Carrion, p.7
Carrion, page 7
(Sometimes, you just need to run.)
No, you say, there is no single scent, no single body for me to follow.
I envy you for that. The glory of being multiple, complex; I know only simplicity, single-union, the limits of a fixed identity; romance, writing romance, teaching romance, the lack thereof. The forest streak you see is not ease but multiplicity, mist. You neglect that. I want that joy of being somebodies, plural. I want to be me and me and you and Byron and Percy and Rhoda and I and I. It is troubling to be so few at once. I am so limited, I am nobody; I have no face.
The photo is ethereal: that length of face, the nose, the hair, her posture. She looks haggard, and I can think only of the Angel in the House (you didn’t create her): she is tied with Leonard’s belt to her wooden chair, the chair bolted up to the desk, and the Angel beating her with a crop, pulling her by her hair to remove her from her seat, gnashing her teeth at her ear and the belt and the paper and the books and the pen, and she screams, You are ignoring them. They know what you are doing, and it is self-indulgent, verging on hedonism. It is selfish. And you know they feel this way, and you feign being unapologetic. But you wish to apologize. Apologize to them. Stop writing. She is tied down, and while there is no mechanism to force her to write, she is at the desk, so she writes anyway, as if that violent voice did not matter. She stole it, gave it form, and carried on despite it. So that she might have something for which to fight. She created a force to struggle against.
The Angel is stronger than I am; writing, a chore. I imagine her this way, beaten and melancholic and struggling in her profession, because that is so often how I feel, and I tolerate it only when I imagine this to be the case with her as well. I cannot shrug this Angel, but I know at least that I find comfort in writing, and I need someone to teach me how. Teach me how to tolerate the screams and the slamming doors, the throwing and the tears. Teach me how to distinguish between what should and should not be ignored; Virginia, teach me how to be as strong as you.
Here, her hair is the same as it always was, dry and frizzy and somehow kempt. She somehow pulls it back, and individual strands dry up and away from the bun—haloed by her own genetics.
Her mouth. Agape, full lips falling from inevitably stained teeth, gapped, as they look in this photograph, though I do not remember her having a gap—though I do not remember ever having seen a photograph of her smiling, one in which I could see her teeth. (I look, and I see her smiling with Tom, with Lytton.) I imagine her young characters, a young Blooms-bury group, overtly loving each other but with six private lives, separate, distinguished, and anguishing in their losses and disappointments. And how they would smile in public and look like this in private.
Her mouth. And a depression in her temple that seems unnaturally, painfully deep, almost as if scarred, a piece of flesh removed then healed over. It looks like damage, a throbbing place. This must have been the source of all those headaches, and I feel I am viewing her from a privileged vantage, able to see exactly where that vulture sits on a bough, where the rat gnaws at her head. I wonder if I was right in first thinking of her death, as this might have been a painful moment, one in which the inevitable catastrophe felt close—her body about to smash itself to smithereens. Privileged, because all but her ink-smudged fingers was private. But there is something about living in an odd amphibian life of suffering that makes one take that pain in one hand, pure sound in the other, and clap them together to give language to all this.
Illness, the great confessional.
I am like the foam that races over the beach, able to smooth out those wrinkles, turn Virginia into Jinny again. I want to cover her from sight, keep her private and singular and mine. Or, I am like the moonlight that falls arrowlike here on a tin can, pointing and perhaps taunting. In turning her into binary, into a single image, into many singular images, I am placing her under glass, pinned and slowly dying the death to which she was already succumbing.
All that’s in focus is the chair. She is before it, as if the photograph was not meant to be of her at all—before the point from which the lens aligns light onto a single plane. As if she is always too soon. She would have liked this. It would remind her of the eternal procession, of her sister’s paintings, of everyone without faces. She was too full of movement to be captured on film rightly. And this is the only aspect that makes the photograph tolerable. She would not only like being but also want to be out of focus, as she should never be the one who is considered, examined, thought about. Only her works.
And yet, here I am.
Here on a spike of the mailed sea holly.
I looked. She wrote, A curious sea side feeling in the air today. It reminds me of lodgings on a parade at Easter. Everyone leaning against the wind, nipped & silenced. All pulp removed. This windy corner. I tell myself I understand this—an unnerving idea, less the fact that I live in Chicago, and I live so near the lake.
I saw it for the first time when the clouds were sparse and thinned to nothing, making the lake indistinguishable from the sky, which turned from that sky blue to pale to aluminum. Leaves hovered, gold and bronze and sinusoidal, working the impression of stagnation. The way things there always moved, were always moving. That wrought-iron-finished mild steel has chipped and rusted. Because broken. Because abandoned. I counted (neurotic enough to need to know exactly): waves were ruining themselves against sand and rocks every four seconds, from there to the jagged wooden pier to the north, from there to the even more jagged wooden cordon to the south. I still hear the waves, sometimes, from inside, and I think it is the wind blowing through branches and leaves. But the wind is never blowing in these moments, so it is always just the water molecules constantly pummeling and abrading and bumping and melting together.
I watch water change color. Here, nearest to me, the water is transparent and malleable like glass. But here, nearest to me, air is pocketed and engulfed and drawn and outlined to the point of visibility. I watch water change color. The most notable: a mass exodus of electrons, a shower of copper carbonate, oxidized. And I could rub lemons all over this—all this—but I like that color, that form of destruction.
My being here, so close to this water, has brought me closer to you: more water to me than carbon, or a bone or a half-eaten boat.
Her right hand, especially—it is especially blurred. Her hand sooner than the rest of her sooner than the chair. The ring on it. Its position. The tapering of her fingers, how surprising it is to see not a skeletal figure but a fleshy one. And the entirety of the photograph feels so corporeally distorted: her neck is bent a wrong way, and the watch is twisting and pinching the skin of her left wrist; her legs are too long, too big, and her body has always felt so small and light, like mine. I am blown down caverns, and flap like paper against endless corridors.
I must press my hand against the wall to draw myself back. Abrasive and violent and critical. I imagine her telling me my work ought to be sold for only £4.10. Tom’s work shook her. (She was shakable.) I wonder if this is shaking her. Or did my first time shake her more, or perhaps the year of silence between attempts—and how many more will I make at dislodging her.
But since I wish above all things to have lodgment, I pretend, as I go upstairs, to have an end in view. I believe I learned this from you, that we must trust our selves. That we can let our unfinished work become finished. I hear it, your voice, womblife-grayed and liquid and certain, with the scent of delphiniums, sweet peas, bunches of lilac, and carnations and moss and London.
I wait for you to speak and then speak like you.
Conflagration
My former belief in metempsychosis had less to do with afterlife than how to live as if we are each always already somebody else—or always never who we once were. So, when I see a black smudge on my desk, some sort of soot smashed into the grain by some book, I intuitively know that it should stay, right where it is; that I should forgo my ordinary neurotic cleaning.
So it remains, surrounded by burnt-black tips of wick and light caramel-colored pencil shavings with deep green scalloped edges. It should all stay, should also remain alongside the burgundy eyeliner pencil sharpener.
I have decided that it must stay, because, I tell myself, without having or needing any proof, that this was how writers in the 1920s lived: desks against walls in their small apartments, pencil shavings strewn all across, books with broken spines circumventing all the lined paper. Once enough accrued and subsequently fell to the floor, I carefully picked the pieces up and placed them back in the pile on the desk; I am obsessive enough to not allow debris on my floor but not disciplined enough, perhaps, not to keep these pencil shavings on the desk, because I am silly enough to think that doing so makes me more like writers (a writer, one writer) from the 1920s. But I’m not honest enough to say it is silly. So I attempt to fabricate or live a life of a person an ocean away and a whole person’s lifetime past.
The back stairwell of the apartment building overlooks an alley loomed over by a children’s park and another apartment building. To smoke, I lean with my elbows on the dusty railing of the landing between the third and second stories. When a train rattles several blocks away, I crane my head to the left to see it pass; when I hear children scream or laugh, to the right. But mostly I am here at night, peering down and waiting for the rats.
I can tell you from where they come—their burrows or holes or dens or whatever rats keep. I can tell you that there are only one or two large males here, one or two large females, and a handful of young—or brood or fry or offspring or joeys or kids or whatever rats produce.
I had only ever seen one rat before living in Chicago—a real rat, not a field mouse. The nutrients they need are not readily available in alleyless, dumpsterless, mostly unpopulated, hilly, untrafficked, unlittered Ohio. No, but we had raccoons and opossums—animals that could tear open trash bags and closed Tupperware and lift the still-attached can lid that is pressed back into the can so that its sharp edge does not tear the thin plastic while en route to the trash can.
Rats can chew through almost anything, but rats like Chicago because they like alleys because they like dumpsters because they can be gotten into with relative ease compared to chewing through tin or plastic: more than once, one of the big males climbed a chain-link fence below to reach a low-hanging power line, traversed it maybe three or four feet, and stretched itself across the gap over to the open, blue, graffitied dumpster. I wondered, watching this, if rats have thumbs the way raccoons do, the way humans do, and unlike the vestigial bumps that squirrels do. Instead of actually checking, though, by going down into the alley to examine the cold dead one that bloodied the cement around its mouth, I assure myself they do not by laughing as they lose their balance and swing to the underside of the power line—though perhaps the fact that they still hang on is proof that they do.
I do not know if opossums have thumbs either, but I know that I once found one asleep inside an upright trash can. After the expected unhinged-mandible hiss from my waking it and the realization that removing it would be impossible, realizing its permanence, at least for the day until night fell and it continued its nocturnal roving, I named it Eliot.
Perhaps the year before, I had been taught “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and T.S. Eliot quickly became my favorite poet. I created indexes of him all around me for so long that I can no longer tell if I would ever think of him on my own—or if, instead, I only do because I force his proximal existence. I can’t even say anymore that he is my favorite poet.
Were you to ask, I would tell you he is. Favorites become habitual; liking and disliking, a pattern. It might only be a fear of change or loss or the shock of sensation that comes with crisis, when we test our admonishments, that prevents us from moving on from these and, ultimately, being honest. But I won’t do that.
He has become too much a part of my identity, and I do, in fact, fear losing him: I named the opossum Eliot as an homage to Tom, to “Old Possum”; I named my first houseplant and only fichus Neville as an homage to Virginia Woolf’s character in The Waves whose antecedent is Lytton Strachey but whose name is so much more French and sophisticated than the character based on Eliot, Louis; the first of my published poems was printed under my initials, a way to show that I had a literary forebearer; my largest series of poems (also the only) follows a fictional Thomas Stearns, a vagrant who is very much an aspect of me; when I had a significant other named Elliott, whose favorite poem was also “Prufrock,” I thought of him—or made myself think of him—as T.S. Eliot; and, later, when I wrote about him and needed to change his name, the alias seemed all too obvious.
I used to believe in metempsychosis, and then I didn’t. And then I started getting in the habit of referring to my writer-friends by the names of authors of whom they or their writing reminded me. And they did the same for me.
I used to wonder if my soul was his—and if that would even be possible with the time between his death and my birth. I told people I thought I was, even though I couldn’t explain how or why. And still, today, I tell people that I sometimes feel I am Eliot—even though I no longer necessarily believe in any of this (and, if I do, I know now that it must be instantaneous, unless of course it was, twice already, and there was a death in the interim)—but that I am not, in fact, T.S. Eliot.
While moving into this new apartment, a friend who was helping lug four hundred books up that back stairwell, upon first seeing the space itself, told me that this apartment suited me more than my previous, larger, newly renovated apartment. I agreed, reluctantly. When I first saw the space, I knew it was the one I would choose, because my choices had already been dwindling and my budget remained meager.
But I also chose it because it reminded me so much of how I imagined (sometimes struggling) authors to have lived in England in the early twentieth century. It reminded me of how I imagine Tom to have lived: cooped up in a too-small space, too busy or too genius or too poor to find something with better floors, more space, in better condition generally. I think that this is the kind of apartment graduate students ought to have: old and run-down with alcoholic neighbors, chosen in haste and out of need, out of necessity and desperation—though one may grow to say they love it and, after a year and a half, realize their error. Graduate students should only find apartments the week after they separate themselves from a significant other—forced to abandon a life they created with them, escaping to something else—something not necessarily altogether better but something more them or, if not, at least solitary.
When I came earlier that morning to have the building manager grab my keys from what would be my own kitchen cabinet, I stood in the empty space with the early morning summer light stuttering in through the blinds and onto the light wood floor and cream-colored walls, and I imagined my desk positioned to the left of that doorway to the hallway and how Tom would approve.
His desk would have been in the exact same position, and his too would be covered in burnt wick and pencil shavings that occasionally dropped to the floor. His bed could only be where I’ve placed my own, his kitchen table in the only place available for mine, the desk only right here.
No, furniture arrangement is neither unique nor creative; it is both dictated and limited by the space: there are only so many permutations and possibilities, and it seems there are never many. The placement of the bookshelves is inevitable; the chair’s is inevitable; the desk’s is inevitable. (The desk, inevitable.) Everything is patterned and repeated—and so, for how many decades—under the physics of pigeonhole principle.
I say this with no authority, of course, but I am certain that the building was built in the 1920s, and I am certain that it has yet to be remodeled: judging by the floor’s disrepair, it must be original; the toilet, reminiscent of a public restroom’s, with its tanklessness, must certainly be original, though the flushing apparatus itself is clearly new; I have electric floorboard heaters, but I can see where the radiators once were; the walls are cracked from stress, none of the wood fits perfectly together, the molding is more paint or caulking than wood now; the door handles are some that I have only seen in Alice in Wonderland and must be as original as the doors. And although my desk is, I know, a 1950s creation, it feels left-handed and as quintessentially 1920s to me as the apartment.
While I can imagine Tom living in a space such as this, I laugh at the thought of a young, recently married Jinny in such a place, even as only a guest. No, she needed a yard through which she and Tom could walk, hands in pockets, hands at sides, large noses, blurry, blurry photographs. But I do not. I do not have visitors; my friends and I see each other at school, in and between classes. We drink together—I less so than they, so I see them less, generally. But the point is that I don’t invite anyone over, and no one asks to visit.
I was told long before I moved to or even visited this city that I would love it, that I belong there, here; and it only took looking at one obviously art nouveau-inspired entrance to a subway to realize how right these friends of mine had been. The entrance, with its French curves, its thick but rounded typeface—probably closest to Paris Metro—the very color, the only color, I associate with turn-of-the-century decorative art, that pale green of newly-oxidized copper.
I love art nouveau: the floral and feminine, the pencil-underwatercolor paired with the thick hair, all the movement, that lettering, the vectors. And there is so much of it in Chicago: that subway entrance, bar signs clearly incorporating designs of Alphonse Mucha, circular windows and swooping doorways, rust, watercolor, all of it. The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 decimated the city, and its rebuilding began right during the time that art nouveau began to appear and certainly continued after Mucha’s influence became better felt. The city—whether it is in actuality or not—is art nouveau to me.
