We are again engaged in a great civil war.
A cultural war that's about to hijack your birthright to think and say what lives in your heart. – National Rifle Association President Charlton Heston, 1999
1.
Never give advice, particularly on matters of life and writing.
2.
Doctors are employing the help of Charlton Heston and Friedrich Nietzsche to perfect brain surgery. Neurosurgeons at University Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin, used a tape of the actor discussing the nineteenth-century German philosopher to help map the brain of a patient. By measuring oxygen levels while the patient, Lydia Rowley, listened to the Heston tape, doctors could identify the speech and language centers in the brain and avoid damaging them during delicate surgery. – International Herald Tribune, October 12, 1998, p 23.
3.
Nothing spicy or deep-fried. No roasted this on puddles of that. Why? The kitchen is a mess. There are stink ants in the utensil drawer. At night, we hear mice scratch and scrape at something under the sink. Every morning, outside, blowflies weave through the motes rising in the thermals, zig-zagging past the window, dopplering off into the forenoon haze towards Belleville – a lazy mad-awful yawning drone now suddenly silenced – just as suddenly silenced! – in a swirling gathering of twittering swallows.
Murder your darlings, say the writing coaches. Swallow your swallows. Can you imagine the carnage here? Samuel Johnson – “Read over your compositions and, when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.” And if Friedrich Nietzsche followed this counsel? Herman Melville? Walt Whitman? In La Perche last weekend, my sister’s phone app found tomtits, chick-a dee dee dees, warblers, swifts and a skulking nightingale imitating a chaffinch. My dreams, however, were devoid of their song, but a Walt Whitman did appear in one, a recurring loop in which we are herded off a Greyhound into his rest area on the Jersey Turnpike. Someone grabs me by the scruff of the neck and pushes me against the wall. I feel the barrel of a gun, a Revolutionary War-era flintlock rifle, press against the back of my head. My knees give out and I shout, “I haven’t done anything!” The man behind me laughs and leans in closer. Sure enough, it’s Walt Whitman, played by Charlton Heston. “That’s just it, asshole,” he says, pulling the trigger.
You didn’t like that. Which is healthy. When I was a kid, I often dreamt that my mother would take me to Alice the Goon’s house, a single-storey stucco bungalow with a busted screen door on the east side of town. The lawn was mostly dirt and weeds, strewn with half-eaten dinner plates and bicycle parts. The front walkway was uneven and cracked, and as soon as I stepped on it, pulled by my mother’s hand towards the door, I would burst into tears.
“Please, Mama, don’t leave me with these monsters,” I would beg.
“Monsters? Nonsense,” she would say. “Alice is an angel.”
At first, Alice would indeed be an angel, for when the front door opened, she would tousle my hair, and ask if I wanted a drink and a sandwich. “You see, silly, nothing to worry about,” my mother would say. But the moment she left, Alice would puff out her chest, grow twice as tall and shriek like a beast. Dozens of other goons would suddenly appear. I would try to run away but my feet could barely move. The house twisted into an intricate maze, and as night fell, it was engulfed by a dense, viscous tide, morphing into a vast moonlit sea of mire. Goaded on by Alice – and by her controller, the Sea Hag, the last witch on earth and captain of the Black Barnacle – the shrieking goons waded through the murk chomping on plates and balancing an assortment of common household items – baskets, basins, water jugs, watering cans – on their heads.
When dawn broke, I would find myself back in my own bed, exhausted.
4.
“CLOUDY and wet, and wind due east; air without palpable fog, but very heavy with moisture – welcome for a change. Forenoon, crossing the Delaware, I noticed unusual numbers of swallows in flight, circling, darting, graceful beyond description, close to the water. Thick, around the bows of the ferry-boat as she lay tied in her slip, they flew; and as we went out I watch’d beyond the pier-heads, and across the broad stream, their swift-winding loop-ribands of motion, down close to it, cutting and intersecting. Though I had seen swallows all my life, seem’d as though I never before realized their peculiar beauty and character in the landscape. (Some time ago, for an hour, in a huge old country barn, watching these birds flying, recall’d the 22d book of the Odyssey, where Ulysses slays the suitors, bringing things to eclaircissement, and Minerva, swallow-bodied, darts up through the spaces of the hall, sits high on a beam, looks complacently on the show of slaughter, and feels in her element, exulting, joyous.)”
Birds abound in the Odyssey, twenty-one species are named, from nightingales to falcons to bearded vultures. Athena has owl eyes and as Odysseus lets the arrows fly, she flits up to perch on a rafter in the form of a house martin. Two eagles tear each other to death; later, an eagle flies by with a swallow in its mouth. Another eagle flies by with a goose in its claws. As does a hawk with a dove.
5.
Before inventing the world’s first film projector, Eadweard J. Muybridge was a professional landscape photographer, widely celebrated for his wet collodion-plate photographs of the American West. These images mythologized – or, more accurately, given Muybridge’s close personal and business relations with the railroad magnate Leland Stanford, advertised, – the still-wild frontier of California, attracting legions of speculators, ex-forty-niners, and wide-eyed, fresh-start-seeking settlers from the war-torn East Coast.
In 1867, at the beginning of his career as a photographer – he was 37 at the time and a successful bookseller and publisher’s agent in San Francisco – Muybridge used the trade name “Helios, the Flying Camera,” and called his mobile darkroom “The Flying Studio.”
Helios (Ἠέλιος) is the Greek god who personifies the Sun. Every day, he drives his fiery chariot across the full arc of the sky. His mortal son Phaeton, the story goes, to prove to his teasers that he is indeed the son of a god, pleads with his father to let him drive the chariot across the skies. Helios’ retinue – Day, Month, Year, and the Four Seasons – sympathetic to the boy’s ambitions, aids him in his defiance of his father. The Hours yokes the four stallions to the golden chariot. Dawn throws open her doors. Phaeton speeds off into the breaking morn. But the chariot is beyond his skill, he loses control, the horses head straight for the deadly Scorpion, who, tired of chasing Orion, turns toward his newfound prey. Phaeton drops the reins, the horses bolt, the earth ignites. Only Jupiter’s thunderbolt can “save the day” – it pierces the chariot and sends Phaeton into a graveyard spin, and down he spirals in flames into the River Eridanus, where he is buried by nymphs.
All who seek to transcend their limitations and who aspire to go beyond their capabilities should heed the lesson of Phaetons's recklessness.
6.
After his classroom squabble with co-instructor Marguerite Young – whose novel, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, (Scribners, NY, 1965) is more than seven-hundred thousand words long – John Berryman (aka John Allyn Smith, Jr.), future National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, and Bollingen Prize winner, twice-interviewed by the Paris Review, two-time guest on the Dick Cavett Show, selected in 1948 by James Laughlin to make the selection for Ezra Pound's Selected Poems, (New Directions, NY, 1949) for which he wrote the original Introduction, which is excellent, but which Pound rejected as too “over-acute, intellectual and recondite”, took refuge on the top floor of Kenny’s Bar, where he drank eleven gin and tonics and picked fights with anyone – dramatic arts majors, writers, printers, bookmakers – who made the mistake of meeting his Coke-bottle gaze.
Asked to leave around midnight, gently helped to his feet and out the door by Kenny himself, Berryman, unaided, walked the three blocks south down South Clinton and the three blocks east down East Jefferson to his new apartment, 409 Jefferson E, moved into the day before, whereupon he realized he did not have the key.
He rattled the knob. He banged his shoulder and forearm against the door. He raised his face to the moon and screamed obscenities. He cursed, and he cursed; he heaved himself drunkenly at the door again and again, four times in all, with the full force of his fat drunken frame behind each pounding blow.
He bruised his elbow, he bruised his knee. He sliced open his forehead.
The door did not budge.
On the fourth heave, the landlady's hairless head appeared at the window above his head.
"Shh!" she hissed. "Be quiet! It's three o'clock in the morning!"
"You be quiet. The door's jammed. Some Iowan plouk stole my key."
"You're drunk."
"As a skunk, and this here's a tree trunk."
Actually, it was a cat-scratch post. Which he relieved himself on nonetheless. (Or by “tree trunk” was he referring to his manhood? From the poem “Two Organs”: “‘I wish my penis was big enough for this whole lake!’” And from Recovery: “He quoted Lautrec's remark, 'I paint with my penis,' and explained in one fancy sentence (bypassing a Matisse anecdote) who Lautrec was.”)
"I'm calling the police!”
"And I'm dating Denise. Liege and lessor let me in. I have an early date with Jane Austin and a man named Gogol, and I need to evacuate my bowels."
The landlord now. In his slippers at the screen door, wrapped in an Iowan quilt.
"We ain't your lesser."
"Lessor, not lesser. A person who leases or lets a property to another."
"You haven't paid for the room yet."
Berryman squatted on the front porch and defecated.
"My deposit," he said.
The police stripped him naked, took his glasses, and threw him in lockup. Or so he said. He also said they exposed themselves to him, but this is difficult to substantiate, as without his glasses, he couldn't see the tip of his own nose, let alone a cop's scrotum across the room through jail cell bars.
Disorderly conduct and public intoxication were the charges. Twelve dollar fine, no expungement, a permanent blot. Dean Strist fired him the next day. Allan Tate and Saul Bellow found him a place at the University of Minnesota. He loaded his books into cartons and boarded a Greyhound.
Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. We are entering the Dream State again, driving up to the “Nothing to Declare” window. This time two soldiers pull me off the bus and frogmarch me to the centre of the street. I’m wearing a plaid shirt, my hands are tied behind my back. The sun is shining, the glare is blinding. Muybridge men are everywhere, running, jumping, boxing, fighting, sawing trees, sanding wood, hammering nails. Women, too, beautiful, naked or barely dressed, caring for children, carrying bowls of water. Teenage boys, wrestling. A girl kneeling, offering another a drink of water from a large jar.
The soldiers back away. The frame empties of all figures except mine. Walt Whitman, again played by Charlton Heston but this time clean-shaven walks into the viewfinder from the left. He pulls a pistol from his holster, raises it to my head, says something about his “cold, dead hands” and fires. A single bullet to the temple, blood spraying out of the exit wound. Another man’s head, a spectator, bearded, out of focus, wearing thick spectacles – he looks like John Berryman – passes through the frame, blocking our view the moment the bullet scorches through the membranes of my brain. The spectator exits and my body jerks across the screen, crumples and falls to the street. The crowd pushes away. People start running. Alice and the goons appear. Walt Whitman holsters his sidearm and walks away.
Voice up, off, Charlton Heston reciting Friedrich Nietzsche or reading from the King James, hard to say, harder to swallow; all those thous and mines.
“The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.”
The wet collodion process, in which glass plates must be treated with developing chemicals within twenty seconds of exposure, required that Helios carry his sensitizing and processing equipment with him into the field, either on his back, by horse and cart, or, in more rugged terrain – in Yosemite National Park, for example, a favourite subject of Muybridge – by mule train. He also carried firearms.
According to the testimonies of witnesses at his murder trial, Muybridge was physically dextrous, not always to be trusted in business dealings, often capricious and quick to temper, but an agile and creative thinker, as sharp and fast in his judgments as he was on his feet or with a gun. During a six-year convalescence in England in the 1860s (he left America at the start of the Civil War after suffering a severe head injury in a stagecoach accident), he patented a photographic printing process and a machine for washing clothes and textiles. During this same period he devoted great energies to the study of anatomy, in a vain effort to locate the bone of Luz, an almond-shaped bone believed to be the only part of the human body that withstands dissolution after death, and out of which, it is said, the body will be recreated at the resurrection.
“Get out of the frame.”
I hand Mr Heston a wooden staff. A horn lows. Down in the valley below, beneath the fire's glow, a huge black mass sluggishly discharges and oozes toward us, barely perceptible, spilling slowly up the hillside like heavy oil, defying gravity. In front is the long-limbed Sea Hag, dressed in black silk.
The horn blows again. The sky fills with swallows, an electric drone fills the air.
This is not happening, I say to myself.
I am dreaming.
We are all dreaming.
I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’tyou can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write– W.S. Merwin, “Berryman” in Michael Wiegers, ed. The Essential W.S. Merwin (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2017), 188.
PS. Full circle: Heston transliterates into Greek as Χέστον, which sounds exactly like Χέσ’ τον, which means “to shit oneself”.
I shit you not.
Love these little Sunday road trips you take me on
Much affection for these Jaunts
Well, wasn't that a light-hearted, lilac-scented springtime read? haha. Thank goodness for all those swallows. And, I laughed at the Ezra Pound comment. Pretty rich coming from the likes of him!