Thanatographies, p.2
Thanatographies, page 2
One eye is sleeping, the other remains awake. I am like a dog, a pretend sleeper, snout on thresholds. I long for the fullness of a winter’s sleep, when bacteria enter and exit the body, carry the blue to other bodies. I am so lost the other world fetches me.
A nameless woman sits upright next to me on the bed. She gazes at the window, reflections deteriorate toward states of gilgūl, a turning over or rolling over of souls. She appears non-urgent, a little flat, and anachronistic. I do not feel any pity or even interest, but more of a headache. Have you ever reflected on power directly in your own home? Why the telephone languishes at the center of the house? Why some books are on display and others hiding? A magazine has slipped through the mail slot and landed on the doormat. And the doormat says WELCOME but it’s upside-down.
The light from the window molds a threshold, emphasizing the contrast between shelter and exposure, between safety and humiliation, and the fear that connects them. A narrow hallway extends like a birth canal beyond the bedroom. The bed looks colossal. What has made anyone believe that we need beds as large as boats to rest comfortably?
Chantal Akerman took sleeping pills most of her life. A lot of her films hold the bed as a kind of center. The obsessive interior. She writes: “My mother secretes an unbearable anguish and I have to avoid contamination, but I am contaminated anyway and my mother feels shunned and treated like a piece of furniture . . . ”
There is a clock ticking. Truth is calm. It is the clock’s diversion while making a plan. Here is the full body. I have not shown it to anyone in years. This body that is alive whether you look at it or not.
The room is messy. It’s a tired chaos, one that does not really understand itself, random papers in various corners, a single shoe, cables that lead nowhere, and a group of grimy coins. I killed a hornet with Nancy Spero’s The Torture of Women. The blood splatters caked on the wall. The hornet had crawled toward me, very slowly. It was furry, and I first mistook it for a spider. A spider that I didn’t mind. But with the event of murder hornets, I have also trained my eye farther. And I am certain that all this boils down to a general death phobia that stalks this civilization.
There are letters stored in a shoebox. Life reduced to a shoebox. But why say, reduced? Maybe life has become uncontainable so that only the smallest of boxes can be conjured. There are bundles of letters, and if you were to read them now, leisurely, scanning the handwriting, lack of dates and missing pages, you would say this is a person struggling, a struggle manifest in the handwriting, which changes with each page in size and angle, at times diligently small and legible, at others widening and cursive beyond anyone’s recognition. You may think this is a person who had a lot of addresses. The letters in boxes emphasize a disappearing air, an archival sentience produced long after someone has passed. Correspondences turned into elegies that did not yet know of their abandoned condition in a shoebox of the future. They are sorted and bound.
There is the computer and its emails. Some emails are sobering, such as the ones written in short succession from an old friend, whom I had not heard from in many years, chronicling a kind of deterioration. Like the addiction many contemporaries experience to their own image. I recognized no one, and his actions, which he detailed like a police report, read alcoholic. I wondered if he was on the run. At some point the emails stopped, and I never heard from him again.
The houseplant has been moved around several times in an attempt for optimal light and temperature and, of course, with an eye to its decorative potential. The houseplant, since its arrival eighteen months ago, has developed four new leaves. The new leaves are slightly reddened and gleaming, almost perky. The older leaves with yellow spots hang downward.
The nameless woman covers her face with her palms, the most sensitive part of memory, which presents itself as it must, slanted and on repeat before dawn. Though dawn here is a metaphor for a time much less distinct. Her hands look soft, and I would like to touch them, but as if in a dream, her image moves, doubles, and scurries. If I had to characterize her right now, I would say a kind of rudimentary absence stalks her. She reminds me of someone with wealth who does not feel lucky at all but forever shorthanded by life. The rich are miserable, but they are also fascinating. They constantly must invent a life in which their money is needed. Now she is turning into a cliché. What I meant to say, but failed to do so, is how unconscious mystery rules her life. Everything she does not know about herself, or refuses to know, pressures into her sunlit rooms with menacing force. She now stands there like a spoiled brat.
I don’t know how to continue. It is not a thought, much less an argument, I wish to present, but a form of sleeping while awake. Being entranced and in words at the same time. To formulate one’s vision with the slippery skins that they reject but are most definitely made of. When I look at the nameless woman, I see stark compositions, incited by nightly monologues, and the cedar trees that remain. A singular character who is also numerous. Women swarming in the after-hours, subsisting on their own laws, their cold chicken, canker sores, and minimal joy.
The nameless woman builds from a vacation of thought, a sense of idiocy. How do you characterize anything? The task for women, it seems, is to wrangle a deposition, a place on the bridge, where the imagined and the witnessed meet. A place that remains nameless unless it is auctioned off by a museum and one can get a check. Buy a ticket elsewhere.
My first ticket was a plane ticket, bought by my parents after their divorce. I was sixteen and arrived Down Under after three days and nights of travel. My new mother, upon arrival, took me to a body-painting performance on the beach. I transformed into Medusa wearing a bikini and a plastic snake head attached to my abdomen, some wiry ropes on my head. I was placed in a cauldron for five hours and told to keep my eyes closed.
My new mother was a filmmaker and a bit of a fraud. We lived on the outskirts of a small town, on the Gold Coast, in a ramshackle house that was converted into several film sets over the course of the year that I stayed with her. I woke up to actors eating cornflakes, their wigs resting on the counter. I slowly watched all characters get killed. Each death a carefully calculated murder among friends. The film later made press as the cheapest low-budget film ever made on the Australian continent. In the end, we blew up a car on a large sloping field. One of the actors tried to spread a rumor, and I fell for the trap, nearly broke up my new mother’s relationship with the sleazy film director who had written the murderous script. Over Christmas, on the verge of a breakdown, she tasked me to walk two miles to the pharmacy and procure some sleep medication, a bag of taco chips, cheddar cheese, and salsa. It was one hundred degrees outside, and the asphalt began to breathe its tarry breath. We watched films for the rest of the holidays: True Romance, Total Eclipse, and a lot of Australian B movies.
I am trying to recover from a string of enemies who feast on my heart. Lovers, friends, relatives, and strangers who lift their ghostly heads to gaze into my bedroom. Their demands are very subtle, almost negligible, making sure I still remember them. That I am aware of my contractual arrangements. In a circle, in a taunt, and with unguarded eyes. I am no Medusa. Though someone called me a bitch once, and they are right, the bitch is well and alive.
The nameless woman stares at the handwriting in shock. Its naked delivery. Her eyes hang droopy, two spirit cakes that cannot incarnate. Geese sounds echo through the sky, and then a lone seagull’s cry against the wind. In between the murmurs of starling swarms.
The sky, like the ground, is populated, an endless mosaic of forces.
I really want to make this straightforward. You must get used to variation: death and flowers. Seasons and sleep. No sleep. Underworld play and heat. I am a miracle and a plague. You must get used to this “I” getting on your nerves, as it does on mine, its withdrawal into compulsive sets of habits, forebodings, and tics that hog and dangle from a spitfire. Then you must try to read on, regardless, to sense what it is like over there, anywhere.
IN THE EVENING, I NOTICED a new flower arrangement hanging from my neighbor’s porch, where she likes to entertain. I can usually hear these conversations because she speaks loudly. The flowers looked fresh. She had toured her front garden with a visitor, and it seems she understands her premises as a kind of private museum. Of course, she paraded her visitor for the entire neighborhood to see, so that, in fact, the visitor herself turned into an object exhibited. The flowers, I am certain, will not withstand the summer heat very long and dry out, like the grass that has been cut down to a brown carpet.
Everything was quiet, except for the child next door, who cried because his brother told him he looked like a potato. I watched the street, studied each neighbor. Life here with the houseplant is small, small and quiet. Outside there is ongoing applause. A deafening applause.
There was a breeze, like late summer breeze, and I could smell the neighboring gardens. Geraniums, forsythia, and sunflowers mixed with the hairy smell of tomato plants. The sudden desire to plant and weed and be closer to the flowers than to words. I briefly beheld the sun in my grandmother’s gaze, and in that brightness a secret, a friendship. By which I mean nothing other than the interior of things, nothing other than the age before we knew we belonged to anything at all.
The neighbor, who lives alone with her dog, had her fence repainted. She cut the grass close to it, leaving a ditch. Every day she has workers come to her house, like nightly dreams, to inspect, adjust, and clear the mold from her windowpanes. Though it isn’t mold. It is moisture and the life water creates when trapped. Every day, handymen come and go, and the neighbor eagerly awaits them. She opens gates and explains her concerns. She draws people from the street into her home. These are her companions.
When people say, “a charmed life,” they mean a life with money. When people say, “middle class,” they mean you have figured out a way to function in oppressive conditions. You have understood how to maneuver within those circumstances. You have financial investments in some “activist organization.” You managed a down payment for a house. You can hold a job. You can pay for things that help you relax and be healthier than those who can’t. You have acquired a language that balances guilt rhetoric with eloquence and good reading recommendations. You condemn privilege but work yourself to the ground to acquire said privilege. You know when to remain calm and quiet and when to be outraged. You are winging it in ways that are tolerated, and you are failing in ways that are forgiven or endearing. Maybe even marketable.
After my neighbor and her dog returned from their walk, I decided to go out. We avoid each other to not draw too much attention to our prying faces. She watches the street like I do. She wants to only be seen while busy in her yard, with the dog, on another phone call.
I have spent all summer in the neighborhood watching the gardens swell. In the evenings, I walk with swollen joints, sometimes forgetting I am outside at all, trance-moving, as I do inside of the house, undressed. Parts of the pavement are covered with flowers like in The Secret Garden, a book I reread many times during my childhood. On these walks, which are brief, I have noticed my feelings change from street to street. And each evening they change too. The streets have become layered emotional skins. Despite the late light of summer, darkness drips from the sky. There is, of course, always something that makes living possible. There is always something that makes it just possible. Yesterday, I passed a house, one I had seen on sale a few months ago, with lights on and the TV flashing. An old man sat hunched over a meal. He lifted his fork slowly, and there was something in the way he held the fork that invoked a disorienting sadness. Quite pathetically, I wanted him to notice me noticing the sadness and then wave to him, but he continued to fixate on the TV set, dropping and lifting his fork.
I focused on the pavement and suddenly recalled the city where I was born. A hand reached out through the cracks in the sidewalk from the rubble. As a child in that city, I had a fear of faces. What they could do. An anticipation but also uncertainty of what it means to have a face. As a child, I imagined attributes I could acquire that would make others want more of me, even if it ended in my exploitation. The worst was the walled tower. And to the tower I returned, over and over again, like a dog. When I leave now, always brief those absences, to experience absorption, it becomes clear that I will not last. I cannot survive the excitement, the idiocy, like the idiocy of beauty, which can sit in a chair and not speak, lift a hand and be profound. Once, I did not read for six months. Too occupied by what tunneled toward me. Waiting for people to come or leave, relationships to end or begin again. I called it “life” but now life is here, in the tower, where I can flail freely in my elemental condition. I can build a fatty artery and sink to the incommensurable dirt of the basement. As a child, I did not believe that the slow disintegration and disappearances of objects and people around me may have actually been caused by my presence. The child is here to learn that it will fall out with the world it grows.
THE HOUSEPLANT SUDDENLY APPEARS MUCH LARGER. Slanting toward the window, it threatens to tip out of its clay pot. I lie down on the floor in a half-moon shape hugging the space heater. The nervous house creaks from my weight. When I rise, my ribs are dislodged. There is a new mark on my face.
The nameless woman turns around and looks at me. She is not equipped. She can barely cut the egg up. It is not she who is phobic of life but life that has grown phobic of her. To touch her image is to be breached by attrition. Focus on her hands. The shadows on the wall stenograph a former language before we had words like “love” and “trust.”
A woman’s life is unimportant until someone deems that it is not. You may find this flippant, and I agree. A new order of words will be necessary but also a kind of tantrum. From my porcupine nest and close to the houseplant, I watch others expand like rotisserie chicken. Everything must be beside the point.
I will not write of statistics, but it is true that there is an increase of sleep disorders I have eavesdropped on since my first summer of sleeplessness many years ago. Ingeborg Bachmann became dependent on benzodiazepines during her two-year fellowship in Berlin, the city she supposedly despised. During this time, she began her transition to prose, to her final work, Todesarten, while unable to finish “Enigma,” considered one of her last poems, overwritten, rewritten for many years, despite the defiant opening line “Nichts mehr wird kommen.”
Imagination here is not nimble but loops.
The nameless woman likes to dance with the shadows which precede us, and the shadows in their plain presence enjoy being enacted upon by another body. I am the audience watching.
We listen to the lament of the night, its drab performance:
shadows shadows shadows
The planted bamboo rustles by the garden fence and summer ends.
THE SEAGULL BY ANTON CHEKHOV ended my first summer of sleeplessness. The sound of gulls swarmed the stage. It was the last performance of an eight-month run at Berlin’s Deutsches Theater. Arriving late, I was delegated to the balcony, even though my seat was front-row parquet, and watched the play from above, while Nina, the actress, exclaimed down below: “Ich bin eine Möwe, eine Möwe.”
From the balcony’s darkness, I watched Nina stand shivering on a stone, reciting a monologue written for her by Konstantin Treplov. After rejecting his love and following the accomplished writer Boris Trigorin, lover of Konstantin’s mother, to Moscow, only to be abandoned by him, she returns to the lake of her youth. She had offered Trigorin with pathos the following inscription: “If ever you have need of my life, take it.” The entire play circles the sap of unrequited love, some purple shape dancing in the distance. Seagulls are shot, fishes fished. In the end, a suicide. A self of worms. The audience is corralled into a once-upon-a-time ecstasy for which each character pays deadly sacrifices. They stare out across the water, in waiting, already imagining a life after this one. Watching what has escaped the narrow hand and fled in some cross-eyed mania toward the water. The seagull is the totem and messenger, flying across the sea, only to land mute at the shore of a lake and to be transformed into “a little story about a girl.”
That summer, sleeplessness enveloped me with its chronic energy. In the apartment of my father, where I stayed, furniture creaked and heaved, and families of dust balls lingered in the corner. In the glass case an assortment of relics: Ukrainian porcelain, a silvery vase, liquor glasses, a trophy of a fashion prize. Dejected objects. I wrote. The writer is a pathetic character in the play, disassociated, bent between thresholds, looking upon the seagull’s carcass with curious melancholy and spelling its death. And yet, one of the most staggering moments of the whole performance is the young Nina, not yet doomed actress or rejected lover, standing upon a rock and transforming into various animals, as she recites Konstantin’s monologue, in which love is absent and there is no plot.
“All men and beasts, lions, eagles, and quails, horned stags, geese, spiders, silent fish that inhabit the waves, starfish from the sea, and creatures invisible to the eye—in one word, life—all, all life, completing the dreary round imposed upon it, died out at last. A thousand years have passed since the earth last bore a living creature on her breast, and the unhappy moon now lights her lamp in vain. No longer are the cries of storks heard in the meadows, or the drone of beetles in the groves of limes. All is cold, cold. All is void, void, void . . . ”
That summer, amidst heat waves and aimless wanderings through the city, a constant infection of gums, my brain became inflamed by time and osmosis. Language turned glassy at night; pine cones whispered. There are lineages: places, states, and voices that precede sleeplessness. I had been writing a book about Berlin before World War I, about women artists in Berlin, drawn together by the avant-garde movement known as Der Sturm. Everyone in that book suffers from war, lovelessness, mania.
