Harriet Burden
Notebook U
April 9, 2003
My anger is returning, a sweet fury.
He will not get away with this. I have made a vow.
I am leaving messages, sending e-mails. He will not get away with this.
Bruno says: Your philosophies will bury you alive. No one knows what you’re talking about, Harry.
You are all alone with your thoughts.
Today, you accused Dr. F. of not listening. Why? Why did you accuse him? Fierce and caustic you were. Then we talked about it. He is listening. He is always listening to you, and you felt bad, bad again.
April 20, 2003
Four works have vanished from the studio overnight. I am desperate. My windows. It seems impossible, but they are gone. I will look again tomorrow. Perhaps one of the assistants has moved them. No one can get into this building without using supernatural powers. Bruno tells me to remain calm. I must.
(Undated)
I wait for redemption from R.B. And before I sleep, a few notes on the beloveds:
Bruno’s Confessions are getting fatter. He himself is growing fatter. Fat old granddad.
Ethan’s story is called “Less Than Me.” I have been wondering what he means by it. His character S wakes up one morning and is somehow different. Some crucial aspect of herself has gone missing, her me-ness, her essence, her soul has fled her body. She doesn’t look any different in the mirror. Her apartment is the same. Her clothes are hanging in the closet. Her cat knows her, and yet, she is certain she is not the same. She begins to behave differently. She is a vegan but finds herself ordering meat dumplings from a Chinese restaurant. She takes a cab to work. She never splurges on cabs. She speaks her mind to a colleague at work. She never speaks her mind, and so forth. She begins to suspect her upstairs neighbor O, whom she has never met, a loose and merry girl with a bright wardrobe and a slew of boyfriends she bangs loudly enough for S to hear the couplings through the ceiling. Ethan doesn’t explain the suspicion. It just happens as it might in a dream, or in a fit of paranoia or a delusion. S spies on O. She keeps tabs on her comings and goings. She follows her in the street. She finds out everything she can about O, her favorite movies, books, shopping habits, but every new clue tells her nothing. Then S decides to build a monument to her lost self, an object that will be all that she is not anymore. She works hard every night after work and finally she finishes “the Thing.” We don’t really know what the Thing looks like, but it is some kind of body with writing and images on it. S invites O for dinner. O arrives, looks at the Thing, and says, Oh, it’s me.I
I called up Ethan. I was excited, pleased, wanted to tell him what I thought. We are more than the accumulation of empirical data, I said, more than a heap of recorded trivia, more than our wanderings and our meetings and our jobs, but what is that moreness? Is it what we create between us? Is it a neurological business? Is it the product of narrative, of the imaginary? It’s so interesting, I said. But Ethan was sullen, monosyllabic, said I had no idea what he had meant to say. S and O were signs in an arbitrary game of exchange. I said nothing to that. Then I said we artists mostly don’t know what we’re doing, and he told me not to tell him what he knows or doesn’t know. He never takes off that horrible wool hat. He’s worn it for about a year now, a helmet, really, to hide under. When I said we two seemed to have a headwear theme going in the family, he looked horrified. He does not want to be like his mother. I believe he wanted to rip the hat off immediately, but he is too proud. I don’t know how to reach across the chasm. I do everything wrong.
I did not say a word about it to him. But is it possible Ethan doesn’t know that his “Thing” resembles nothing so much as some of his mother’s artworks?
Aven is my number girl. She is seven, and she tells me her sevens are green. Her threes are yellow. She is my mathematical child, a child for whom the equations glow. The Radish is long forgotten. Maybe I am the only one who thinks of her anymore. My granddaughter has had her hair cut very short—a compromise. She wanted a Mohawk, but her father and mother refused. Hair grows, I, the indulgent grandmother, said to Maisie, but she said, Oscar is afraid she’ll be teased. She’s already strange. And I remembered my girlish strangeness.
You’re still strange, Harry, strange and estranged.
I eagerly await my coming out. It will happen. I am tense with excitement. It shall work. I bid you good night, whoever you are.
May 5, 2003
I believe Rune is the Barometer’s angel. The Barometer has drawn me another image of the intruder he claims he has seen coming and going at night. He likes the phrase the dead of night. And then he plays, Dire night, wee hours, hours of wee and woe, our wee, woeful hours. Wee Willie Winkie goes through the town. Upstairs and downstairs in his nightgown. We chanted it together. His drawing is of a huge muscular man with wings. When I looked into the Barometer’s eyes as he held out the paper to me, I imagined I was seeing Alan Dudek, the Barometer before he was the Barometer. I thought it was Alan for a moment because his gaze looked unclouded. He has moments of clarity, of a consciousness undiluted by madness. He is part theater, not all theater, but there is a piece of his illness he plays and plays with. This must be acknowledged. After all, we all play parts. We shouldn’t be so naïve as to believe that insane people are incapable of dissimulation. My mad friend has his masks, too, his games and subterfuges to avoid the all-important weekly bath or shower. But he also has access to the rumblings underground, a psychotic gift. He feels what we have suppressed, what we fear but cannot say. Isn’t this a kind of weather we make among us? I have studied the drawing. The longer I look at it, the more it looks like Rune to me. Bruno thinks I have joined the ranks of the mentally ill, that I’m in the grip of a paranoid fantasy.
I used his old name. Alan, I said, did you let him in? Did you let the angel in?
He looked surprised. He dug his nails into the skin above his wrist. I told him to stop scratching and repeated the question. He shook his head and said, He will cut out my brain and boil it for a stew.
Did Rune threaten him? If you tell, I’ll boil your brain and eat it. The idea is too vivid for Rune and its expression too precise. Rune’s diction rarely moves beyond the borrowed and the banal because Rune uses words to create a public being that hides what others would hate if they could see it. His language must socialize the treachery beneath. Beneath! The Barometer, on the other hand, is an ambulatory high tide of verbiage, but those waves of words include the occasional oracular insight. The problem is how to extract the prophesy from the verbal flood.
You must complete your Maskings without anyone to help you. There is R.B., after all. And there are the others, your several secret other ones.II The game is not over.
* * *
I. Ethan Lord, “Less Than Me,” The Paradoxical Review 28 (Spring/Summer 2003).
II. R.B. must refer to Richard Brickman. The question of “others” remains open, but it seems possible, even likely, that Burden published articles under other names in various journals.
Harriet Burden
Notebook O
September 23, 2003
The summer people are gone, and the island is chill and brown with patches of burning reds. The surf frightens me these days, and I keep my distance, staying close to where the beach meets the grasses that bow down in the hard wind. Today it made a noise that made me think of a great hoarse animal calling out to no one in particular. I am alone. I have lost Bruno now, too, lost him to my schemes and my rage and my failure. I wanted to bite the world bloody, but I have bitten myself, made my own poor tragedy of things.
And I feel even older alone. My belly is always bloated, even though I am thin. I eat alone, and the food doesn’t look as good as when he is with me. I have pains, vague abdominal aches that I wonder about. Sometimes at night they scare me, but in the morning I chide myself for hypochondria. My wri
nkled face surprises me. I don’t know why. I know it is wrinkled. Knowing is not seeing. I have tried to work here, but I cannot. It is as if all the worlds in my head are dying now, my blazing worlds, which I have clung to with my whole being, are slowly being snuffed out. And I sit in front of the fire wrapped in blankets reading Paradise Lost again, slowly, slowly, taking in the dense language I know so well. This afternoon I arrived at Eve’s dreadful meal, the big turn in the old story. The flawed, stupid, vain woman has eaten the damned fruit. “Greedily she ingorg’d without restraint.” She has done it for knowledge, to know more, to be illuminated. How I understand it. Yes, light up my head. I will do anything to know, to know more. Adam is horrified, but he cannot leave her. “Flesh of flesh, / Bone of my bone, and from thy State / Mine shall never be parted, bliss or woe.” And it was like my own fat man speaking to me, and I cried on the old paperback edition I’ve had here in the house for all these years. No one has loved me better than Bruno, and yet, it cannot work between us.
I have become hard.
Harriet Burden
Notebook D
Rune is inundated with my messages. He has agreed to see me. He wants me to stop “the harassment.” He refused to see me in Manhattan. He wouldn’t meet me in a restaurant. No, he wants to collide here in Red Hook in the open air where no art world types will see us, no tongues will wag. Fine, I said. Fine.
I have lost. Rune will never let go. He will never tell, and without him it is over. I can hold tight to Phinny’s words in Art Lights, to the Brickman piece, but I see how little people care. Somehow my story doesn’t interest them. I wanted to turn Rune back into a whining Ruina, to ruin him, to make him pay; but he owns the game now and makes the rules, if there are any rules anymore, if there ever were any rules. My hand is a swollen, purple mess. I hit him so hard. And I found Bruno. No, that’s a lie. Bruno found me. There he was, as if by magic, to pick me up off the ground. Today he made me chicken soup and watched my face closely as I spooned it into my mouth, and I made all the right sounds to please him.
October 18. I read it in the paper. Rune is dead.
He has made the last move, and he has done it in a contraption that steals from Beneath, and now he is sanctified. How the world loves the artist suicide, not old artists, of course, not old bags like me. No, they must be young or youngish. Thirty-eight is the perfect age to die if you want to cement your fame, to summon the throngs to feast on your beautiful corpse, to chew on your luminous legacy, made more poignant by the now-impossible future. Ah, Rune. Checkmate. And if he didn’t mean to do it? He would have gotten around to killing himself sooner or later. He wanted a beautiful death, didn’t he? And such a death must be planned. It don’t come natur’l. Celebrity is life in the third person. Ethan is right. Some people are better at living the third person than others.
But I sabotaged myself without knowing it, didn’t I? It was as if I had to follow the game to its end, to wind up in that room with Rune and the dead Felix to be threatened, slapped, and humiliated, to be turned back into a cowering, ashamed child who cannot speak up. I was pulled toward it, as if time were nothing, and the past had become both present and future, and the dead could walk again. They tramp through the furrows of your mind, Harry, in that rumpled wilderness of gray matter, the two men you wanted but couldn’t have, your father and your husband. It was not just love. That’s where you went wrong. You know that now. It wasn’t just about love and wanting to be loved. You were not that eternal plaintive female bleating over the ages, I love you, and I want you to love me, and I will wait for you, my love, with my hands folded and my head down. I am not that paragon of virtue, Penelope, waiting for Odysseus and turning away the suitors.
I am Odysseus.
But I found out too late.
I hate you, Father. I hate you, Felix. I hate you both for not seeing that truth, for not recognizing that I am the clever hero.
And Mother, you bent your head and you took his punishment. He shut you out and he shut you down. He did not speak to you. He acted as if you did not exist, because you wanted to speak.
And you, Harry, you bent your head and you took his punishment, and you cannot bear it, can you?
And didn’t you wait at home like Penelope, without any suitors, sadly, just two children? And were you not faithful? And were you not kind? And were you not long-suffering? So are you not Penelope? No, because she did not want to be Odysseus, at least as far as we know she didn’t, but who would want to be Penelope? You did not want to wait, and yet you nearly went mad waiting. And now your son, too, keeps his distance from you, as if you are contaminated. If he identifies with you, he is emasculated, such an old drama; my feminist son is terrified of maternal stench.
I am Odysseus, but I have been Penelope.
But how he loved you back in the day, little, intense, hypersensitive Ethan, whatever he says, whatever he has forgotten. You have that passionate story in your memory fields. And your daughter is with you still. You have Maisie. And you have Aven.
And Rune? He is the sign of your hatred, your envy, your fury, isn’t he?
Did he start it, Harry? Or did you? What did he want from you? Did he only want the pleasure of hurting you through Felix?
“He liked to watch.” That’s what Rune said, that Felix was a voyeur. Does it matter that he rubbed his cock to ecstasy while he looked at others humping on the floor in front of him? No. And does it matter that when you imagine it you feel sad? But why sad, Harry? Didn’t you enjoy tormenting Ruina in the game? Didn’t Rune know it filled you with sadistic joy? Isn’t that why he turned the tables on you? He knew that you played both parts. There’s the rub. And knowing is power. Elementary Freud, dear Watson. A child is being beaten.I
But I didn’t know about Felix. All I knew is that there were secrets and that some of the secrets had names. I wondered what was in his head when we grappled in bed. I wonder if it was Harriet Burden. Was it ever Harriet Burden, wife and helpmeet? Sure it was. In the beginning it was. Rune might have lied about Felix, but even if he were lying, it wouldn’t make much difference now. Rune became the sign of all the boys who studied their Quine and mastered their logic and smoked their pipes and looked at your father with worshipful eyes, the boy you might have been, Harry. But for a twist of fate in the womb, you might have pleased him and triumphed. And Rune became the sign of all the boys Felix showed and Felix loved and Felix made famous and Felix bought and Felix sold. That gets close to the heart of the matter, doesn’t it? What do you say, Dr. F.? Am I getting close to the heart of the matter? Rune, Mr. Third Person, Mr. Swagger, Mr. Glib—the one who counts, the one who wins. And isn’t it just that quality of knowing, of assurance, of entitlement that you detest, Harry, that you find so hard to imitate, the quality they all had? And did they not all condescend to you, Harry? Did they not regard you as an inferior, you who could out-think, out-work, out-do every single one of them?
Yes. They did. And they are all dead. I cannot believe that they are all dead.
November 1, 2003
I am back to my blazing mother Margaret. Margaret, the anti-Milton. She gives birth to worlds. It is not God who speaks here, but Nature:
All paines I can take,
Will do no good, Matter a Braine must make;
Figure must draw a Circle, round, and small,
Where in the midst must stand a Glassy Ball,
Without Convexe, the inside a Concave,
And in the midst a round small hole must have,
That Species may passe, and repasse through,
Life the Prospective every thing to view.II
Mad Madge had no children of her own, no babies to raise up into adults. She had her “Paper Bodies,” her breathing works, and she loved them dearly.III
“So do I likewise not persuade myself, that my philosophy being new, and but lately brought forth, will at first sight prove master of understanding, it ma
y be, not in this age, but if God favour her, she may attain to it in after times: And if she be slighted now and buried in silence, she may perhaps rise more gloriously hereafter; for her ground being sense and reason, she may meet with an age where she will be more regarded than she is in this.”IV
I will leave my bodies behind me, too. I am making them for hereafter, not for the bruising present with its cold, dismissive eyes.
The witch hides herself in her castle by the sea with the bear, her friend and lover. That is how the fairy tale has ended. The old witch and the old bear live happily and sadly together ever after.
December 1. The Natural Mask. That’s me. I am the natural mask. It’s Maisie’s idea. I used the words for Raccoona once, and she’s adopted it for the film about her mother and now she’s letting me explain myself to the camera, me, H.B., in all my pseudonymous mania, and I’m explicating and expounding and pontificating and we’re having good fun together. Now you’ve got a hoarder, a schizophrenic, and your mother, I said to Maisie, a perfect trio. And my Maisie smiles. I can’t tell all. I must keep some secrets, of course, but the telling has almost made me feel that I might be understood. Is it such a vain hope?
Aven looked long and tall and thin today. She has entered what I call “high middle childhood.” She examined my mischievous little people, turned red when she saw my copulating pairs, and laughed wildly at my Ursula who’s taking a shit. She let me draw her into my lap today, let her grandmother revel in the tactile pleasure of holding her young body close to my ribs. I put my nose into her short brown hair. Today, it smelled vaguely of apples.