Plus c’est la meme chose.
Gail Armstrong is seeking some little comfort. And so I went looking for that marginal note Ada makes to Van: “If we all remembered the same way, we would not be different people,” I think it goes, but I can’t find it, not tonight; it’s a terribly frustrating book, after all—appalling, heartbreaking, beautiful, vicious. This is what it offered up, tonight, instead:
An individual’s life consisted of certain classified things: “real things” which were unfrequent and priceless, simply “things” which formed the routine stuff of life; and “ghost things,” also called “fogs,” such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occurring at the same time formed a “tower,” or, if they came in immediate succession, they made a “bridge.” “Real towers” and “real bridges” were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture; it almost never happened, though. In some circumstances, in a certain light, a neutral “thing” might look or even actually become “real” or else, conversely, it might coagulate into a fetid “fog.” When the joy and the joyless happened to be intermixed, simultaneously or along the ramp of duration, one was confronted with “ruined towers” and “broken bridges.”
See? Tedious. Pedantic. Ferocious. Utterly necessary. But ultimately useless. Damn!
So instead I pick up one of my recent obsessions, Diane di Prima’s Memoirs of a Beatnik, picked up at Powell’s for a song, and I flip to the passage that first caught my eye:
We lived through the horror of the 1956 election as we had lived through the horror of the Rosenberg executions and the Hungarian revolution: paranoid, glued to the radio, and talking endlessly of where we could possibly go into exile. Every inch of walls and floor in the apartment was covered with murals and wise sayings: “The unicorns shall inherit the earth.” “Sacrifice everything to the clean line.” “Think no twisty thoughts.” Etc., etc. Wilhelm Reich was in federal prison.
The first fallout terror had finally struck, and a group of people were buying land in Montana to construct a city under a lead dome. In New York, the beginnings of neo-fascist city planning were stirring, and the entire area north of our pad was slated for destruction, to make way for what was to become Lincoln Center. The house next door to us, which had been empty for twenty-eight years, and had functioned as our own private garbage dump for as long as we had lived there, was suddenly torn down, leaving a number of bums homeless and scattering thousands of rats—most of them into our walls.
Most of the more outrageous gay bars had been closed, and people cruised Central Park West more cautiously: there were many plainclothes busts. There were more and more drugs available: cocaine and opium, as well as the ubiquitous heroin, but the hallucinogens hadn’t hit the scene yet. The affluent post-Korean–war society was settling down to a grimmer, more long-term ugliness. At that moment, there really seemed to be no way out.
And it’s not that the disaffected we will always have with us, and it’s not that these grim ugly battles have always been fought and look! We’ve largely come out okay. Those are crap lessons, New Age pablum, mealy morals for people who don’t want to listen to older, colder fairy tales. —No, it’s the sharp shock of deja vu: I know this place, though I have never been here before. It’s a backstage pass; a Golden Ticket. It isn’t History, it’s a story you feel in your bones. The world sits up and opens its dead eyes and tells you something three times, and the hairs on your chin stand up. Diane di Prima’s glued to the radio, paranoid, listening as Eisenhower kicks Stevenson’s ass, and I’m on a futon in a second-floor bedroom of a ratty unheated house in Boston watching the bombs fall on Iraq for the first time, and maybe this doesn’t ring true for you at all, but that’s okay, because if we all remembered it the same way, we wouldn’t be different people. Would we?
Comfort. —We all need comfort, but suddenly I’m thinking of Ann, so very tired, who lay down in the Martian snow to die, and then Simon came up out of nowhere and kicked her helmet and turned her suit’s heater back on, dragging her back to the world as it was, as it is, and she kept asking him why, why he wouldn’t just leave her alone and all he could say was because, because, because. It’s not that sort of comfort, where you’re so tired of fighting you just lie down and wait till you stop shivering. (Though they do say freezing to death is a comfortable way to go. —They also say that about drowning.)
Where do we turn for comfort, then? Sometimes I turn to David Chess:
Last year I told y’all about how in my vanished youth I used to go square dancing every few weeks with a certain bunch of people, to a certain caller, and how that caller had had this great handsome house big enough for three or four squares, and I wondered if he still had it? Well over the weekend we went across the river and square danced with roughly those same people, to exactly that caller, in that same house.
A house where some of my fondest childhood memories were formed, and a house I hadn’t seen in thirty years. It was just the same, and completely different. Same woods, same rooms, same chairs and benches, same stairs down to the bedrooms downstairs, same livingroom big enough for two squares, and a posible third over in the alcove. But not as enormous as when I was little, not as mysterious, not as filled with that amazing unconscious kid-sense of being cupped in the warm palm of the universe, with everything being taken care of for you by other people, and nothing to do but dance and sing and run around shouting.
It was great fun, and (but) I was all melancholy all night after we got home.
What a world.
Because the trick of it, of course, is that you can’t just order up one of these moments, these bridges and towers, whenever you suddenly need one. You have to have built them out of the stuff you’ve got lying around, or picked up from what somebody else made once, or found, and told you about in a book or a conversation or a song, and so you tucked it away in your pocket and forgot about it until, and you have to have left them just scattered haphazardly across the floor of your memory, and you can’t ever stop; you never reach a moment when there’s finally enough. You have to keep building them and scattering them like bread crumbs, these booby traps benign and otherwise you stumble over when you least expect them but most need them, and suddenly oh, I see. Oh, I get it.
What a world.
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I can say, from firsthand experience, that drowning to death is a relatively unobjectionable way to go. You struggle for a little while (say, a minute), and then you fall unconscious as your brain shuts down from oxygen deprivation; the latter is, basically, exactly like falling asleep. The principal disadvantage is that you're dead afterwards. Fortunately, there was a diver, trained in CPR, who pulled me out of the lake shortly thereafter, and I lived, though I had to spend a couple of days regrowing my lung tissue at the nearest hospital.
Too true, too true, and you not only have to keep accumulating those crumbs, you have to get in the habit of putting them where you can find them when you need them.
Which brings us back to Ada, where I can never find what I'm looking for either. Next time I read the damn thing I'll have to make a running index.
"Unobjectionable" is a fine synonym for the comfort I was sort of trying to get at, or so it seems by the brighter light of morning. --I have no first-hand experience either way, myself; just the folk-knowledge of moldering pulpsmiths: freezing to death, relatively speaking, or so they say, seems to offer better hallucinations (perhaps because it goes on for so much longer?), and everyone, but everyone, cites that moment after you stop shivering when it starts to get warm again, sort of.
And: languagehat: isn't it astonishing how thoroughly unhelpful Darkbloom's annotations are, in that or any other regard?
The Diane di Prima is both wonderful and timely. Just last night, Aaron and I were discussing what I've fond to be a not uncommon topic on the left - are we now in a situation analagous to the US in the 1950s, with Muslims instead of Communists as the universal scapegoat or are we headed for darker and even more threatening times - essentially the debate about whether it would simply be pleasant to leave the US or if it might become necessary. During this discussion, we both realized that we perhaps needed to read books written by 50s radicals to understand the situation better.