The novelist Rikki Ducornet asked me to contribute an essay on “the monstrous and the marvelous” for an issue of the American Book Review, July–August 1998.
The normal outcome is that deference for reality gains the day. Nevertheless its behest cannot be at once obeyed. The task is now carried out bit by bit, under great expense of time and cathectic energy, while all the time the existence of the lost object is continued in the mind. Each single one of the memories and hopes which bound the libido to the object is brought up and hyper-cathected, and the detachment of the libido from it accomplished. Why this process of carrying out the behest of reality bit by bit, which is in the nature of a compromise, should be so extraordinarily painful is not at all easy to explain in terms of mental economics. It is worth noting that this pain seems natural to us. The fact is, however, that when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again.
—Sigmund Freud1
1.
Reality had no fixed address. I could not keep it in a frame, it drifted, toward and away, accumulating as fast as it dissolved, a mercurial temporality that argued against the ordering sequences on which it was, ostensibly, founded. Temporality and chronology were antagonistic, sequences of possibility and probability were misaligned. What I desired began to separate, like a shadow from its object, to drift into scenarios of salvation and promise, installed on a phantom.
2.
The household, its slippery incipience, meant that one was obliged to invent.
3.
I was given some colored oil crayons. I made winged things whose radiant vitality surprised me. They seemed somehow beyond me, outside of anything I knew, a fiction whose purpose was to embody a truth. They appeared to inhabit more than one epistemology, more than one narrative.
4.
The poem makes a claim. It claims to know something about having been being. It acknowledges an oscillation between stillness and motion, recovery and discovery, difference and sameness. It is a search for the form of this different sameness, a recognition that transforms back to cognition.
that the poem is a toy
with the structure of insomnia
—Norma Cole2
As if you could write away from and into simultaneously, so that the temporal articulates only presence. Yet there are instants so hard as to be gems, refracting and reflecting any new proximity.
5.
I have told myself that on the day my father was carried out of our house, not on a stretcher but on a chaise longue he had assembled from a kit (black cloth straps over blond wood) to be taken to hospital, he looked up at me, standing by the front door of our apartment, in the hall, on the black floor, my head quite near his, and said:
“Don’t worry, I’ll be back.”
Did he say these words or did I rob another, earlier memory, when he was about to depart again for one of his assignments to the place called, mysteriously, The Far East, not lying sick on a self-made chair but standing in his tan raincoat, his typewriter in one hand, bending down to me:
“Don’t worry, I’ll be back.”
A child tells herself a consoling fib; borrows a piece of reality. This fib enters the dream space.
At night, further scenarios were composed, shoots off the fiction of the return. A party, for example, in which he would say some coded something, to let me know he was himself, only disguised. He would give a sign. His death was a covert trick, a dissembling; he had been sent on a mission which demanded that his identity be obscured.
6.
Things are not outside of us, in measurable external space, like neutral objects (objecta) of use and exchange; rather they open to us the original place solely from which the experience of measurable external space becomes possible. They are therefore held and comprehended from the outset in the topos outopos (placeless place, no-place place) in which experience of being-in-the-world is situated.
—Giorgio Agamben3
On my eighth birthday, a few days after my father died, something occurred. I was not allowed to have a birthday party with children my age, as I was quarantined for polio, but several of my father’s friends came by. (Friends came by all week; I do not remember if my birthday was singled out as an event within this murmuring current of mourning celebrants.)
A gift arrived, carried up the staircase that he had descended for the last time, in a large oblong white box. It came without a card.
7.
When my father returned from his trips he always arrived with presents: Chinese pajamas, black silk pants with white piping, a mauve silk jacket meticulously embroidered, tiny frog closures; a pale green chiffon dress whose floral print was a foggy Parisian park; for my mother, an engraved sandalwood fan, a painted Russian Easter egg; bolts of silk brocade, wrapped around themselves like huge ribbons; a small Chinese box in which there was a seal on a smooth nut which, when pressed into thick crimson paste, made a mark in indecipherable Chinese characters; a Samurai sword in a long sheath with a hidden button to open it; an immense black kimono lined in crimson, with green flowers, and another, pale yellow jacket, with black satin edging, in which my sister and I were enfolded and photographed, one sister to each sleeve, holding our infant brother in a swaddling blanket; a frail silver charm bracelet with a jade clasp; a helmet, festooned with gold dangling ear cups and orange tassels, that sat akimbo on the head of a carved wooden figure, its rich wood darkly gleaming, with an inscrutable face, neither baby, nor Buddha, nor old man, rounded belly protruding, eyes squinting, a mute incubus, country of origin and provenance unknown. Presents/presence.
8.
The teddy bear was not beautiful. It was ordinary, brown and cream, with shiny amber eyes. More silky than fluffy. I named it Beauty. Over the years, it became matted, dirty, and it lost its eyes: a blind old ugly thing. My father never became blind or old or ugly; had he lived out his life, he might by now perhaps be all those things.
History and magic oscillate.
—Theodor Adorno
9.
The essential relationship between language and death takes place—for metaphysics—in Voice. Death and Voice have the same negative structure and they are metaphysically inseparable. To experience death as death signifies, in fact, to experience the removal of the voice and the appearance, in its place, of another Voice (presented in grammatical thought as gramma, in Hegel as the Voice of death, in Heidegger as the Voice of conscience and the Voice of being, and in linguistics as a phoneme), which constitutes the originary negative foundation of the human word. To experience Voice signifies, on the other hand, to become capable of another death—no longer simply a deceasing, but a person’s ownmost and insuperable possibility, the possibility of his freedom.
—Giorgio Agamben4
synchronic: structure: langue: myth: ritual
diachronic: event: parole: narrative: play
In the episode of the advent of Bear/Beauty, the distinction between reality and make-believe became indistinct, contingent upon one another: a real event gave rise to an invented cause. The object came with its own internal puns and permutations: ear, be (perhaps a bee in its bonnet, Bear Thinking), re (returns). In its nakedness (bare) and its inexplicable appearance (the beautiful), it became a tangible witness to, well, the unbearable lightness of being.
10.
At a time when everyone was concerned to give us prompt and reassuring answers, the doll was the first to make us aware of that silence larger than life which later breathed on us again and again out of space whenever we came at any point to the border of our existence. Sitting opposite the doll as it stared at us, we experienced for the first time (or am I mistaken?) that hollowness in our feelings, that heart-pause which could spell death, did not the whole gentle continuum of nature lift one like a lifeless body over the abyss.
—Rainer Maria Rilke5
A boneless stuffed Thing, comforting icon of a vanquished wish, trace of the other side of time, fragment that had miraculously escaped, catapulted like the white badminton birdie that wheeled over the net with the mere touch of a racket, making a slight blunt sound, plunk: a souvenir.
The souvenir…is an allusion and not a model; it comes after the fact and remains both partial to and more expansive than the fact. It will not function without the supplementary narrative discourse that both attaches to its origins and creates a myth with regard to those origins.
—Susan Stewart6
I had wanted to be a painter. Maybe I would have been a painter, but a painting, an object in space, could not articulate the ontological vanishing point between Bear and Beauty.
11.
Stepping from room to room, into places that no longer exist, have not existed for decades, as if never lifted from an essential nocturnal disposition, a tunnel or throat. An obdurate secret, like a dream whose telling cannot recreate the experience of the dreamer.
Besides, death is always the name of a secret, since it signs the irreplaceable singularity. It puts forth the public name, the common name of a secret, the common name of the proper name without name. It is therefore always a shibboleth, for the manifest name of a secret is from the beginning a private name, so that language about death is nothing but the long history of a secret society, neither public nor private, semi-private, semi-public, on the border between the two; thus, also a sort of hidden religion of the awaiting (oneself as well as each other), with its ceremonies, cults, liturgy, or its Marranolike rituals.
—Jacques Derrida7
12.
Into the gap between Bear and Beauty comes the differential play of language.
13.
Who is my father in this world, in this house,
At the spirit’s base?
My father’s father, his father’s father, his—
Shadows like winds
Go back to a parent before thought, before speech,
At the head of the past.
—Wallace Stevens8
There was a back door which led onto the back stairs, situated at the juncture of the hall as it went around the room I shared with my brother, and turned down the long hall to the bathroom and kitchen. The young man who collected the garbage came up these back stairs from the sooty coal cellar, dragging with him an enormous burlap sack, and we could hear this sack thumping up and down the stairs as he came and went.