Five years after I resigned from West Point, a truth happened to me: I learned that to be intellectual means being weird. In college (Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina), I was still too immured in my fine-young-man upbringing to try on outlandishness. I was quite staid, applying the inflexible discipline to my studies that I had once applied to football. I worked twelve hours a day, sometimes more, on Eliot, Wordsworth, Milton, Shakespeare, Donne, Chaucer; turned in papers early, after putting them through three drafts; never missed class, never was late; spoke at least twice during each class discussion; performed eager intellectual behavior, with brow furrowing and knowing nodding; brownnosed the profs; and got what I wanted at that time more than sex or booze, the A. “I might fail in the army and football,” I said to myself, “but I sure as hell won’t fail as a disciple of Larry Darrell.”
It wasn’t until I reached graduate school that I mustered the guts to get weird. I decided one day in 1991, during my first semester in the Ph.D. program in the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, that I would make my mind labyrinthine.
I was sitting in a seminar taught by Angus Fletcher, the most brilliant person I’ve ever met. I can’t remember the course. Doesn’t matter, because all the courses Angus taught were really about the mind of Angus, exhilaratingly labyrinthine: baroque, otherworldly, expansive, far out, cosmic, uncanny.
It was in Angus’s classes that I first read Borges’s collection Labyrinths, which includes “Funes the Memorious.” The collection also features “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” which is about a translator of Cervantes who immersed himself so deeply into his rendering that he wanted to reproduce, line by line, in the Spanish of Cervantes, the exact Don Quixote itself. “He did not,” Borges’s narrator writes, “want to compose another Quixote—which is easy—but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes.” According to the narrator, Menard accomplished this. Here is an example of his work, set beside Cervantes’s own text. There is also commentary by the narrator.
It is a revelation to compare the Don Quixote of Pierre Menard with that of Miguel de Cervantes. Cervantes, for example, wrote the following (Part I, Chapter IX):
… truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.
This catalog of attributes, written in the seventeenth century, and written by the “ingenious layman” Miguel de Cervantes, is mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:
… truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.
History, the mother of truth!—the idea is staggering. Menard, a contemporary of William James, defines history not as delving into reality but as the very font of reality. Historical truth, for Menard, is not “what happened”; it is what we believe happened. The final phrases—exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor—are brazenly pragmatic.
I need not say that Menard’s version captures the primary argument of this book, Keep It Fake, rather beautifully, much more so, in fact, than Cervantes’s own text and mine.
One day in class, Angus actually read this exact passage, in a resonant, slightly hesitant, melancholy yet affirmative voice, the same voice with which he one day read Andrew Marvell’s longish “The Garden” (in which the mind annihilates “all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade”), after which the class sat in stunned silence, before Angus gave a gentle chuckle, to save us from awkwardness but also to acknowledge that something really wondrous had just occurred. Remarkably, in reading both Borges passages—one by Cervantes, the other by Menard—in exactly the same way, he captured perfectly their vast distance in depth and meaning. Once he had finished—again with the class sitting in stunned silence, but not as stunned or silent since the passage wasn’t as long as Marvell’s poem—he said, after pausing a few seconds, “Isn’t that uncanny?”
I knew what this word signifies in Sigmund Freud’s famous essay “Das Unheimliche,” or “The Uncanny”: the return of the repressed, in such a way that what has returned—an unspeakable fear, perhaps, or a forbidden desire—is both unfamiliar, because it has been hidden below consciousness a long time, and familiar, since it has been an integral part of the consciousness it has shaped. Uncanny moments: walking into the bathroom in the middle of the night—you’ve really got to go—accidentally turning on the light, and seeing, in the mirror, someone who looks like you but is not you. Freud would say that you have experienced how your soul might appear once you die, as a near double of your living self, and you are terrified and fascinated.
I think Angus meant that Borges’s passage is uncanny because it elicits both fear of and desire for the double: not wanting to die; longing to become a soul. The passage is also perhaps uncanny in another way: it dredges the horror of the possibility that it’s all a recording, that we all are simply mimicking, word for word, gesture for gesture, scenes that have taken place in the past but making these scenes seem to mean different things. At the same time, the passage unearths desire for the very situation, since if we are simply acting out, without choice, prefabricated scripts, we are released from the burdens of responsibility.
(Repetition is horrifying. Think of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which features the labyrinth made of shrubbery. In the film, the ghosts of the two daughters the caretaker Grady hacked to pieces look exactly alike and are dressed the same in little-girl yellow party dresses, though one sibling is slightly taller than the other. The picture also features Jack Torrance’s insane novel, a sign that he will soon attempt filicide, in which the same sentence, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” is written over and over, for hundreds of pages.)
Uncanny moments occurred all the time in Angus’s classes: moments that felt both familiar and strange, inevitable and weird, “of course” and “what the fuck?” One early autumn day, referring to his famous book Allegory, Angus observed that characters who take their identities from conventional symbols, like crosses or roses or serpents, are daemonic. They are driven by an uncontrollable inner force to behave in one way: the cross character must behave charitably, the rosy one is devoted to romantic love, and the serpentine guy is pernicious. Then Angus said, roughly: “But then how are we to know if we ourselves are not acting out an allegorical plot not of our own making, if your so-called leading virtue, charity or charisma, say, isn’t something you’ve cultivated and now control but the other way around: your virtue is controlling and cultivating you, as Socrates’s daemon did him, by reminding him almost daily of his main purpose in life, gnothi seauton, know thyself?” I thought, “There is no way of knowing,” and was afraid to turn my head, lift my hand. What if every time I believed I was moving, something, something foreign, monstrous, was moving me?
Another time: it was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, when everyone in the department, except for those of us in Angus’s class and Angus, had left for the holiday and it felt as if we were the last of the Overlook Hotel’s close-down crew in Kubrick’s horror movie, the remnant that prepares for emptiness. On this day, Angus brought in a copy of some tabloid he had whimsically purchased from a newsstand on his way from the subway station to the Grad Center, then in the Grace Building on Forty-second Street. On the cover was a cloud formation resembling a giant demon—Cumulus Lucifer, I would have said, had I not been so shy and afraid of appearing, before Angus and the other grad students, to be daft. The headline read SATAN APPEARS IN CLOUD. Angus said, “I saw this and wondered, ‘What does it mean, to appear?’” Yes, I thought. Think of how we use the verb “appear.” A ghost appears. A celebrity appears. A relative, though, shows up. And I, when entering a room, enter, just as I, attending a party, attend.
Remarks like these made me hyperattentive to everything Angus said. I didn’t know when he might, like a Zen master, utter some koanesque phrase that would alter, as might a pair of colored glasses, everything I thereafter witnessed. And so, on that very day before Thanksgiving, just as we were shuffling out of class, Angus said, “Well, once a friend of mine told me that if you’re going to cook a turkey, just put it in the oven and leave it in there for four hours and it will be cooked.” Was this just a bland description of what happens when you cook a turkey or a deep statement on the nature of existence?
I believe that Angus’s otherworldly qualities—were they controlling him?—were enhanced by his clothing choices: old black Chuck Taylors, duct-taped around the toes, apparently because they leaked; equally old khaki pants; a gray L.L. Bean–type crewneck; horn-rimmed glasses; wild gray hair, as if he had just put his hands on one of those electrified globes that junior high science teachers use to exemplify the behavior of static electricity and to make their volunteers suffer the indignity of having their hair raised, as if they were hanging upside down. If he were wearing a soiled, rumpled lab coat, I would say he fringed the genotype mad scientist. If his memory weren’t so voluminous, I would call him an absentminded professor. Since he was so insanely intricate and disorienting, idea-wise, and so mnemonically profound, his mind opening into compartment after compartment of ancient and modern books, I did call him, not to his face, labyrinthine.
The idea of something—a concept, a state of mind, a place—being labyrinthine fascinated Angus. He wrote about the labyrinth as a state or space of bewilderment in his book on Edmund Spenser, The Prophetic Moment, in which the confusing maze is contrasted with the temple, place of tranquillity and clarity. In that book, and in other works, like his riveting essay titled “‘Positive Negation’: Threshold, Sequence, and Personification in Coleridge” (which inspired me to write Coleridge’s Melancholia: An Anatomy of Limbo), Angus is most interested in the boundary between temple and labyrinth and how it feels to cross it, one direction or the other. Angus, if anything, as another professor put it, was “liminal,” attuned to what happens at the threshold.
Lo and behold, I’ve just come across a rare piece of Fletcherania, on the home page of an Italian poet, playwright, and essayist named Nanni Cagnone. In 1979, back when Angus looked something, if the photo on the page is accurate, like a cross between John Berryman, sans biblical beard, and Iggy Pop, pre–Dead Man, and Neil Young, Tonight’s the Night phase (c. 1975, exactly twenty years before Neil composed the sound track to Jarmusch’s Dead Man), Angus wrote a little review of Cagnone’s collection What’s Hecuba to Him or He to Hecuba?, which I am totally getting, even if it costs $27.50 used on Amazon.com and has a sales rank, by far the lowest I’ve ever seen, of 11,209,648 (compared with which, the 359,971 rank of my latest appears to be a bestseller). In that piece, you can get a feel for Angus at his most playful, writing about, yes, a labyrinth, in connection to the temple, and the space in between: “The threshold does not exist; it is fairly pure betweenness. So you swing with das Zwischen. (Note on ‘error,’ from Ariosto and others, eg. [sic] Spenser: errare, wandering knights, planets, maze-walking: varieties of maze, mountains, the Grand Canyon [sic] vs Bryce Canyon—or Zion—in the State of Utah, the maze at Hampton Court; Olivier and Michael Caine; Marvell’s ‘Garden,’ William Empson on ‘complex words,’ etc.).”
I’ll leave this cryptic litany alone, except to say, Olivier and Caine played in a 1972 film titled Sleuth, which featured a hedge maze (built for the film on the grounds at Athelhampton House in Dorset), and Caine once owned a pub near the Hampton Court hedge maze, located near London.
So. After my first class with Angus, I wanted to be Angus, to be labyrinthine. I was already, by this time, well on my way to “weirding” the Larry Darrell persona I had created in college: studious, serious, diligent, regular, hungry only for the A. From the minute I moved from Boone to New York, I started drafting a new script, titled “The Country Boy moves to the Big City.” To make good among the skyscrapers, I felt I needed to drop my Southern accent—diphthongs be gone—as well as expunge Southern colloquialisms (except for, when someone runs fast, “He took out of there like a scalded dog”) and ingrained grammatical errors (like “might could”). I also did the exact opposite of what I imagined my rural townsfolk doing and so became liberal, wine-drunk, ironic, neurotic, androgynous with a capital “David Bowie.” I moreover actually got educated, seriously. I read ferociously, from Homer to Seamus Heaney, desperate to make up for a fifth-rate junior high and high school education and an only slightly better than average college one.
(Now, wiser and sadder, I feel about so-called intellectuals, especially academics, English professors in particular, almost the same way I once felt about my rural townsfolk: that I can’t get far enough away. At least, I have come to learn, there was among my fellow country dwellers an engaging suspicion of pomposity, a strange verbal lyricism [such as, in telling a boy to rush to school, “Break brush over to the state high school”], a physical vigor, and the deep lonesomeness of Celtic immigrants, who sense “I shouldn’t really be here.” I know this all sounds as if I’m romanticizing rural life, as I once idealized the city, and I probably am.)
Very soon after arriving in NYC, I had almost perfected my act. Other students in my Ph.D. program asked me where I was from, barely able to detect my Southern accent. They admired, or seemed to admire, my left-leaning pose, bolstered with highbrow allusions to William Blake, Oscar Wilde, Theodor Adorno, Zora Neale Hurston, Herbert Marcuse, Langston Hughes, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Lefebvre, Maya Angelou, Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, and Noam Chomsky. They also apparently were impressed with my knowledge of French theory—Derrida, Lacan, Foucault—and the Continental philosophers from whom it emerged: Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. The ostensible proof of my critical and literary acuteness: I had been awarded one of a handful of teaching fellowships.
Eventually, I found my way to Angus Fletcher’s seminar and saw how boring my antirural persona was. I had become a caricature of “hip grad student”: blue jeans, Doc Martens, black blazer, black T-shirts, little round John Lennon glasses, long early-Bono-style hair, invoking the Frankfurt School like word-magic. Then Angus appeared and in an instant, with one uncanny sentence, or two, made me feel reductive, obvious, ridiculous. What to do? Gather more French theoretical odds and ends and purchase more black clothing? Return to the just-out-of-overalls cornpone, play up William Styron’s–Stingo’s ingenue? No. Be like Angus. Labyrinthine.
Which meant, to me, lacking Angus’s cerebral capaciousness and Hamlet-like wit, simply trying to be oddball, substituting blunt peculiarity for unsettling subtlety, H. P. Lovecraft, say, for Edgar Allan Poe, or Carl Solomon for Franz Kafka, not that I could touch, if there were garments on H.P. or C.S., the hems. My new role (still, alas, somewhat in progress, though I’m in the process of abandoning it) involved such studied idiosyncrasies as wearing brown Timberland boots, houndstooth blazers, and flannel shirts (a “RetroJethro” look); cultivating a weird tale interest, devoted to, in addition to Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood (still love “The Man Whom the Trees Loved”), and Arthur Machen, whose The Great God Pan, if read enough times, might transport a man, for real, into a realm of myth and purposelessness; citing the periodic table of elements as a major influence on my self-fashioned “object poetry,” poems containing only nouns; espousing the idea that a weeklong study of the Weather Channel could be the basis for many a tenure-worthy monograph; spending Friday afternoons walking from Hell’s Kitchen down to SoHo, drinking from a forty-ounce beer, held in a paper bag, and slipping, flaneur desirous, into reveries of the fin de siècle; and citing seemingly inexplicable pop song lyrics as sites of unwittingly defamiliarizing surrealism that startle listeners into sudden awarenesses of the earth’s untrammeledness, e.g., “skip the light fandango” (Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale”), “Revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night” (Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s “Blinded by the Light,” a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s original, which says “cut loose like a deuce,” referring, rather unambiguously, to the slang for a 1932 Ford coupé), “rocket man, burning out his fuse up here alone” (Elton John’s, or Reginald Kenneth Dwight’s, “Rocket Man”)—none of which should be confused with mondegreens, mishearings as a result of homophony, as in John/Dwight’s “Hold me closer, tiny dancer,” sounding like “Hold me closer, Tony Danza.”
You can say: “Man, that’s pitiful, an immature effort to escape from what you saw as the limitations of your upbringing and to pretend to be something you’re not. If you had any integrity, you would have acknowledged that your childhood made you who you are today, giving you as many virtues as vices, and you would have embraced your past, been true to it.”
You can say that. You can say it again when you hear that my trying to be labyrinthine opened me to a deeper appreciation of my past, an appreciation that invigorated my present and energized my future. For what is the desire to be labyrinthine but a hope to be, one day, an angel?
So suggests Robert Hass in his introduction to the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, where he explores those moments “whenever our souls make us strangers to the world,” moments that occur when “children [are] at home by themselves looking in the mirror … lovers [are] bewildered by the intensity of their feelings … solitaries [are] out walking after dinner.” All of us know such instances and the impulse that follows from them: “to imagine that we were meant to be citizens of some other place. It is from this sensation that the angels come into existence, creating in this world their ambience of pure loss.”