LESSNESS
A little less of us every day.
Seven words, nine syllables, twenty-three letters.
That’s all that is the case, precisely what we really know about ourselves, sans irony, sans wit, sans posturing, sans philosophy, sans desperate belief: how it is impossible to reason with our own bodies.
There is hope, Franz Kafka once wrote, but not for us.
Blessed is he who expects nothing, Alexander Pope once wrote, for he shall never be disappointed.
An e-mail from a friend, her lung cancer having recently metastasized to the brain: “They have me on this experimental chemo pill, long-term, which is supposed to reduce the risk of recurrence greatly. The problem is it made my face break out in this horrendous acne-like rash. So I’ve cut back to half a dose and begun taking antibiotics as well as using all sorts of creams. My dermatologist’s assistant spent nearly an hour with me showing me how to use makeup to cover the rash. I’ve never used makeup in my life, and really hadn’t planned on starting now, but it does seem to make a difference.”
Grenz-Situationen, was Karl Jaspers’s term.
We seem to believe it possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming, Don DeLillo once wrote.
How we keep writing anyway.
Grenz-Situationen: Limit Situations.
How we keep writing anyway until we don’t keep writing anyway.
The bioengineered replicant Roy Batty to his creator, Tyrell, in Blade Runner, a moment before Roy crushes Tyrell’s skull, drives his thumbs into Tyrell’s eyes: I want more life, fucker.
How I saw the writer Ronald Sukenick for the last time one humid rainy April afternoon in his Battery Park City apartment two months before he died of inclusion body myositis, a muscle-wasting disease that eventually makes it impossible for one to swallow, then to breathe.
Jaspers’s philosophy being an extended effort to explore and describe the margins of human experience, an effort to confront what he thought of, beautifully, as the Unconditioned.
Death is so terrifying, Susan Cheever once wrote, because it is so ordinary.
Ron couldn’t use his fingers anymore, so he bought a voice-recognition program and wrote by means of that.
Ridley Scott re-editing the scene so that in the final cut Batty says: I want more life, father—thereby draining the life out of the line, making it into mere Frankensteinian, mere Oedipal, cliché.
How my wife and I strolled along the banks of the Bagmati River in Kathmandu among myriad cloth-wrapped bodies burning on funeral pyres.
How Ron and I both knew this was it, how there would be no future meetings. How we both understood there were no social conventions to cover such an event. How the unsettling result was that each of our simple declarative sentences seemed anything but.
When we speak of “seriousness” in art, Thomas Pynchon once wrote, ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death.
How, shortly before his in 1631, John Donne obtained an urn, his own burial shroud, and the services of an artist. He wrapped himself in said shroud, posed atop said urn, and had said artist render a charcoal sketch of him, which the poet kept by his bedside throughout his final illness.
The distance between the real and the ideal.
Two large framed photographs hang on the walls of my writing studio, both by Joel-Peter Witkin. They are the only ones by an established artist my wife and I have ever felt a need to purchase. Each is a still life, a nature morte, constructed from corpse parts the photographer found and posed in morgues in Mexico and France.
Families of the dead in prim circles around the pyres along the river.
Holy men spattering butter on the fires to help them burn faster.
How, to pass time on the Paris Metro once between stops, I asked my sister, with whom I was riding during a visit, how old she wanted to live to be, and, instead of answering, she began to cry.
Jaspers referred to the ultimate boundaries of being as Das Umgreifende—The Encompassing: the indefinite horizon in which all subjective and objective experience is possible, but which can itself never be apprehended rationally.
How, after fifty, your face becomes an accomplishment.
Eighty-three, less than a year before he died, Kurt Vonnegut: “I’ve written books. Lots of them. Please, I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do. Can I go home now?”
One only becoming authentically human, in other words, according to Jaspers, at the instant one allows oneself awareness of the Encompassing by confronting such unimaginables as universal contingency and the loss of the human, the loss of the body—the latter otherwise known as death.
Everything else refusal, fear, repression.
How the last words Roy Batty speaks, huddled on a dark rainy L.A. rooftop in 2019, are some of the saddest, the most powerful, in the entire film: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain. Time to die.”
How it is the case, precisely, that life can be defined as a slow dying.
A terminal illness.
Birth, Beckett once wrote, was the death of him.
The goal of all life, Freud once wrote, is death.
How it is the case, precisely, that death is a protracted amnesia visited upon those who live beyond the lost one’s passing.
Ernest Becker: The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.
Remembering, Milan Kundera once wrote, is a form of forgetting.
My dying friend: A lot of the brain motor difficulties that I was expecting after the first surgery seem to be appearing now. My left hand feels more or less like a stroke patient’s, unable to do very much except spill a glass of water on a computer keyboard or leave A. walking two blocks behind me because I had no sensation that I let go of his hand. For about two weeks there I was having some real palsy tremors, what they’re calling mini-seizures.
On a large enough time line, Chuck Palahniuk once wrote, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero.
That’s it. That’s all.
How, as I was working on my novel about Friedrich Nietzsche’s last mad night on earth, I couldn’t shake off the abrupt uncanny realization that inside always becomes outside in the end.
The simple, brutal notion: how that which separates us from the world—our sphincterial control, our skin, our existential deep-sea suit—gradually goes away.
We are always becoming something other than we are, something other than we want to be.
Traveling.
Every once in a while, Ron stopped talking, shifted in his electric wheelchair, looked out his picture window at the Hudson, then drifted back to what we were saying, and we would pick up where we had left off. I drank bourbon, Ron tea through a straw. He was having trouble swallowing. He was becoming tired very quickly. You could see it.
Every parting gives a foretaste of death, Schopenhauer once wrote.
How I could hear steam building in the skulls of the corpses as I moved along the banks of the Bagmati.
How Hemingway turned himself into a character in one of his books and shot himself in the head. How Hunter Thompson turned himself into a character in one of his books and shot himself in the head. How Yukio Mishima turned himself into a character in one of his books and committed seppuku. Publicly. In 1970.
Outside, people not cheering him on, but heckling him, jeering, as he disemboweled himself.
Gradually, or not so gradually. It depends.
I lost all my hair two weeks ago, my dying friend wrote. One of the things they talked about was the need to keep the head covered at all times and I ended up buying a large assortment of what they call chemo turbans, some of them reasonably stylish, to wear around the house. I mean, it’s a perfectly good wig, and I’m sure was once a very nice beaver or groundhog or whatever it was, but I hate it. The hair of my nightmares.
The head. Not my head.
As if she had already begun to become something other than her own body.
My sister-in-law was in town, my dying friend wrote, and her comment was it looks okay, it just looks nothing like me. I’ll use it for teaching, since it still masks hair loss, and there’s no need to impose my limitations on the students. Then I decided to say screw the chemo turbans and looked at some hats. I ended up buying three outrageously exquisite retro-style felt fedoras which cover the whole head and are marvelously comfortable. You won’t believe these. I’ve never been so stylish in my life.
Roy Batty, a replicant, virtually identical to humans in every way except for the fact that the memories he believes are his own are really someone else’s, except for the fact that he has a four-year lifespan, is more human than the other so-called humans around him.
A ball will bounce, Richard Wilbur once wrote, but less and less.
How the sadhus, Hindu holy men who live by begging, cook bread by burying it among shards of smoking human bones.
I want to enjoy my death, Beckett once wrote.
Presumably with some irony.
In that race which daily hastens us toward death, Camus once wrote, the body maintains its irreparable lead.
But how Tennessee Williams accidentally swallowed the cap of his nasal spray and suffocated alone in his hotel room.
How Sherwood Anderson choked on a toothpick at a party in Panama.
How Maupassant tried killing himself by slicing his own throat, failed, was declared insane, spent the last eighteen months of his life in an asylum, dying from syphilis he contracted in his youth, as did Manet, as did Gauguin, as did Schubert, as did Nietzsche, as did Scott Joplin.
How, after a little more than an hour, I realized I should take my leave of Ron. How I don’t believe I ever experienced more difficulty closing a door behind me.
How that door both shut and remained wide open.
How the only real closures come in mimetic fiction and memoir, redemption and faux wisdom hardened into commodity. Like an order of Arby’s Cheesecake Poppers.
How a group of children stood knee-deep in the river, oblivious, in the black oily water that used to be strangers, throwing a red rubber ball through gusts of coppery haze.
Charles Sanders Pierce: If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at last, as every good fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does. In place of this we have death.
The graveyards are full of indispensable men, Charles de Gaulle once wrote.
Death is not an event in life, Wittgenstein once wrote: we do not live to experience death.
Yes, I want to say, and no.
My mother waiting primly in her living room in suburban Dallas, also dying, also of cancer, this time breast metastasized to the spine, the liver, the brain, inventorying the clutter that took her nearly seventy-four years to quilt around herself, noting out of the blue, almost casually, to no one in particular: All these things will forget their stories the moment I’m gone.
A little less, and then a little less.
The first Witkin photograph on my wall: a plump old woman, the top of her head missing, her skin blotched, her body supported by wires, sitting at a chair next to a table in a sparse room. On the table is a book. Her finger holds her place, although the arm to which the finger is attached isn’t itself attached to her torso. Interrupted Reading, the photograph is entitled.
Anna Karenina throws herself under a train.
His books are questions of survival of personality, Carole Maso once wrote of the narrator’s former lover in Ava.
Yes, and no.
My cousin entered the hospital for routine hip-replacement surgery to fix his fullback years in college. The operation went off without a hitch—until an infection flowered within him, one of those virulent bacterial strains that chew through a patient’s every prospect. One week my cousin was perfectly fine, minus the limp and a certain throbby stiffness. The next he was on a ventilator. The next his wife was e-mailing what amounted to acquaintances like me in an attempt to drum up something that looked like an acceptable audience for the memorial service I had absolutely no intention of attending.
Emma Bovary eats arsenic, Eva Braun cyanide, Alan Turing cyanide, Abbie Hoffman phenobarbital.
There is no boat in Hades, no ferryman Charon,
No caretaker Aiakos, no dog Cerberus.
All we who are dead below
Have become bones and ashes, but nothing else.
Someone once carved on a Roman tombstone. Two thousand years ago.
The second Witkin photograph: a woman’s untorsoed head, eyes closed, atilt on some dark surface (let’s call it a table), next to which a stuffed monkey is posed.
Patrik Ouredník recounts how, during the first months Buchenwald was open for business, those in charge gave the inmates postcards that said: Accommodation is wonderful, we are working here, we receive decent treatment and are well looked after. The inmates were made to sign them and address them to relatives, some of whom apparently believed what they read. One Greek prisoner mailed his postcard to his father in Pyrgos. Three months later, his father arrived for a visit.
At the railroad platform, the son leaping on him and strangling him to death before the Germans could get their hands on the man.
My wife’s grandmother refused to be buried, insisting on being entombed in a mausoleum instead because, she said, she didn’t want to get dirty.
The distance between the real and the ideal.
Whatever opinion we may be pleased to hold on the subject of death, Proust once wrote, we may be sure that it is meaningless and valueless.
How it would be a perfect misreading of his work to suggest that Witkin’s intent is to shock, disgust, exploit his subjects, his viewer’s vision.
My uncle had a heart attack on a beach while feeding pigeons. A good Scandinavian, he was too embarrassed to draw attention to himself, reported his wife, who had been sitting beside him at the time, and so he expired, sotto voce, on the spot.
Diane Arbus swallows barbiturates and slashes her wrists, as does Mark Rothko.
The living being is only a species of the dead, Nietzsche once wrote, and a very rare species.
Death is the mother of—
No, that’s not it.
Another dying friend. Another e-mail. Another cancer. Another metastasis to the brain. Sorry not to have updated you sooner, but the fog is settling in so even this will have to be short. Not much news. I wish I could write something light and cheerful, at least something light and pomo-ish, but, fact is, cancer does suck. Or, rather, it’s the treatment that sucks: makes me want to do nothing but sleep all day (and night). Not much pain—occasional headaches, joint aches. What’s most scary is the felt deterioration of my mental abilities (such as they were)—each day, I get dumber and dumber, and know it. Memory loss, inability to follow conversations, inability to find words. B. finds it inevitably frustrating, seeing me standing in the middle of a room, clearly without a clue what I’m doing there; and never sure if I understand or will remember two minutes later something she asked me to do. Frustrating for me, too—feeling like a retard who needs to have notes pinned to his shirt, reminding him what he’s supposed to be doing.
Every plot being an education, ultimately, about how everything ends.
Jerzy Kosinski swallows barbiturates and puts a bag over his head, as does Michael Dorris.
While I thought that I was learning how to live, Leonardo da Vinci once wrote, I have been learning how to die.
Witkin’s work performing an act of reminding.
This is how to say it.
Every narrative being, ultimately, a study in death.
Freud overdoses on morphine.
How, as one gets older, deaths begin arriving closer and closer, like mortar shells zeroing in on their target.
Death being the one idea you can’t deconstruct, David Lodge once wrote.
How I was reading to my mother from Eliot’s Four Quartets when she died. My wife was holding her hand. We were at her bedside, talking to her, trying to comfort her, even though she was already unconscious, even though she had been for more than a day. After a while, I began reading to her, to us, a little from her favorite book, the Bhagavad Gita, a little from late Eliot. She suddenly flinched and stopped breathing.
She was herself and then she wasn’t.
One thousand and one things change the meaning of any book on any given reading.
Witkin’s goal slant-rhyming with Viktor Shklovsky’s: the technique of art being to make objects unfamiliar, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception.
Alice Bradley Sheldon, aka James Tiptree, Jr., mercy-kills her terminally ill husband and then shoots herself.
Near death and incoherent, Nietzsche lay in his narrow bed in a small room on the top floor of the archives his sister Lisbeth had had built in Weimar. The people Lisbeth had brought in with the hope of establishing a lucrative cult around her brother were talking about literature. Nietzsche roused, opened his eyes briefly, said I too have written some good books, then faded back into silence.
Gregor Samsa starves himself, as does the Hunger Artist, as does Kurt Gödel.
And I have come to relinquish that most modern of stances: uncertainty, Carole Maso once wrote. I am certain now of what will happen.
How my mother changed tenses before my eyes.
They said the side effects of these last two chemo sessions would be the hardest, my dying friend wrote. The latest development is that I’ll suddenly pass out for a few minutes. Yesterday I was teaching and woke up as they were loading me into an ambulance. They checked my vitals, did a quick EKG, I signed a waiver stating that I didn’t want to be taken to the hospital, and I went back to teach without incident.
Witkin’s goal slant-rhyming with Gaston Bachelard’s: art, then, is an increase of life, a sort of competition of surprises that stimulates our consciousness and keeps it from becoming somnolent.
Edwin Armstrong, inventor of FM radio, jumps out a window, as does Gilles Deleuze, as does F. O. Matthiessen.
In heaven all the interesting people are missing, Nietzsche once wrote.
Witkin asking his viewers to sympathize with the fragility of the human flesh, the human heart, the act of lessening that we call ourselves.
Birth was the—
The head. Not my head.
Everything else refusal.
Grenz-Situationen.
Everything else fear and repression.
Yes, I want to say, and—
It happened on a Sunday when my mother was escorting my twin brother and me down the steps of the tenement where we lived, Joel-Peter Witkin once told an interviewer, recounting a pivotal moment from his childhood. We were going to church. While walking down the hallway to the entrance of the building, we heard an incredible crash mixed with screaming and cries for help. The accident involved three cars, all with families in them. Somehow, in the confusion, I was no longer holding my mother’s hand. At the place where I stood at the curb, I could see something rolling from one of the overturned cars. It stopped at the curb where I stood. It was the head of a little girl. I bent down to touch the face, to speak to it, but before I could touch it someone carried me away.
Remember that we are what we are.
How the angelic four-voice vocal texture of Guillaume Dufay’s masses make the day on which you hear them feel thoroughly lived. How your consciousness arranges the entire piece of theater called living into a series of remarkable paintings called recollection.
A polyptych.
How each morning, as you rise from your bed, the belief hums through your head that you are going to die, going to die, going to die, yes, surely, no doubt about it, but not today—an observation that will remain correct every morning of your life, except one, because—
Because—
To hope, E. M. Cioran once wrote, is to contradict the future.