bill.

“Gilda got married and went away. None of us saw her anymore. There was one good thing: Laraine had a party one night, a great party at her house. And I ended up being the disk jockey. She just had forty-fives, and not that many, so you really had to work the music end of it. There was a collection of like the funniest people in the world at this party. Somehow Sam Kinison sticks in my brain. The whole Monty Python group was there, most of us from the show, a lot of other funny people, and Gilda. Gilda showed up and she’d already had cancer and gone into remission and then had it again, I guess. Anyway she was slim. We hadn’t seen her in a long time. And she started doing, “I’ve got to go,” and she was just going to leave, and I was like, “Going to leave?” It felt like she was going to really leave forever.

So we started carrying her around, in a way that we could only do with her. We carried her up and down the stairs, around the house, repeatedly, for a long time, until I was exhausted. Then Danny did it for a while. Then I did it again. We just kept carrying her; we did it in teams. We kept carrying her around, but like upside down, every which way—over your shoulder and under your arm, carrying her like luggage. And that went on for more than an hour—maybe an hour and a half—just carrying her around and saying, “She’s leaving! This could be it! Now come on, this could be the last time we see her. Gilda’s leaving, and remember that she was very sick—hello?”

We worked all aspects of it, but it started with just, “She’s leaving, I don’t know if you’ve said good-bye to her.” And we said good-bye to the same people ten, twenty times, you know.

And because these people were really funny, every person we’d drag her up to would just do like five minutes on her, with Gilda upside down in this sort of tortured position, which she absolutely loved. She was laughing so hard we could have lost her right then and there.

It was just one of the best parties I’ve ever been to in my life. I’ll always remember it. It was the last time I saw her.”

we write "and for the first time" so often.

În clasa a şaptea, când am primit de la doamna dirigintă Istoria Literaturii Universale în 3 volume potrivit de groase, mi-am pus în minte să citesc integral toţi autorii prezentaţi acolo, pe rând, să nu pierd nimic, pentru că ori e tot ori e nimic, îmi ziceam de parcă aş fi ştiut ce zic.  Şi nu ştiam cu ce să încep şi mi-am zis, might as well start from the end, why not, şi am început de la litera z şi singurul autor cu z de acolo era Zola şi prima carte de el care mi-a căzut sub ochi la biblioteca din oraş a fost Fecunditate, groasă carte, promiţătoare, mi-am zis, încep bine, chiar dacă de la sfârşit. Şi-aşa a fost, am sfârşit de cum am început, pentru că atunci când am ajuns la pasajul cu vătraiul pe post de instrument de tortură menit sa vindece femeile fecunde a trebuit să o las din mână şi să merg în grădină să dau afară mărul roşu pe care tocmai îl mâncasem de prânz. Şi era aşa un măr mare şi roşu, un măr care-ţi scraşnea printre dinţi şi-ţi zemuia toată gura. A fost păcat de el. Nu poţi să termini ce începi de la sfârşit, am învăţat atunci. 

as he finally managed to swallow.

“It’s the same with everything, why do or not do something, why say ‘yes’ or ‘no’, why worry yourself with a ‘perhaps’ or a ‘maybe’, why speak, why remain silent, why refuse, why know anything if nothing of what happens happens, because nothing happens without interruption, nothing lasts or endures or is ceaselessly remembered, what takes place is identical to what doesn’t take place, what we dismiss or allow to slip by us is identical to what we accept and seize, what we experience identical to what we never try; we pour all our intelligence and our feelings and our enthusiasm into the task of discriminating between things that will all be made equal, if they haven’t already been, and that’s why we’re so full of regrets and lost opportunities, of confirmations and reaffirmations and opportunities grasped, when the truth is that nothing is affirmed and everything is constantly in the process of being lost. Or perhaps there never was anything.”

E ceva cu cartea asta. Mi-a luat remarcabil de mult timp să o termin (aproape o lună încheiată), deşi are doar 278 de pagini. Not because it was bad or dull or overly difficult, but because I kept getting caught in rereading loops that propelled me back to the beginning. Ceva neobişnuit pentru mine, avand în vedere că-s genul de cititor liniar, care reciteşte abia apoi, dacă simte că nu a digerat cum trebuie totul. Să fi fost calitatea prozei, labirintică prin excelenţă, and hauntingly so, sau pur şi simplu cvasi-terifianta auto-identificare cu naratorul, habar n-am. But I loved it. This is the type of reading experience that doesn’t happen to me every so often as an adult and any book that manages to provide it is immediately propelled into an exalted category.

Deşi cartea îşi ia titlul dintr-un vers din Macbeth – „My hands are of your colour, but I shame to wear a heart so white”, sentimentele de vină şi implicit complicitate fiind două dintre temele majore ale lui Marias – personajul principal îmi aminteşte mai mult de Hamlet în indecizia, pasivitatea şi propensitatea sa de a reacţiona în faţa fiecărei situaţii printr-o retragere grăbită în solilocvii şi o stare generală de anxietate paralizantă. Despite his self-description as pathologically eager to absorb every piece of information (he is a translator and interpreter), Juan’s constant avowal that he does „not want to know” is a more apt description of his existence throughout the book; much of the tension comes from his unwillingness to say or do anything at all. Pasivitatea lui e mai mult decât o trăsătură de personalitate, mind you, e mai degrabă un soi de frantic existential angst: he is tormented by the dialectic between wanting to understand and the futility of communication; the desire to record and to remember, to create a coherent narrative of a life, juxtaposed against the pointless repetition and subjectivity of existence; the inherent instability of both personality and reality.

E o carte despre trasul cu urechea şi voyeurism, despre conversaţii auzite prin ziduri, comentarii rătăcite care sunt sau nu destinate persoanei care le prinde din zbor, uneori fără să vrea, despre corespondenţe consumate de alte persoane decât cele cărora le erau destinate. M-am tot gândit la Bakhtin, teoreticianul cu care mi-am petrecut cea mai mare parte din timp în facultate, şi la teoriile lui despre dialog şi alteritate: if ever a book is highly dialogic this one is; it’s a book to make me long for academia. The mystery unfolds through these layers of dialogism with a sharp interpersonal voice. Există foarte multe pasaje care se repetă, dar care îţi dau sentimentul de accentuare narativă necesară, în nici un caz plictisitoare, obositoare sau enervantă. It’s a symphonic, polyphonic buildup, utterly accurate if I’m to compare it to my own experience of this kind of ongoing obsessive anxiety.

E, to say the least, o carte teribil de intensă, dark and fretful. Care mărturiseşte prin intermediul personajelor atent construite adevăruri incomode, pe care poate nu ţi le-ai recunoscut în totalitate, dar care sunt acolo, lurking beneath your layers of social and emotional obligations. De exemplu ce se întâmplă cu doi oameni, în intimitatea gândurilor lor cele mai sincere, odată ce relaţia lor trece de bariera căsătoriei. E genul acela de carte pe care, atunci când o închizi, nu poţi să zici decât, „oh, you know, I don’t know, you know?”

beneath my hands, your hands, their hands, more hands.

leaving is not enough; you must
stay gone. train your heart
like a dog. change the locks
even on the house he’s never
visited. you lucky, lucky girl.
you have an apartment
just your size. a bathtub
full of tea. a heart the size
of Arizona, but not nearly
so arid. don’t wish away
your cracked past, your
crooked toes, your problems
are papier mache puppets
you made or bought because the vendor
at the market was so compelling you just
had to have them. you had to have him.
and you did. and now you pull down
the bridge between your houses,
you make him call before
he visits, you take a lover
for granted, you take
a lover who looks at you
like maybe you are magic. make
the first bottle you consume
in this place a relic. place it
on whatever altar you fashion
with a knife and five cranberries.
don’t lose too much weight.
stupid girls are always trying
to disappear as revenge. and you
are not stupid. you loved a man
with more hands than a parade
of beggars, and here you stand. heart
like a four-poster bed. heart like a canvas.
heart leaking something so strong
they can smell it in the street.

(Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell- Marty McConnell)

and that’s how people burn to death in hotel rooms.

After you’ve been to bed together for the first time,
without the advantage or disadvantage of any prior acquaintance,
the other party very often says to you,
Tell me about yourself, I want to know all about you,
what’s your story? And you think maybe they really and truly do

sincerely want to know your life story, and so you light up
a cigarette and begin to tell it to them, the two of you
lying together in completely relaxed positions
like a pair of rag dolls a bored child dropped on a bed.

You tell them your story, or as much of your story
as time or a fair degree of prudence allows, and they say,
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, until the oh
is just an audible breath, and then of course

there’s some interruption. Slow room service comes up
with a bowl of melting ice cubes, or one of you rises to pee
and gaze at himself with the mild astonishment in the bathroom mirror.
And then, the first thing you know, before you’ve had time
to pick up where you left off with your enthralling life story,
they’re telling you their life story, exactly as they’d intended to all along,

and you’re saying, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, the vowel at last becoming
no more than an audible sigh,
as the elevator, halfway down the corridor and a turn to the left,
draws one last, long, deep breath of exhaustion
and stops breathing forever. Then?

Well, one of you falls asleep
and the other one does likewise with a lighted cigarette in his mouth,
and that’s how people burn to death in hotel rooms.

Life Story - Tennessee Williams

(photo: Installation for Arnhem Mode Biennale, 2011 by A.F. Vandevorst) 

you loved with more hands than a parade of beggars

The glass does not break because it is glass,
Said the philosopher. The glass could stay
Unbroken forever, shoved back in a dark closet,
Slowly weeping itself, a colorless liquid.
The glass breaks because somebody drops it
From a height — a grip stunned open by bad news
Or laughter. A giddy sweep of grand gesture
Or fluttering nerves might knock it off the table —
Or perhaps wine emptied from it, into the blood,
Has numbed the fingers. It breaks because it falls
Into the arms of the earth — that grave attraction.
It breaks because it meets the floor’s surface,
Which is solid and does not give. It breaks because
It is dropped, and falls hard, because it hits
Bottom, and because nobody catches it.

(stallings)