By Victor Greto
The couch (my wife calls it a sofa) cost me five hundred and twenty-five bucks, and that was without the stuff they offered to spray on it for protection. We sprayed it on ourselves, although the water did not bead on it like the can said it should. But we did it twice.
I did it myself the second time, spraying till it was wet. Part of the water did bead a little, but some of it soaked right in. It’s an old colonial type couch, and looks real nice in the living room. The people who came over for our Fourth of July party said it looked real nice. It goes with the walls we just painted, and looks quaint by the fireplace.
I sleep on it.
I first learned my dad had had an affair through my wife. Through her I’ve also learned how much my life is a sham or a series of poses where I’ve engaged her in a battle of wills. I sleep on the couch now because she is winning the battles and I am still posing for all to gawk and point.
We just bought our first house. The war of wills has been in high-gear for almost nine months. We’ve been so close to breaking up. We’re both afraid to. So we’re still together. But she’s winning the battles now.
The battles before the previous nine months were unconscious on my part, but very conscious to her. I have been too dominating in the past and now am hurt and pissed because I am suddenly conscious of her own life. You must grin and say I deserve it. Perhaps.
I used to write about my father a lot; he got mentally sick in cycles of two to three years at a time and was a great source of embarrassment for me in my junior high and high school years. It is why I wanted to leave, why I took off just after high school to go west. I’m in Colorado now. I met my wife here when I was nineteen; we lived together after about two months of knowing one another.
That also may be part of the problem. Ten years are gone; I’ve gone to college, tried out graduate school and quit, and now am trying graduate school again.
I stuck to my wife like I did my mother when my father was nuts, and then hated and neglected her for letting me – and then going and having the nerve to get something out of it. Looking back now, she offered a lot without question (another problem?), and I acted as I did without question. She put up with it. You’d have to ask her why on that one.
When I was twenty-two and before we were married, I had an affair and she kicked me out, and then I came back on the condition we marry. We did. That was when I went to college. I had a part-time job at the school and she worked. She said she was not interested in school. Now I have a decent job and make more than she does, but am very tired of what I am and how I have acted.
Do you fear mediocrity as much as I do? It’s like, well, a full-time job, steady and plodding, and you wait and depend on that bi-weekly paycheck for a couple of thrills, after you pay the bills. That is mediocrity. It is mediocrity because there is no experience within it – only apathy or indifference: looking at one’s co-workers with a sense of inevitability, even destiny; finding one deferring to one’s boss even though you hate his pompous guts; having to smile at just the right time – and, perhaps worst of all, not knowing you’re even doing it at just the right time. That’s it; that is most definitely it.
And then, what is the worst mediocrity of all: sleeping on the couch like the perfect realization of some marital cliché, not speaking with your wife, having to tiptoe around her anger; looking at your adopted child as one would an anchor, tired of even the kid’s wrath. Now this is ingrained mediocrity of the kind I had not before envisioned. I mean, buying the house and everything that goes with it, the full-time job and the assumed and reflexive deference, all rolled into a giant slimy, snotty ball of a life.
Does this mean, then, that I fear my own life, the pathetic cliché it has become, the stolid routine and bowed-head complicity?
I’ve become complicit within it, and now know the soothing reassurance of mediocrity in all its power: the power of envy, desperate jealousy of things and actions I am really not jealous about at all; the firm politeness toward one’s in-laws whom I desperately despise; the feigned indifference of all believed slights committed against me; the worshipping of self-containment and balance and real power, and the pathetic affectation when I try to emulate it.
I’ve lost the track, though. I was talking of the power of mediocrity, the power which, I think, everyone has experienced at one time or another. It’s Ulysses’ siren song. But none of us is tied to the mast; none of us has the power to tell his fellow men and women not to let him crash into the rocks. In fact, our fellow men and women are usually more than happy to let us crash into their own mediocrity, to become one of them. Follow it out: when did I crash, and what was the song that lured me in?
I’ve never loved anyone. I know that now, though it took someone else to tell me, and then even more time for it to sink in. It takes me a long time to figure things out. I seem to be able to grasp intellectual ideas fairly quickly, but, when it comes to my self, my face hits a wall. I have this great facade that says on one’s first look: I have it together; in fact, you know, I’m a fucking stoic.
I remember nothing of my past.
I hear her now, like some old hag with that screechy voice; she has become the woman I always have feared: hot and cold, touching one moment, vindictive the next.
Think: I would have written something very different if she had not come home. I would have told you how terribly lonely I am.
Up the stairs to show the universe I don’t have it together; back down again for pretension’s sake. Do you know how much it costs to say things like that?
****
The couch demands nothing; it doesn’t even laugh at me when I’m on it with the lights out. It’s very cushy, pastel-pink flowered prints, with a bowed wooden spine across the top. It reminds me, like a lot of good history, of something outside myself, where my brain can think on, remove my self from its average context, and push it out, I suppose ironically, into another context of my own making.
The indifference of the universe: that’s the Italian, Bruno. Okay: moderation, ideas of average in our minds, molded by our own expectations. But patterned after others, their lives, their accomplishments. It is a competition after all. They are there, like the pictures I put on the walls, staring down upon me, both in expectation and bemused derision. That’s me, too.
Self-conscious and looking from afar, as though I was a piece of history in a different context, and could stare at it bemused because I am removed. Perhaps there lies the key to some kind of profound perspective on life, the kind that Shakespeare probably had, or Montaigne, or a number of other great men and women. How does one consistently remove one’s self from oneself? And feel the range of emotions and feelings and thoughts without eating oneself to death? It is art somehow, a struck balance, a pact between the mind and the heart.
It is like my drinking coffee at this moment, watching the steam rise, and then placing the image on the printed page; so now it is removed, black letters on white paper: it exists in both realms and I can enjoy both. Was that just art? Or is that just the idea? Now we have to investigate the “human condition”? That seems much harder than coffee.
Is art always fake? artificial? a faded reproduction (in whatever sense)?
Like acting, one relives or reinterprets life into something very different, a structure of some kind: poem, novel, short story, play, painting, movie, dance, music, reading.
No, it’s not fake. Every time I read Shakespeare’s work, or read about him and am reminded of certain passages and personalities, I feel so empowered by the thought of attaining such power: why can it not always be so? Not to be removed from things, but to mix them perfectly within one’s self, to endure and grow from experience: the power of not using one’s strength.
Art, then, as a reflection and reinterpretation of life, reflected back upon the life and influencing it somehow.
I want that.
That must be my goal, beyond the persistent and very damning self-pity I seem to interminably feel: I must go beyond and transcend all emotion and pain, stuff that is real but that needs to be controlled. No more of this pain on my sleeve for ‘daws to peck at; no, what is worse, when the others peck at it and the pain deepens and feeds on itself. Perhaps this is what truly increases the self-pity and thus the danger of digging a premature, living grave. Now it must be like a life after death.
The end of any kind of manipulation, no matter how small, how large: it all seems to be a petty way to uphold a self that does not deserve to be upheld. I must live it. I see it, I internalize it, I must do it.
That giant’s strength and understanding must be used for a reification of my self: never, never, never manipulation. If there is any power in my self to change my own life, let it be now, let it take hold of me, like a great clenched fist grasping the core of my heart. Let it take hold of every thought, of every feeling, of every action, and guide it as some ingrained and unmoving precept. I will take it in when I breathe and exhale it moment by moment.
No more pity; no more couches. When I lay upon that couch, I lay upon my exposed self, protecting and soothing it as though it was an infant.
****
I’m so ashamed. After only two days I want to go back to the couch. This must be my version of wielding what is left of my penis around for all to see – the poor souls. Why is it, WS? Did you live the way you wrote? How is it done? What exactly is self-control, anyway? It seems so relentless, she here, and she at work; both like some obstinate transplanted bitch that laughs as I feed on my own idea of my self. They know I am not who I purport or wish to be.
It is so musty down here in this hole where she has me; if I cannot go outside, there is only here, and when the winter comes and there is no way I can go outside, there will only be this hole, with the cat smell from the other room and no open window to relieve the air. This air is like the marriage, stale and musty and beginning to smell very bad. All intermixed with those Airwick solids, fake like cheap perfume, but it makes the horrid smells a little easier to take.
But to the point. Where is the control, the strength? Is it this awful circumstance that I’m in? It is so maddening! How did you handle it, WS, when you left for London and left three children? How could you write? Who did you love?
Not Annie. Not Rachel. Then who?
What self-confidence it must have taken! What did you look like when you spoke to another? How did your eyes glitter when you drank too much and spoke inordinately? And what did you say? And who did you love when you spoke so glowingly, and perhaps smiled a very quick but sincere smile?
Hero-worship? It’s the star I want to reach for. Not a man idly by, watching each nuance. That is what I have hated. I do not wish to know how you spoke or looked or thought because I want the very same things. Never! It is just the communion, the interweaving, the melding.
I want to die.
To not feel is a dream devoutly to be wished. What a gift! like the gift I had once dreamed of when I was in grade school, of no temptation, only concentration on God or whatever the hell I thought I was concentrating on, no sexual temptation, castration – who was that guy that actually did that in the Middle Ages? – I wonder if under different circumstances I would have done the same thing; I mean different circumstances from my own. Or is this a question of character as well?
Does it all come down to character?
I opened the window, even though it’s late and we had a big thunderstorm. Hey, live bravely for once, will you? Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow (literally) I must go to work and deny everything that I am, and pretend to listen once again, and perhaps, even if only barely perceptibly, incline my head a bit when I truly want to spit as hard and as fast as I can. When will I allow myself to do that?
That question of character again.
But I do it here as well. This perhaps belies the circumstance theory, and we are back in the character explanation once again. O beat on, masochist!
WS invented the word lonely: more like aloneness probably. What did he think and do when he was alone? What did he enjoy reading, seeing, experiencing? Was he not afraid to stray into new female experiences? Probably not, but definitely not haphazardly, and not with the words “love” and “dearest” so ready on his lips. How could he? They would have caused his lips and tongue to burst into flame.
O what if he was not all these things? No, doubt it. Just pick up WS’s stuff and read a few lines: this is no accident.
The rest is all bad writing: for affective manipulation; in short, preaching.
Free and open natures do not preach. Only fools like me who are swelled with responsibilities he imagines are his to hold over others. What fools these mortals be!
I was just perusing through one of my reference works: worship of WS dates from the Romantic period. I am a Romantic! I was just called a retro-romantic in a letter. Perhaps that is a romantic who doesn’t want to be one.
I want to go to the couch. Not to the bed. Which is giving in?
I am so very tired of clever satire, those smug words sprinkled heavily with topical allusions. Joyce made it too respectable. It seems to be either that or slim minimalist nothing, telling me how meaningless life is, after all. No fucking shit.
But what else?
What do I want from her, anyway? Worship. Is that it, after all? How awful! Not circumstance, character.
He had sensitive, full eyes; mine are sinister. He was balding; I have long and thick dark hair.
Why people do not understand other people: because they are other people, centered somewhere else, unsure, grinding their own multitude of axes, throwing up their own multitude of shields, blocking each opposing thrust. Again the character issue: one with a giant’s strength and self-confidence does not need to block or grind an ax – at least in public.
There’s understanding in a nutshell. You see, it does come down to doing it with your self before anything or anyone else. I used to be pissed when I was in grade school and at the end of the Mass we’d sing, “Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me,” and I would mumble to myself, No, let it begin with anybody, I don’t care! Wasn’t that sweet?
****
My room, secluded and away, and I wonder if I am a sick man when it becomes my world and I forget that it is only a room next to the concrete cellar with the cat smell. But I like the cat. She is easy to like. How could I read a book without letting go of the thought of the cat? It’s a world, too, like this room. The thing is, my self is the biggest world of them all – one in which I can never leave or find a satisfactory perspective. I am stuck here – not particularly unwillingly, for how can “I” know anything else? – and when I believe I am out of my self, I know it is just illusion, a play of the brain, a leap of thought or feeling that for a tiny moment allows me the illusion of something more. And this is so wrong. For it is only those times when I actually touch my self.
This self is so impatient with things and with people; it hates all pretension and obvious self-protection on the part of other selves. It hates weakness and tries to bury itself in some outer core of skin from which mostly everyone flinches. It is a self worthy of attention and excavation – it’s all I have, and I want to know what it is to be strong; and yet: not to force an other into anything.
How hard that is. The meaning of WS.
Why is it that I can remember nothing of my past? It’s all a blank. As though I burst forth on the half-shell, erect penis in hand.
My own context is abashedly average. But inside? Probably as much so. Fighting out through the keyboard, through black on white, intellectualisms and depressions and escapes into history. But it is all for the same goal: to look the figure in the eyes, yes, most of all WS – but others as well – and feel them inside me till I know who and what they are. I wonder now if this is only – only? – a psychological lack within the self, or just a need for sophisticated communication. Probably the former: there is sophistication out there, right now, but to go back and attempt to commune with those that are dead is safer.
That was a bit depressing.
WS on the toilet, having sex, being hurt, falling on the thorns of life and bleeding profusely, pridefully ensconced within himself to lick wounds. The book is merely him at his best: this complicates the live human being communion. Always reaching for the best within – this is more possible when they are dead; they leave relics behind, deemed the best of their brain and heart: nothing else to contend with, no smells and bad manners; no annoying idiosyncrasies.
Idols, then, are only formed when those who keep seeing the highest do not wish to look or at least acknowledge the lowest in a person’s being. Okay, the man shit and piss and perhaps had hemorrhoids; perhaps he washed himself once a week when he found the time. Is this context?
****
Fear and trembling unto death. The whole night spent on the couch! Like some kind of cushioned elixir: natural and wholly mine, without having to move for anyone else, her whims, moods or snoring. Picked up Nietzscheagain, reading and re-reading. His father was gone, too. WS may have been luckier: his more a Falstaff, embracing life.
Wonder if my father has been dead to me; I wonder if all that mental experience with him was trauma, why I think I need to write about him all the time, and why I no longer wish to write about him anymore, and feel subsequently wrung out with nothing to say, the result being I claim I am no storyteller, and am trapped in eternal clichés.
For the father-thing seems to be an eternal cliché, doesn’t it? It seems that has been what it has always been about. From writing about Angie when I was sixteen, escaping as profoundly as possible for my age into a love I thought was so pure and true. Then the really awful second book which I have mercifully tossed and is now in some land dump somewhere, if it has not yet become one with the earth (the poor trees that had to die for that tripe! and think of all the tripe the trees have had to give their lives for) – the great chronicle of running away, filled with my own pitiable dreams and pathetic stagy drama. Then there was my senior college thesis novel that was worse than the previous one. Then the next one, the dip because I purposefully tried to ignore Him, which was simply awful. Perhaps that author is right on cue: how does one kill the father; and if that is not the real goal, what is?
That Angie thing when I was sixteen; I often think that it was so overbearing that I was drained. But that was adolescent fantasy. And perhaps that is what I have never done – loved Him. I used to think I loved my mother, but did I? (Forgive this, but I have to be honest some fucking time!) I clung to her because of Him and his illness, as I think I try to cling to her to whom I am married tralala. Is that love, or just some kind of pathetic need-fulfillment? Do I want love to be more than it ever could be? And is this just for me, am I trying to universalize something that can only be personal, idiosyncratic, chained to circumstance, neuroses and anxieties?
Have I ever really tried for a father figure? Is that WS? The couch? My self, maybe. The need and admiration for those with the giant’s strength – but who do not use it. That’s the key. But why?
Why do people think so many ways of feeling, such as alienation, are “modern”? Perhaps the ancients just didn’t moan and groan so much about it. Why is it so hard to imagine Socrates lonely, feeling far away from the rest of the world? Well, it isn’t. The pain of Socrates, WS, FN, all of them were of a kind.
Communion, ingestion of the wafer of thought and ideas and feelings of the Other. But me first. How else to understand?
In another age I would have been profoundly religious: would have castrated myself when I was about sixteen or seventeen, then went off to a monastery in the mountains and tilled what soil I could, contemplated the skies, the earth and god. Prayed and prayed for absolute communion with the absolute god.
But the self must be first. How then? With honesty – brutal honesty, like those old Norse sagas, plain and matter of fact, give and take, death and vengeance. Very personal. It is so very awful to break open a window to your heart for someone else to see.
Surrounded by pine and books and shelves and oak and books and eyes that stare out at me – and away at the same time. Surrounded by a wished-for self.
Trying to become what I am: I think that’s very good; from FN.
I want to live: mornings like this one, the sun, the grass, the trees, just the newness of the day, like a great promise – that will be eventually broken. But it’s not the day’s fault. Like blaming the cat for the smell.
Trying to become what I am. Implication of self-consciousness. Trying to be comfortable with what I am? Who’s the father right now? And when I kill him, will it hurt a lot, or just a little, and if I am not conscious of it at all, will it even matter?
I am a couch man. Prone and unable to respond.
I wonder if WS ever slept on the couch – actually, he may have slept on the second-best bed, and his giving it to Ann may have been a private joke. That would be funny yet very mean. But he had the balls to go off to London and make a career for himself after three children. FN did not even bother to marry. Perhaps he was the brightest of us all. But how lonely it must have been for him, always sick and alone – but then he penned such interesting ruminations. But WS also penned his own version of profound ruminations. He was filled with a kind of power that perhaps I know nothing about. This is sad, too.
I should call home this weekend, but I know that would just make me sadder, hearing about daddy’s madness. It’s daddy that hurts, though he probably is dead in my head. It’s mom, too. But I don’t understand that.
Suffering is not necessarily conducive to great art, especially if one is unbelievably self-indulgent and lacks a structure. The latter may be a result of the former; I thought about that just yesterday, and think it may be true: emotions and feelings and a knack for words are not enough. One must contain this bubbling over of words and feelings and thoughts into a coherent and profound structure: this is not a pejorative artifice but the only way to communicate – and that is art.
This perhaps makes life an art: emotions and thoughts and feelings expressed correctly or appropriately in measured and full tones. But they must be okay to begin with. Not dramatics, of which I always have done: this is the intestinal mud sliding out my mouth at times. It is immaturity: now, how do I do it? Is the power inherent or worked over for days and months and years? Can it be done without love?
****
I keep asking myself who
They are, eulogizing my
Youth one moment, feeling the
Pain fresh the next. I do
Not understand them, their
Endless, quicksand-pain, the
Sinkhole of their martyred
Relationship. I find my brothers
Survive by placable answers –
They seem unable to contain
Mine. I am tired and
Frustrated and
Hurt.
I do not understand them;
I do not understand understand.
I survive by canonizing their
Love, but I do not believe
It. What is left after all,
This time and the
Persistent cycles of renewed
Pain?
I turn my head away and
Work and read and sing and
Laugh. I cannot even
Offer them the strong end of
The branch to help pull
Them out.
I am not a good son; I am
Not a bad person
****
The couch has become my home! Almost something like my other or second self: a part of me: I eat, sleep, read upon it, like leaning against some friend that is always there.
It is alone here tonight, they are all gone, and, yes, I am very lonely, even though the couch is there for me.
But FN would have told me as WS would not: it is resentment that makes me lonely now – not in the lack of companionship with another human being – but petty jealousy. I no longer have any control. This is good, though it hurts like hell, for it is a step toward freedom.
WS showed me how, with his life and in his plays, in the self-containment I have been talking about. But, again, how is it done? How does one escape the human element? How do I overcome the woman? Not by just escaping, surely. Perhaps that will become a necessary part of it, but not the cure. I must become better than that. But that will be a part of it: for what is this marriage’s purpose when the couch becomes one’s best friend? But it always has been so, hasn’t it? It only becomes clearer now that she is returning my glances, my attitude, my activities. It is justice, and I must go beyond this, my own behavior reflected in her. I must go beyond it.
But this is pose and resentment, and it mounts like a desire. I am afraid.
FN: The will is not only a complex of sensation and thinking, it is above all an effect, and specifically the effect of the command. That which is termed “freedom of the will” is essentially the effect of superiority in relation to him who must obey.
I am undone.
Despair seems as often as strong as desire: both are like a cocoon of single-minded purpose and feeling; there are really no questions involved with either. Like Adam and Eve, they were made originally as one, tied in strands of fate, then separated and considered ever after as two. There are so many lies in the air, from false bravado, poses, coy actions, families knit together by locks of blood prejudice, circumstance, convenience: the cowardice of striking out into the world while protecting oneself inside the vessel of art. Where to go from here?
I have been mocked beyond all the bounds of ridicule by my self, and it hit the end yesterday: I really wanted to die, but I infused it with pose – even then! Is nothing sacred within my self ? No. At least not yet. Will there ever be?
Passion must be found without the tacit or overt approval of others, or there is no self, as now there is none. How else can one define one’s power? One cannot. I cannot. I am anti-context after all. It is all quite sad.
After the rock-bottom phase, it will be separate lives, and it will actually be okay; no, better: the perfection of the marriage cliché. The separate life is too perfect, too good to be true, as though some master novelist contrived it just right. Wanting to be out of context, I am ruled by context.
Even though it’s my home, the couch has become strangely foreign and anonymous; that is, irrelevant. Now it is merely cold, and lying side-by-side, there is no point except sleep. My body aches, but it will adapt. One can adapt to and with anything; it just takes me longer than most. I want to ride my bicycle a long way today, and sweat like crazy, let the sun burn my skin and feel my hair matted and sweaty; I want to make love as soon as I get off the bike, with sweat dripping from my eyes and nose and neither of us caring one way or the other.
****
The couch is an obscurity now. The final words were spoken last night, and it is by sheer inertia that it will continue, inertia and fear and desperate emotions. I have never known such hurting pain, an extreme unction of emotional fire. To be told such things is to want to crawl into a hole and die; to know and, worse, feel that the past ten years have been a mistake is so beyond my comprehension that my brain feels glazed over and numb. The fire of this engulfs every part of what I am, whatever that is.
And that’s the problem. If only I knew who and what I am, perhaps I would now know what to do, how to act, what to think, what to feel. Not that, but how to handle the feelings, anyway. The assumed control is now elsewhere, and this is perhaps what really hurts. The buffer zone constructed around a self not yet defined also is a buffer against my finding out what I am as well. And all this intense and incessant emotional strife compounds the pain.
Never before have I felt such pain, lying near her, and being told such awful things. Indifference is stronger than hate; it implies your nonexistence, while the latter at least recognizes you.
How far and away the core of my self seems, as I tend to the immediate satisfaction of desperate emotions.
Is this all pedantry and fear at being or becoming honest?
Sometimes I think honesty consists in looking at you and kissing you full on the mouth. Other times I know it is something very different, that only has to do with me in a darkened room.
One good thing about the previous night’s crisis is that it did not last long; I was angry, but it was for about forty-five minutes, and then I read and became absorbed. But it was the same story at first: the initial anger at the empty house – being ignored! This is the rub, after all, and I know it now, but I am overcoming it, I will overcome it, it can only be a matter of time.
****
The day is golden again, and slightly warmer, though summer is fading into fall. Sometimes words are very cheap, but they have hidden values, perhaps more often than not hidden from those who write them so engagingly. WS knew. FN seemed to.
I wanted to sit outside this morning like I do on many mornings, but it is cold: August is dying, slowly. But the sun is very bright and the grass is wet again after its sprinkling, and the air is sharp and says, Next week will be September.
I still cannot understand why it is so hard with them; I seem to be jealous of every move she makes that is independent of me, done without any thought toward me. It is wrong, I know, but it boils inside me; it is a hand which takes hold of my heart and squeezes it, blood oozing through that strange hand’s fingers. My hand.
When I boil or when the hand grips me, I hate many things. No, I hate all things and people. Drink numbs it and I can smile a little. But I do not do it very often, as though being numb or liking things in a vague way is not what I enjoy. I am afraid that I like to hate things and people; anger is my mainstay.
I live only in the present, enmeshed within a context I don’t understand, because I can’t remember what happened yesterday and am too absorbed to think on what may happen tomorrow. This is a curious way to live. I cannot think or imagine what I was like a few years ago.
I think only in spurts, images, and unmeaningful epiphanies, as when a peculiar scent slips the present out from under you. A moment ten years past: at nineteen, with fading pimples, my future wife for the first time, in bed, and her suddenly kissing my body repeatedly. And like then as now: I only see the image, the rude passion of her expression, my own puzzled expression.
Daddy’s face that way: a sudden realization that life is not what you had thought, but, really and all at once, something more puzzling and mischievous.
I like walking through downtown; the used bookstores especially are wonderful to walk through, to smell, to read the titles. I like the creaking floors and pine bookshelves. I like the paperbacks that have been handled a couple of times, actually read. The hardbacks are too much like textbooks; they seem more sterile and less flexible than the paperbound books with their soft creases and the smell of their pages. New bookstores miss the point of books altogether.
Why go on so much? Because I feel at home there. It becomes just about the only real reason why I work for a living. A living: to buy used books and stack them in my room, read them, smell them, drink them in. I do not work to pay the mortgage, or even to eat, perhaps to drink a bit; but most of all to buy books.
I think I have the energy and passion to fill ten vessels of art: by necessity, books – emotions that must turn into those books I pass by on the used bookstore shelves, creased covers and all. Not stories; not particularly poems; and please no pretension. Notebooks of a kind, with thoughts and observations: yet, again, the old nemesis of structure. The structure may be the page, the black letters on white paper, communication to you. Perhaps you can be the structure, the vessel; but, then, what is the art?
Perhaps the worst thing about youth is that one thinks one is unique, has secret and profound thoughts – and if these thoughts are couched in heavy metaphors, they come off pathetically pretentious. This must be avoided because it attempts to make the notebooks or the thoughts the final hardened vessel of art, and gives no credit to you who read them. The thoughts will not be unique – perhaps uniquely presented. It’s almost as though one should be taught that one is not all that particularly unique, but one must express uniquely in order to have one’s message received by others. There can be insight, but only when one reaches to communicate. The rest is adolescent pretense and silence.
****
WS worked to survive, and wrote his life out on a piece of paper, whatever that consisted of during that time. FN looked within and, perhaps with eyes large and rounded, wrote and, like an artist painting a self-portrait, kept looking up at his image in the glass as he wrote, more desperately as the seasons waned, until he lay splayed across his pages exhausted.
It is as though both WS and FN were too messy for little old me. I have a daughter and a wife which I unduly worry about – but so what? The “unduly” is the lack of self, the implicit confidence one might bestow on another if it is assumed in one’s self.
This seems always the key. Sometimes I feel I am like the old adage: all dressed up but nowhere to go. Again, the self is the key, in the sense that the “dressed up” is only outward and not where it should be. Spiritual renaissance first, the outer face like stone: priorities first, a redundancy missed for so long.
Been thinking how all that assumed deep self-searching I have been doing for all these ten years was so misguided, more like a dramatized still-life of mediocrity. I know the insides of my eyelids very well – but what did all that looking accomplish? No depth, no improvement on who and what I am. Just self-indulgent moments, wondering if I had an audience; I am so used to it that I do not think I realize it is all gone now. Every day and night now proves it, the empty eyes of the other, and, yes (or no), not the couch for comfort, not even that. So it follows that these “separate worlds” of myself that I had entered so regularly and profoundly for the past ten years were really set stages; and I was such a good actor – or a bad and vulgar audience – that I fooled even myself and then tried to convince those who were watching that I was involved deeply into something they could never understand.
I wonder if these pages are the same, this newly indented sentence. All is in question now: the motives, the look and direction of the eyes, even the feelings themselves. All seem to be compromises based on experience, the experience of receiving a particular response or type of response from the other.
This is nothing but enslavement, to others perhaps, but even more so to the lowest form or spirit. I have believed the politician within myself, and am so much the lesser for it. How to get out?
I despise her and I despise myself. It always has been that way. There is really nothing different now: only a little more light to see the lines in faces, clearer nostrils to smell the fetid odors that always lingered still and motionless, drifting mazily so one can hear the hollow echo of conversation and invective.
Hope only after they are gone. This is no way to live.
I just opened the window and you could hear the sudden rush of traffic, and then the quick chirping of birds, and then the traffic, more minutely, but still there, as always.
I seem to be on an even plane, but the plane is much lower than it has been for most of the years I have been here. My skin has become almost fully numb, though I still receive twinges of nerve, but this is like when I hit my funny bone: almost comical and always painful.
Let all the walls tumble in around me; perhaps only then will I finally make my way out of the rubble and do something finally with myself. What the ghost of a voice said to me Thursday night before I came home from work, that WS and even FN had whispered to me for so long: not the couch, but action, pure and simple, and then we’ll talk. To earn the right to talk about things with another who has passed the threshold: not this pathetic flirting that is a tease for everything, even more an insult, to a god if it was there, to the universe as it so persistently is.
Would it be wrong to let the plane exist, and then take action elsewhere, as though it were a separate reality? No, if only because it is so common and dishonest. Action in this sense would be temporarily fulfilling, I think, but then it would die from lack of spirit and honesty. I am like an old-fashioned Puritan: works are not enough, one must be chosen and filled to the very marrow with grace.
Often, I feel very strong, and am so conscious of how and where I stand on something, that I can finally and truly move – what is that like always? Is that perfection of the spirit? How easily corruptible, though, it seems. But never self-satisfied. It is like an assumption that one must incorporate into one’s being, a goes-without-saying attitude, but dealing only with the capability of one’s self; not the concrete attitudes and opinions of that self, just its legitimacy. Perhaps I am a Puritan, after all.
My mother is so sad in her recent letter. Both of my parents are aging, and the world is perhaps closing around them and her: I understand nothing but tone. I know nothing of pain, for I am numb. What do I know of love, when I cannot even understand what I am? And she is crying in pain and I can do nothing but tap away and think on this new sunny day, and wonder if I will get through it numb to all the pain, real or imagined, which surrounds and infects every part of me. She is lost in the cocoon of her awful circumstance and duty; I am just a shallow reflection.
****
The weather is turning colder and more dismal, but this doesn’t reflect me personally anymore. I am feeling better at the job and even with my self. The celibacy will eventually end, and I must make love like I have never done so before, without it being taken for granted, as though perhaps it truly is in some way a fulfillment of some kind: all-out sensation, mind-boggling, and so forth. I do not sound convinced if only because I know not what to do. It is very strange to admit on the precipice of thirty.
But perhaps this is the beginning of something better: that is, at least I am being honest with that self which had for so long wallowed in its own inadequacies. It’s almost as though it were time to push out, and do as much as one can to push out, and in so doing push inward at the same time: open up, loosen up, release something that was always a myth. But how far to go? Already self-conscious about it, filled with a self-fulfilling caution that delimits before anything is even done.
I am asking myself as I was thinking of what to write next, why do I no longer wish to write? Have I truly given up what I had so longed for in school? What does the discovery mean? Is it true? and if so, why does the longing still fill me? Like I’m thrown off some cart, and, after deciding not to run after it, I suddenly break into a nervous sweat and walk as if in a trance down the road where the cart disappeared.
Again, I have not yet shown or proven to the space around me that I am likened unto WS, the assumed sophistication, the face as stone – only in reflection of the inner power. But I need the pale cast of thought, the sickliness of the soul, its transparent hunger, in order to build upon it afterward. But how the sickliness continues like some long and drawn-out illness. I will act only when I am without guilt: to know the conscience of the king is perhaps not everything, though it is good policy. I must act.
****
I must commune with my self, bitterly alone. My outer self must play and paint the arts of conversation, but it must all be within. Do your job, do your work, even tap away here in the morning cold. How dark and strange the world is around me, surrounding me like an unstamped envelop.
All my stuff, surrounding me in this very cold room, just waiting and innocent: I am its black and unknown presence; does it or do they know me all too well, too?
Is that why they are so silent?
I read snippets of TW the other day, and it was both wonderful and depressing because I thought: where did that enthusiasm go? I had always been angry, but there was always that extra something to spill from my heart and head onto a page that was at least receptive if not understanding. But now it is just you and my pathetic reiterated pleas for a soul. That is why TW wrote so much, and overwrote and overwrote on top of that: don’t lose it! he kept crying to himself. Even if they say you are an overgrown adolescent, it’s better that than a stifling academic passing judgment on things he doesn’t even know, sitting back in his armchair with the heat on high. That is it.
I hate who I have become, everything I always have hated.
****
Am not sure, but I think I am starting to settle down. Strangely enough, two days ago I had never felt worse, stuffed up with a cold and intensely depressed. I am free when I am away from here and can transform myself; no, better yet, unfetter myself from whatever constraints I have forged.
I read some poetry last night and wondered once again what I am doing with myself. This fiction (though poetry is not fiction) is artificial and far away, and even the artifice of poetry seems somehow false to me, also fettered in some way to an old form. WS would have laughed as he showed me his latest “fettered” sonnet.
What new form to create? What vessel to contain the passion and opinion and thought? The fabulous artificer: what is WS but that? Not necessarily FN, but perhaps.
So?
Not sure what to want from these others around whom I feel more free. Still indebted in some sense to the look in their eyes, the curve of their mouths, the shape of their bodies. I wonder at how and what I love, and long to fulfill it. Perhaps to lose myself in them. The softness of lips upon my own, hands lightly clasping, very real and soft, fingertips alive to every part of the body. In other words, more free, but maybe not free enough.
This love thing got to me last night after watching a movie with her, and it felt very good to come down here afterward and let it all out. She knows nothing and is as desensitized as the rest of that pathetic movie audience that surrounded me last night. How I despise all those people, and even the makers of the movie, who surrounded what was good with a lot of tripe and desperation. What is the point of all that excess? It is as though the movie makers were beating me over the head like a bunch of hoodlums, and I was supposed to thank them for the pain, and then for the little glimmer of goodness and genuine power encased so suffocatingly within.
But the love thing is so strange and wonderful to see, because I remember when it may have been so, and how nothing it is now, and when I cried and sobbed last night, I thought to myself, My God, how much longer can I live without any kind of love? How is all this reconciled, WS? How is this integrated, FN?
Anyone?
I cannot be hurt, though, and humiliated again, my heart and mind cannot take that. And this is why this life has become so terribly empty and alone and fake. That word, fake. I am overly dramatic, but I did okay last night; I did not reveal myself, but I think it is because she is so cold, and this may have taken away whatever victory I achieved through communing with myself, and only with my self. No more laughter, no more desensitized looks. This world is gone, I think; it feels only what it thinks it’s supposed to feel. And then we go back to normal life: art is something separate; it does not relate for them. They do not see themselves in its mirror. They know not what they do.
I know not what I feel; but o how I feel!
Silence.
****
It’s TW’s October, with all those bursting descriptions, filled with life, even when approaching death, in a rage as angry as the colors against the coming of winter.
It seems all so crisp and clear toward the mountains, on these types of mornings; the sun so new and young and energetic, its zillion fingers prodding everything, that I wonder, sometimes, why it has left me out of its touch. But even though one may consciously accept the fate of loneliness, that aloneness becomes unbearable, and tears come out of my eyes, warm and wet. I no longer wonder why I am so alone. I accept it, tears and all. Yes, because I have no choice and refuse refuge in cheap universal comforts, but also because they mark my penultimate power; that is, the tears are mine, they are genuine and only for myself.
I wonder now if it is only bravery that is lacking, the self-confidence to follow what one’s heart and mind tells one to do, no matter what the surface responsibilities are. I mean, to read what I must to feed myself, to act as I must to respect my self, alongside of doing those things we do to eat and sleep and provide shelter for me and the two around me. Why is that so difficult? Is it, really? No, partially because I have not thought of it in those terms, but also because those surface responsibilities, those powerful engendering assumed habits of mind and body are so grooved into one’s being like a phonograph record; to follow this line, I must skip, or be playing simultaneously a deeper and more transcendent tune, perhaps even one that encompasses the so-called more obvious line of my life.
It is a sad time that whenever my eyes and heart are filled, they are with the indifferent, negative feelings of who I am – not really who I have become, for it seems that it has always been this way; only my choices have been circumscribed about my wife’s former attention, which has now dissipated like some morning mist, and now the atmosphere is burning me into looking at myself so strangely, so taut, so manipulative.
It is true that I am so very tired of being unhappy, but this is the mirror shining itself back upon me at last – after all these attempts of mine! This self is showing back something I never thought was true of me. It reminds me of one of those old horror movies, where a man looks in the mirror and sees himself as Hydish, ugly, strange.
Sometimes I feel trapped by my own feelings and emotions. That is, I cannot control them, and at the time when I am conscious of the fact that I do not control them, I am enraptured with them, and feel them as beautiful and real as when I look into her eyes and see the form of her mouth, and even touch the warmth of her hand. But the emotions and feelings are really too raw and unformed; I only nod at their legitimacy because I do feel them; but like formless, undisciplined art, I have no vessel to pour them into. And thus I am alone in my head and heart, and every one I see and who knows me says I have no emotion and am distant, that I cut myself off, perhaps even that I am a hypocrite who only says at certain times when he “loosens up” that which he never follows through. That opinion is legitimate, I think, for its profound falseness does not make it illegitimate. Potential and thought and ideas and emotions without action are meaningless, self-contained eruptions. When these eruptions top my self and are revealed to any one, they are puzzling and, in a real sense, meaningless and hypocritical. And I retreat with my heart in my hands, hurt and partially mystified by whatever it is I feel or purport to feel and think. And these thoughts and words I type now do not legitimate them, for they are still encased within what I am, unrealized.
I am he who no longer is what he was and is not yet what he will be.
****
The same, and more, and nothing done this morning except eruptions above my self and anger vented into the morning air, ironing my clothes and vacuuming the carpet and looking into the dead space of the living room, wanting to be with WS, to drink with him, look him in the eyes – and not say anything; listen and look and move my head side to side and up and down; and then walk with him through October and kick the leaves and love the crunch – knowing that he would love the sound as well.
I am thinking, hardly thinking: do I really have nothing to say? No. Do I just not know how to say it? Yes. Why is it always the form that is the problem? Does that have anything to do with honesty? That’s a different question altogether. It must be.
This is getting rather old, isn’t it? Almost Thanksgiving, and there is really no substantive change. I suppose the wrestling is genuine, but I and whomever else I’m wrestling is getting pretty tired of it all. I need a beaker to pour it all into. A story? How, a memoir? Of sights, sounds, smells, impressions? But concrete events? Has any one thing really happened, some event into which I can pour everything else?
****
She hugged me today, the day after the beginning of the new year, and told me she loved me, and I hope so much that it is all true, beyond the words, wrapped in the hug itself. Can it be true?
In what desperate circumstances I place myself in the name of excavating the soul. It is like some lie I tell myself in order to be permanently distant, away from all of them. I have never been as pathetically unhappy as I am now; it seems like it is permanent, alienating everyone who comes near me, even while drunk and supposedly uninhibited. There is nothing to say because I have blocked everything else off. Reading is salvation because it gives me its undivided attention, without question or pretense. I am its equal, within myself.
Everything I experience congeals within my self, instead of inspiring me on to do something of value. I must somehow bleed myself upon the page, you, until it makes sense. But fiction does not seem the proper channel. It seems so artificial. Although I know that it is not artificial, it seems so very much. Must I get over this? Or is this just too much categorization?
The ideas in my context seem to be there, but how to express them? Perhaps I need the discipline, the abandonment of that wry cynicism, which is essentially bullshit and an excuse for inactivity. No, not necessarily the fear of mediocrity, but the discipline and will to greatness. Perhaps it lies within those two major terms, one form, the other substance. I have been through a great deal of hell as a parent and a husband, and I love so much, and now I need to contrive all this feeling into some disciplined expression – toward what end, and for whom?
To be released into the arms of another. To be set free from even the books I love, and go beyond them to my life, my thought, my doubts, just me, that onion I always seem to be trying to peel away, but which I must analyze and express. That art Thou! That’s the crux of it all, to express on the way to whatever I will be from what I am and what I was. The journey, the intense interweaving of material which makes it all up and demands a say, an opinion, a right to shout out loud and scream: This is me!
****
I am Orestes, not
Oedipus, like I’d always thought.
I pondered him too much and
Deceived myself.
I am Hamlet in league with
Claudius, cleft in twain.
I have made myself
Irrelevant and impotent with
Blood on my hands and feet.
© 2024 Victor Greto