out of us had come out. Who cared? Where was my sense of humor?

  Where was your sense of humor, Harry, that glorious feeling for the ridiculous? Who was that masked man galloping across the television screen? Wasn’t it you? Laugh loudly! Do not turn back now, Harry. You two are partners in the masked dance, and its steps will mean nothing if they are danced alone. Are you not double in the game? Johannes and Cordelia, John and Mary, Richard and Ruina? And why did you drone on about Dora Maar to Rune if you weren’t doubling yourself yet again without even knowing it?

  There you were, Harry, on the red sofa beside Rune, telling him about Picasso sighting Maar at a café in Paris, her fingers splayed on the table in front of her as she stabbed the spaces between her fingers with a knife. When she missed, she bled. Five-fingered fillet. Picasso saved her gloves as a trophy.

  Picasso painted Maar as the crying woman, as Spain in mourning, but the he-goat loved to make women cry. As the tears tumbled, the goat’s penis stiffened. What a buoyant, energetic little misogynist Picasso was! And you told Rune the whole story, about Maar’s Surrealist photos, the sublime Ubu that won a prize in 1936 among them, and her not-as-wonderful paintings. You told him about how she broke down after Picasso left her, about her analysis with Jacques Lacan, about the hideous chair with steel bars and hairy ropes Picasso wrapped up and sent her as a present and the rusty shovel blade she mailed to him, a game of gifts they played together. And then the package that was found in 1983 among Picasso’s possessions: a signet ring he had designed and engraved with the letters P D, pour Dora. Inside the circlet was a spike.

  The man who unwrapped the ring was horrified, but, I said to Rune, it must have been meant as an allusion to Maar’s knife game, don’t you think? To look at the ring is to see a bleeding finger.

  No one can play alone, I said. Even when there is no one else in the room, there must be an imaginary other.

  I found the quote from Cocteau for Rune: “Picasso is a man and a woman deeply entwined. He is a living ménage. Dora is a living concubine with whom he is unfaithful to himself. From this ménage marvelous monsters are born.”

  We are all a ménage, I said to him.

  And then Rune said, A long time ago someone told me you were brilliant, just brilliant.

  Who? I said, but he couldn’t remember. It was someone who knew me or had known me. It might have been at a party. It’s true, he said. You are.

  I was so pleased. Slathered up with the compliment, I felt yielding, pliable, happy. Shine a warm light on poor old Harry and she turns into melted butter.

  We were silent then and listened to the ocean. Let’s go down to the beach, I said. And we did. The moon was a crack of light only, a gleaming pale space in the sky briefly uncovered by the thick moving clouds, and we looked up at those cumulus depths with their illuminated grays, and I suppose we saw the same thing, because he whistled. We trotted down to the water and let the surf wash over our feet and felt its drag on our ankles as it withdrew. I felt we were friends.

  It was only an hour ago, but in memory I have already changed the view. I find that odd. I am no longer inside myself. I see the two of us from behind, standing on the beach, two tall, dim silhouettes in the compromised moonlight. At some point, we turn and walk up the beach and down the path of gray wooden planks that leads to the house. When he bids me good night, he smiles. He says that it has been a great day, a banal phrase, but that is what we say, don’t we? It’s been a great day.

  Then he kissed me lightly on both sides of my face and said good night again.

  Sunday, June 10, 2001

  Coda:

  Tonight I luxuriated in the empty house, ate pasta with heaps of vegetables, read Emily Dickinson. She blazes.

  Mine—by the Right of the White Election!

  Mine—by the Royal Seal!

  Mine—by the Sign in the Scarlet prison—

  Bars—cannot conceal!

  Rune, on the other hand, is a lowly jingle that has dug a trench in my mind and plays again and again. He lingers as a song of doubt. I see his tanned face at dinner as I listen again to his talk about AI, facile and adolescent, but somehow alive: “Machine and human libido.” I have invented new pictures for him: a towheaded boy with his head in sci-fi novels. I see him build a machine in his backyard. I see him in a darkened movie theater, his eyes lit by the screen as he watches an alien invasion. He must have felt like an alien out there in Iowa with his sister. I see cornfields and red barns. I have never been to Iowa. I am painting by the numbers.

  Yesterday—I think it was yesterday—he inscribed a quote in the sand with a shell as we sat on the beach. It was from Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto,” 1909: “We are going to be present at the birth of the centaur and we shall soon see the angels fly.” When I told him Marinetti was mad and repulsive, he said he loved the mad and the repulsive. He loved fire, hatred, and speed. There is beauty in violence, he said. No one wants to acknowledge that, but it is true. I looked at his lower arm, brown under the white linen shirt he was wearing, the sleeves rolled to his elbows, a baseball cap on his head. I argued with him. It was a fascist aesthetic, I said, and in order to see beauty in maiming and bloodshed, one had to be far removed from those involved. But Rune has learned that the swift verbal or visual kick will prod strong reactions, which he can then lie back and enjoy. He falls into easy insurrection, the kind for which no one pays a price. But this persona is perfect for my plan. They will sit up and notice.

  It is the dark thing, the inexplicable lump of a thing that gives you real doubts, Harry. And the dark thing is not in Rune but in you, isn’t it? It is in you as Richard Brickman. And Rune knows this. He is sensitive to undercurrents, just as you are. I see him pick up the mask and put it on. That is what you wanted, isn’t it? You wanted to play. But there is the fear of the burning arousal between your legs born of the game, out of control. The secret: I am not attracted to Rune, except when I’m Richard and he’s Ruina, but in order to play one has to take both parts. There’s a confession. Do I dare tell Dr. F.?

  I am responsible for the drama (or whatever it was). I, Mistress of the Masks, have created the whole shebang. Rune played along with it, nothing more. He played well. He was game, but it was my show, wasn’t it? Where is the boundary between the two inventions, Harry, the absurd masked beings on the screen? Can you draw the line? Have you given too much away? Are you vulnerable? That is the melody of your doubt.

  And now, as you write these words, you see your not-yet-old father sitting in silence at the end of the table in the Riverside Drive apartment, a speechless statue. Then you see your old mother many years later wearing her lilac robe in the hospital
. She is telling you the story of how he punished her for wanting to speak. He punished her by saying nothing, and you, Harry, blurt out the words, That was cruel! He was cruel! Your mother agrees. It was cruel.

  Of this I am certain: There has been more than one turn of the screw.

  * * *

  I. J. G. Ballard, The Day of Creation (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 64.

  II. J. G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (London: Fourth Estate, 1990), 27.

  III. The popular quote about Aristotelian logic is from a character in Dick’s novel VALIS, not from Dick himself. In her notebooks, Burden frequently returns to what she calls “the limits of logic.” Her attempt to engage Rune in a discussion of various forms of logic fails. Boolean logic, named after the nineteenth-century mathematician George Boole, is an algebraic binary system in which all values can be reduced to true or false, a logic fundamental to the design of computer hardware. Paraconsistent three-valued logic systems are designed to retain forms of traditional logic but also tolerate inconsistencies: “the unknown or the ambiguous.” In 1931, Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem demonstrated that any system of mathematics or logic cannot be both consistent and complete because it must rely on unproven assumptions that lie outside the system.

  IV. “Overdetermined: The fact that formations of the unconscious (symptoms, dreams, etc.) can be attributed to a plurality of determining factors.” J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 292. Burden suggests that her sudden coming upon the name Brickman is derived from multiple unconscious sources.

  V. The art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929) developed the term Pathosformel to describe the emotive formula of visual representations. For Warburg, works of art were charged with psychic energies expressed in a gestural language. See Warburg’s The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles, Calif.: Getty Research Institute, 1999).

  VI. Burden is referring to the master/slave chapter in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, in which the philosopher argues that self-consciousness is achieved only through an agonistic battle with the other.

  VII. Judith Butler coined the term performativity: “Gender proves to be performance, that is, constituting an identity it is purported to be. In this sense gender is always a doing, though not a doing by the subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed.” In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 25.

  Rachel Briefman

  (written statement)

  I confess there were times when I found Harry’s intensity about her pseudonymous project rather exhausting. At our weekly teas, her eyes shone as she reported on her voluminous reading and how it fit into her larger schema. She showed me drawings and charts, handed me books of philosophy, science papers on mirror systems in the brain, and she wanted my opinions on all of them. Every once in a while, an article or book caught my attention, but often I had to tell her that I didn’t have time to work my way through it. I never met Rune or witnessed Harry designing or building the project, but she discussed it regularly with me and worried continually about the risks they were taking by introducing elements he had never used in his work before. I know she imagined a great victory waiting for her at the end of the tunnel, redemption for her years of toil and oblivion, and I admit that this fantasy had an irrational coloring to it; but to those who believe that Harry lied about her work with Rune, I say it is not possible, and to others who have argued that she lost her hold on reality altogether and no longer knew whether she was coming or going, I can say firmly as a psychiatrist that Harry was not psychotic. She was not delusional. Her friend the Barometer was psychotic and delusional. Harry was no more deluded than the average neurotic.

  In fact, she was hell-bent on understanding the psychology of belief and delusion, which, let us be frank, are often one and the same thing. How do preposterous, even impossible ideas take hold of whole populations? The art world was Harry’s laboratory—her microcosm of human interaction—in which buzz and rumor literally alter the appearances of paintings and sculptures. But no one can prove that one work of art is truly superior to another or that the art market runs mostly on such blinkered notions. As Harry pointed out to me repeatedly, there is not even agreement on a definition of art.

  In some cases, however, delusions become apparent. Harry and I were both fascinated by what have been called “moral panics,” outbreaks of spreading terror, often directed at one supposedly “deviant” group or another—Jews, homosexuals, blacks, hippies, and, last but not least, witches and devils. During the 1980s and early 1990s, satanic cults popped up all over the United States, and their gruesome rites were all soberly reported in the newspapers. Countless arrests, trials, imprisonments, and wrecked lives resulted from that hysterical contagion. Social workers, psychotherapists, law enforcement officials, and the courts were all swept up in the panic. In the end, there was no evidence of a single accusation having been true. One conviction after another has been overturned. Caught in an epidemic of traveling thoughts, hundreds of people were eager to believe that the woman or man at the day-care center, the sheriff, the coach, the neighbor down the street were monsters who raped and mutilated children, who drank their blood and ate their feces for breakfast. Gruesome memories sprouted from the minds of grown-ups and children, accounts of Black Sabbath masses, of sodomy and untold numbers of murders, but no one ever found a dead body or any marks of torture on a single person. And yet people believed. There are those who still believe.

  Think of the stories that bloomed and circulated after 9/11, that no Jews were killed at the World Trade Center and that the U.S. government had manufactured the atrocity. This nonsense had adamant followers, as, of course, did the Bush administration’s big lie about the same carnage and Iraq. It is easy to claim that those who are swept up in these beliefs are ignorant, but belief is a complex mixture of suggestion, mimicry, desire, and projection. We all like to believe we are resistant to the words and actions of others. We believe that their imaginings do not become ours, but we are wrong. Some beliefs are so patently wrong—the proclamations of the Flat Earth Society, for example—that dismissing them is simple for most of us. But many others reside in ambiguous territory, where the personal and the interpersonal are not easily separated.

  It should not be forgotten that Harry had been rewriting her own life in psychoanalysis for years, that what she called a slowly developing “revisionist text” of her life had begun to replace an earlier “mythical” one. People and events had taken on new significance for her. Her memories had changed. Harry had not recovered any dubious memories from her childhood, but on February 19, 2003, only a month before Beneath was shown, she told me that when she looked back on her life, vast stretches of it had vanished. With a little prompting, she could easily fill in those blanks with fictions. Weren’t most memories a form of fiction anyway? She remembered what I had forgotten, and I remembered what she had forgotten, and when we remembered the same story, didn’t we remember it differently? But neither of us was prevaricating. The scenes of the past were continually being shifted and reshuffled and seen again from the vantage point of the present, that’s all, and the changes take place without our awareness. Harry had reinterpreted any number of memories. Her whole life looked different.

  And, Harry asked, where does it begin? The thoughts, words, joys, and fears of other people enter us and become ours. They live in us from the start. Moral panic, the multiple-personality epidemic, and recovered-memory mania ran wild in the eighties and early nineties as a wave of suggestion passed from one person to another, a kind of mass hypnosis or spreading unconscious permission that allowed countless people to suddenly become many, a Pandora’s box. Therapists reported on patients with dozens of personalities. Whole populations housed
inside a single body—men, women, and children coming out as alters. What did it mean? And then when the name of the illness was changed to Dissociated Identity Disorder and skepticism reasserted itself, the numbers of people diagnosed with the illness diminished to a few cases here and there. What Harry wanted to know was: Were we just one person or were we all many? Didn’t actors and authors invent characters for a living? Where did those people come from?

  I argued that however passionate artists were, they knew the difference between creator and creation, that the illness, under whatever name, was connected to trauma and that, without question, the epidemic had been encouraged by eager and often ill-informed therapists.

  Harry sat across from me, her gray hair curling out from under her beret, waving at me with her right hand, with which she knocked over her teacup and sent the pale brown liquid seeping across the tablecloth. Yes, yes, she said, but aren’t creatures and alters manufactured from the same subliminal material? Aren’t these others inside us like dream figures? She shooed away our solicitous waiter who had come running, placed her napkin over the stain, and continued. She had been working with Rune for some time, and for Beneath the two of them had been playing games and staging them on film, games with masks, costumes, and props. And when they played, things began to happen. Harry held me with her eyes. I asked her, What things?