answering the sphinx
by Douglas Messerli
David Antin I Never Knew What Time it Was (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2005)
Reading David’s book, moreover, called up
my own memories of David and his readings. I witnessed two of these pieces in
their oral performances: “california — the nervous camel” at one of Paul
Holdengräber’s cultural forums at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art — where
I also served as unofficial photographer of the event — and “time on my hands,”
performed at CalArts.
Accordingly, I spent some time, after
reading these works, attempting to remember them in their oral manifestations —
which seemed to me quite different from the written documents. This is
inevitable, I suspect, when attempting to remember what was said during a
hour-long event. In short, I experienced a sort of fracture between event and
document, a sort “crack in time,” if you will, which my memory had to bridge. I
have known David and his wife Eleanor now for about 25 years, moreover, and
during that long period my personal memories of these and numerous other
performances I’ve witnessed have become intertwined with their personal lives
and the several events I shared with them.
For example, after reading “california —
the nervous camel”— the title of which arose, apparently, from the travels of a
San Diego couple to Egypt, where the couple’s camera had captured the fall of a
woman from a camel who’d been given contrary orders (“get up,” “go down”) by
the camel driver — I could not quite comprehend this image within the context
of what David was saying about the region. It was a wonderful image and sounded
perfect as a metaphor for the desert lands of Southern California, but I grew
uncertain whether California was like the camel because of the rolling
earthquake-like temblors, the indecisiveness of its citizens or leaders, the
quick rise and fall of its cultural interests and/or economy, or the constant
shifts in its values. The metaphor presented a series of possibilities, all of
which were of interest. Just as I had reinvented the lyrics of the standard
ballad, I made a new meaning of David’s image. I chose a much more personal
meaning for the metaphor, picturing the author himself as the “the nervous
camel”— albeit with one hump, that marvelously domed head that anyone who’s
seen him cannot forget.
When I first visited California, I stayed
with the Antins, who lived, as they do today, near San Diego. I remember them
picking me up at the train station and the three of us beginning a series of
conversations that would continue seemingly nonstop during the two days of my
visit. As he drove up the sandy paths to their then somewhat isolated home,
David, speaking, seldom seemed to attend to the road, which terrified me!
Between the continued movement of his hands and the almost complete inattention
of his eyes upon the road, I was amazed we reached their house safely.
Later he took me to the beach — as he
reminds me it must have been the more isolated Solana Beach rather than the
popular La Jolla beach — where I recall, with fondness, our remarkable
discussion as we walked along the Pacific (in what must be one of the most
beautiful landscapes in the world), the bald pate of his head glistening in the
afternoon sun. We returned to the house and friends stopped by, friends who
were introduced not just by name or vocation, but through extensive
descriptions of their intellectual achievements and their current subjects of
research. Such intense conversation is highly exciting, but also exhausting,
and I was almost relieved to hit the bed. From my room across the way from
their bedroom, however, I could hear David and Eleanor continuing the day’s
discussions long into the night. I realized that, in a sense, language never
quite stopped in the Antin’s house. Just as Eudora Welty had described the
constant rhythm of the cotton gins as defining the life of the Fairchilds in Delta
Wedding, so did the sound of voices define the Antins. It is easy for me,
accordingly, to project the image of David as the nervous, one-humped camel of
California, attempting to display the beauty of the landscape while discussing
the narrative theory of my PhD dissertation which I was currently writing as we
shuffled across the sand in a constant state of indecision between the
enjoyment of space (sitting down to rest) and intellectual pleasure (moving
forward with our ideas).
One might note that David was born into
just such a world. As he describes his early life in his recent book-length
conversation with Charles Bernstein: “My earliest family memories were living
with my grandmother and my aunts — all beautiful women — living in a great old
house in Boro Park. …People kept coming from all over the world to visit, to play
cards or chess and to tell stories and argue in a handful of European languages
about people and facts and politics. …And my grandmother presided over the
entire household in a droll, mischievous manner. This is the household I most
remember. It was noisy, cheerful and gay, and a world away from the austere
prison of living with my mother, which happened only once in a while.”
It is no wonder that Antin has spent a
lifetime now “talking,” talking in public about the past and family, the
present and ideas, philosophy and reminiscences. Although Antin has long been
determined to separate his “talking” from fiction or story, and has doggedly
argued that his work, with its intense use of poetic devices, is poetry, one
must admit—as David does finally in this new volume — that his is a life of
storytelling as intense—if not as encyclopedic — as Scheherazade. Indeed, it is
the life-saving necessity of Scheherazade’s Thousand
and One Nights, a necessity growing out of desire — in her case the desire
to survive — that most distinguishes Antin’s storytelling from other, more
normative, patterns.
These, in fact, are the very subjects of
this new book: How does one remember? How does one understand life within the
constant flux of time? How does one frame meaning when it constantly shifts?
Or, to put it in the context of “the nervous camel,” how does one live in a
place that is simultaneously rising and falling, beginning always anew by
destroying the old? Naturally, one cannot help tumbling from time to time.
In exploring these ideas, however, Antin
does not simply weave fictions — at least the kind of fiction most people
understand by the word. For Antin’s talking is as interesting for what it
leaves out as for what it presents.
The long California piece, for example, is
a strange kind of love story. Well — it might be seen as a love story, although
we have no evidence, no plot details that allow us any certainty. “california —
the nervous camel” is about many things, but at its heart is a narrative about
two couples, friends of the Antins, who seemingly do everything — except travel
on vacation — together: Jack and Melissa, Richard and Alexandra. When Jack is
killed in a car accident, Richard’s behavior radically changes:
Richard
never seemed to recover from jacks untimely accident
his life
changed completely after that he moved out of his house
and into the
servants quarters behind it he stopped going to concerts
and openings
where alexandra appeared alone he started spending
more time at
the clinic in mexico and even that wasnt enough for
a while he
literally disappeared …but when he came back to
san diego he
gave up his practice left the house to Alexandra and
took up an
entirely new career….
In Antin’s
“story,” in which the characters are not overtly psychological, the
reader/listener has no way of knowing what Richard is really feeling. Perhaps
the death simply reminded him, as many men are reminded at his age, of his own
mortality; perhaps he merely suffered a kind of mid-life crisis. Yet we feel,
given the extensiveness of his withdrawal from his previous life, that the two
men may have had a deeper relationship than the narrative itself presents, that
perhaps their friendship might have been a gay one.
As with living beings, however, there is
no discernable “plot,” we have no clear motivating action, just the events, the
narrative of his acts. Antin has presented us with a story that, just as in my
confusion of the work of art and the person, creates a sort of “crack in time”
which the individual perceiver must fill with a significance of his own
imagination. For Richard the face of the “nervous” camel, as it settled back
into its relaxed state, appeared as a sphinx, an inscrutable beast demanding an
answer to its impossible riddle, which is perhaps what Antin really means by
his comparison of California to the camel. Clearly it is an image that might
also help to describe Antin’s art. For what the cracks or hollow spaces of
Antin’s “stories” force the reader to encounter is precisely that: the riddles
of life.
In the title piece, Antin’s father-in-law
undergoes a stroke and is able to speak only one word that sounds as if it
might be from his native language, Hungarian: zaha. “zaha zaha he said zaha
shaking his head and repeating it over and over zaha zaha to anything we had to
say.” The Hungarian dictionary has no word remotely like it, and David is
puzzled by the repeated word: is it a command? a desire? a person? something or
someone he loved?
A Hungarian friend, a violinist, suggests
it’s an inverted word, haza, which means homeland. But even this “answer,” if
it is one, explains little. What does a dying man who has spent most of his
life as a displaced Hungarian painter and poet in La Jolla mean by repeating
“homeland?” As Antin notes:
…he was
thinking of his homeland and of course budapest
is no longer
his budapest and keckemet is no longer the little
town where
his father painted the interiors of churches but
he was
looking for this one place that he was sure never ever
to find
again
The
reader/listener can only imagine, can only fill in this “crack in time” with
his own imaginative responses.
Something similar to the riddles at the
heart of David’s “stories” occurs also on their larger structural level. In the
more constrained form of commercial fiction it is plot that carries forward the
events. In other words, it is a pattern of narrative continuity that allows the
specific events of a tale to occur at regular intervals to this: Unhappy with
her life, Jane takes a vacation to a small village to visit her friend Sally.
There she meets an old friend Richard, a handsome man, who is still in love
with her. Jane refuses the old friend’s advances, but as she finds herself
growing fond of him once again, she discovers that Sally, who has always hated
Jane’s husband, has secretly invited Richard to the town. At first she feels
betrayed, but gradually comes to understand just how mistaken she has been in
marrying her husband, a man whose affections she accepted just to goad her
mother and father. Suddenly, comprehending that her life has been lived in
emptiness, she seeks out her old friend’s love. But having been spurned twice,
he has left the little country village. She follows him to the mountains, but
he has moved on, and she is forced to return to her husband and family with the
realization that true love will never be possible again. (If you don’t like my
hastily constructed plot, substitute the plot of almost any Henry James novel).
What Jane does in the little tourist town,
the beautiful coat she wears as she again encounters Richard, what the town
looks like, what she says to her acquaintances, the memories that overcome Jane
in the little village — these are pearls on the string of the previous
paragraph’s somewhat banal story-line, that, apparently, retain the attention
of certain kinds of passive readers.
In Antin’s writing the strings have all
been cut; his “tales” have no true beginning, no middle, no necessary end.
Rather, they are structured by a sense of rhythm, most often linked by
philosophical meditations or ideas, closing only when a literary narrative
presents a parallel image of the ideas about which he has been talking.
For example, in “the noise of time” Antin
begins with a discussion of an essay he’d read in The Nation on Robert Morris,
an essay that disappoints the author and happens to mention the Hegelian
aphorism that “an artwork is the embodiment of some truth.” Antin finds it
difficult to perceive something as tangible as a piece of art or an artwork as
a receptacle for abstract concepts, propositions or ideas. Perhaps the closest
an art work can come to the embodiment of an idea, he suggests, is in the form
of a machine, as an example of which he drolly proposes a mousetrap, a killing
machine set up to act in a certain way when the mouse licks the peanut-butter.
But what if the mouse prefers jelly, or the spring on the trap was not properly
wound, or a whole myriad of other events intervene? Will the machine-of-art
still hold its truths? Perhaps the “truths” only work under certain conditions.
Abandoning this possibility, Antin
humorously explores another, slightly violent image: perhaps making art is more
like bowling. The ideas are the pins toward which one propels the work of art,
the ball of art hitting some of them, leaning against others. But the author
admits he is a terrible bowler and most of his balls reach only the gutter. How
does one then get at ideas through art? How does something mean?
Ultimately Antin argues that, for him, a
work of art is something in which ideas go running in all directions, sometimes
to be lost, sometimes accidentally crossing paths with others. He presents two
narratives to prove his point about how ideas are lost or are transformed into
other things. Having just purchased a copy of the Russian poet Osip
Mandelstam’s essays, The Noise of Time, he is struck with the translator’s use
of the word “noise” in the title, since in Russian shum is used to evoke the
sound of repetitive or abrasive events, “the rustle of leaves,” “the roar of
the sea,” “the pounding of the surf,” “the clamor of a crowd,” etc. Translating
Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Vladimir
Nabokov renders the word as “hubbub.” Why has this translator, Clarence Brown,
translated the word as “noise?” Perhaps, argues Antin, Brown was influenced by
the period in which he was translating, when “noise” came to be understood as
entropy, “the growing disorder that affects all ordered systems over time the
frictional forces that reduce all directed energies to forms of disorder sooner
or later as we go from more orderly universes to more disorderly universes
given enough time.” I am personally somewhat skeptical about this explanation
for the translator’s choice, but certainly anyone aware of the association of
the word “noise” with “entropy,” would find the title much richer, as Antin
argues, than Mandelstam might ever have imagined in his use of shum. And that
is Antin’s point. Time and its myriad changes alter the way in which we
interpret things, even how we interpret.
A more convincing example is a discussion
he has with the critic Leo Steinberg about a passage of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Steinberg uses the
passage as a proof of Shakespeare’s genius: “His head sat so tickle on his
shoulders that a milkmaid might sigh it off an she had been in love.” For
Steinberg, the choice of the word “tickle” so close to a dark moment when the
hero is in danger of losing his life, is proof of the bard’s monumentality.
Antin, however, is suspicious. Perhaps the word “tickle” meant something other
in Shakespeare’s day than the light rubbing under the arms, something we have
forgotten. Looking it up later in the OED, Antin finds that indeed it had been
used in a fifteenth century text to describe rocks “that stood tickle in a
stream,” rendering passage perilous. His inclination is to write Steinberg,
telling him of the discovery, that the older meaning has simply been lost in
“the noise of time.” But he resists doing so, knowing that he would simply take
away Steinberg’s great delight in the “strange” usage of the word. In short,
the “truth” of the meaning is of less interest than the reinterpretation of it.
This “story’s” final narrative event
concerns the same father-in-law he describes in his title piece. Antin’s then
teenage son Blaise and the poet from Hungary enjoyed one another’s company,
played tennis together, discussed literature and even, apparently, the older
man’s “Schnitzlerian” love life in the old days of Budapest and Vienna, which
must have reflected his present sexual loneliness, with which Blaise could
probably sympathize, coming as he was into his full adolescence. But Blaise was
about to go away to college, and desiring to give his grandfather a special
gift, he and a friend came up with the idea of setting him up with a hooker,
which they planned to do with what they perceived to be the quite generous sum
of $150. All the hooker had to do is to pretend to accidentally encounter the
gentleman and seduce him. “you don’t have to say a lot,” the boys explained, he
may just show you his paintings and “recite some poetry to you.” They tried
several street girls but found no hooker willing to take on the job, not if
they had to listen to poetry!
What Antin reveals in this wonderful
narrative is the absolute worthlessness of poetry and art as a container for
good ideas. The gap between generations has been bridged by his son’s and his
father-in-law’s friendship, but what I have called “the cut in time” has
irreparably severed the art from its would-be perceivers, for the art — and
whatever truths it may bear — has no currency in the world of these women of
the street.
In this “talk,” as in almost all of
Antin’s “stories,” there is no true plot, but a series of events or narrative
incidents that can only be comprehended — if they can truly be comprehended —
through the reader’s/listener’s imagination, his desire to make meaning and
determination to answer the sphinx.
Isn’t that, of course, what all great art,
all great poetry and fiction depends upon — the willingness of the author to
invite the reader into the text and the reader’s reciprocation? After all,
Scheherazade would not have been able to relate her remarkable stories if the
Caliph had refused to listen.
Los Angeles, July 25, 2005
Reprinted
from The New Review of Literature,
Vol. 3, no. 2 (April 2006)
and from My Year 2005: Terrifying Times (Los
Angeles: Green Integer, 2006).
