ANSWERING THE SPHINX
by Douglas Messerli
David
Antin, I Never Knew What Time It Was
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
I told my friend David Antin the other day that I had
a bone of contention with his new book, i
never knew what time it was. For the several days I was reading it,
whenever I went into the room where I had last left his book and glimpsed the
cover, I immediately began singing the Rodgers and Hart song. That song began
to haunt me, in fact. I couldn’t remember the actual lyrics, so I would begin
with “I never knew what time it was / Till there was you…” and make up the
rest… “What a strange time it was / so long without you,” each time creating
new lyrics. For those who have a memory for lyrics, of course, the song
actually begins with the phrase “I didn’t know what time it was / Till I met
you.” and continues, “Oh, what a lovely time it was, / How sublime it was too!”
So both David (perhaps intentionally) and I had gotten the lyrics wrong. How
appropriate for a book that is very much about memory, about what one thinks
one remembers in relationship to whatever the actual “reality” may be.
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).
