Siri Hustvedt - The Blazing World

Felix goes to work. Felix comes home. Felix gets on a plane and flies away. Felix sells and Felix buys, but you should have told me about your secret life, Felix, your secret lives, on the chase. It did have something to do with me. You were wrong, Felix. But you wanted your babies, didn’t you? Yes. They were easier to love than me. Maisie rushing to the door, bouncing up and down in her pajamas, panting with excitement. He’s here. He’s here. Daddy! Daddy! Elusive fathers. How we love them.

I am feeding Ethan, his tiny soft nose smashed against my breast. He pauses, a thin stream of milk bleeds from the edges of his mouth, and he looks around confused, blinks, breathes noisily, and returns to feeding. The curious Maisie is watching, pushing her head into my shoulder, whining at me. Is my Maisie lazy? Do you want to cuddle under my arm, lazy Maisie girl? Yes, Mommy. And I have them both, one hanging from a nipple and the other nudged into the cave made from underarm and elbow — a triple body. A depleted body of three. Tired as I am, I know this is joy. I say to myself: This is joy. Don’t forget it. And I don’t.

To end there, with the babes. That is good for the sleepy mind grown lazy with writing.

Tomorrow there is work, and there is Bruno at night. I call him the Rehabilitator, because he loves the big body of his big love. He likes to see me spread out on the bed, Harry, an aging, naked Venus no Baroque painter would have chosen, but here I am mooning over my own dive-bomber, Bruno the Bear. Not so young, my Romeo, an old fart if there ever was one, with a gut, too, and most of the hair worn down on his legs and the skin turned smooth, to his surprise! He’s not young! What happened? He worries over semen flow, a bit low, the flow, compared to days gone by. You’d think he had walked around with a volcano down there for years, conceited man. But face to face and pubes to pubes, or face to pubes and pubes to face, or straddling and riding or fingers inside delicate orifices here and there, God (why do we call on the supernatural at times like this?), God, I cannot wait to tackle that fat man and kiss his round ass.

And we fight and snarl, too.

H: Finish the poem or flush it!

B: Get your butt out there and show your own work, you coward!

But I’m in love, isn’t that mad? Now, to really end here. I am wanted, wanted. In your eyes, Bruno man, I am shining (well, at least part of the time). Sleep now, sleep, as the bard says, sleep, the balm of hurt minds.

January 18, 2000

Maisie reported today that Aven has an imaginary friend who lives in her throat. The person is known as Radish, and is causing upheaval in the household. Maisie has taken to addressing Radish, which means that Aven spends a lot of time with her mouth gaping, so her mother can confront the invisible insurrectionist directly. I am all sympathy because Bodley was with me for years, and I remember him with much love, but Maisie is worried that Radish has made her appearance (it’s female) for dark psychological reasons — the child is under stress in nursery school. They are showing her letters and numbers she wants nothing to do with. She has just been given eyeglasses, another worry (for her mother, I believe, more than for Aven). I told Maisie that these friends, wherever they may be lodged, inside or outside, are usually helpful and serve some useful purpose. My own mother was very kind about Bodley. She set a place for him at the table and talked to him politely (when he wasn’t misbehaving).

As for the plot, it seems to be working. Phineas has been offered a show of The Suffocation Rooms at Begley in the spring of next year. I had a hallelujah moment about my own queer sensibility, about showing my Phinny man. But then a hint of sadness, low thoughts soon after. I have begun to wonder if I could show work by Anonymous. That might be impossible. There is no orderly vision without context, it seems. Art is not allowed to arrive spontaneously unauthored. Bruno says that turning my pseudonyms into moving pieces in a philosophical game about perception is just a cover for my insecurity. I am masked twice. Phinny disagrees. He has been out and about with me, traveling incognito, so to speak. He says that he has seen it over and over again. He has seen that it matters little what I say; my intelligence is discounted. Piffle and twaddle. Were I to come out with The Suffocation Rooms , the powers-that-be would instantly back away.

The work would look different.

Would it look old-womanish all of a sudden?

I insist that this is a question with urgency.

I have often wondered what a Josephine Cornell would have looked like to people? Piffle and twaddle, frippery and sentiment? Soft?

Not the same, surely, as Joseph.

When it’s a gay man, it’s something else again, right?

Phinny says yes and no. He cites Ethan; it’s queered, he says, but there’s macho and fey, top and bottom, somehow important.

Is it?

I tell him I like being queered with him, paired and queered.

Eve, with her high heels and her low-cut sweaters and her corsets worn on the outside and her Rube Goldberg machines made out of old dresses, is oblivious to the onus of her sex. Well, she’s young. She knows about me and P.Q. She had to know because she lives here.

Two days ago while we were lounging about before bed, Phinny actually yelled at the big B. “Don’t you get it? It doesn’t matter what she does! They see the widow or they see her money. They are blinded by what they think they see!”

Another Goldberg, the Goldberg study, 1968. Women students evaluated an identical essay more poorly when a female name was attached to it than when a male name was attached. The same results were found when they were presented with a work of visual art. Goldberg study revisited, 1983. Men and women students rated the essay with a female name attached more poorly than with a male name attached. And so it goes, but there is a twist as the research progresses in the 1990s. When expert credentials are attached to a woman’s name, the bias disappears. For artists, expertise is fame. Sex and color don’t disappear; they no longer matter.VII

Bruno does not want any part of bias studies or psychological research. I am not just another dame. I am his very own brilliant Harry. Give the jerks a chance. They’ll come around. Weirdly, his faith that Phinny and I are wrong makes me happy, and Phinny’s insistence that I am right makes me unhappy. I am perverse.

(Phinny is thinking of himself, too. The glare of prejudice is all too familiar.)

Sometimes I think of Anton sadly.

There is something else. I met Rune. I can’t say why, but I didn’t mention our encounter to Bruno. It was at the opening for some silly work — balloons, faces. Such a handsome man. Anointed, heralded, wearing his laurels. Vain, I think, probably very vain, but aren’t we all? And then maybe we attribute more vanity to beautiful people than to the plain, and perhaps it isn’t fair. We talked about memory. Mnemosyne is the mother of the Muses. Cicero. One thought led to the next. It was almost as if he knew me, one of those uncanny connections. And what about machine memory? This fascinates him, artificial intelligence, but, I say, they have hit many dead ends. I told him about Thomas Metzinger.VIII Looked at Rune’s work again — faces in surgery, flaps of skin. I have a catalogue. New surfaces, he was saying, surgically transformed, but also bionic technology for new limbs that respond to the nervous system, computers as extended selves-minds. All true. But what does it mean? He spoke to me about external memory — an odd idea. For him the frenzy for documentation, photos, films, the second lives on the Internet, the simulated wars and games. I pointed out that self-consciousness is not new. But the technology is, he insisted. He said, “I want my art to be these questions.” We don’t agree, but that might be the pleasure, the sharp back-and-forth, the agon with a worthy partner. I recommended papers and books to him, and he wrote them down. Read Varela and Manturana, I said.VIIII He said he would. We talked about Wechsler. On him, we agreed. O’s Journey . When we said goodbye, his handshake was just right, neither limp nor too firm. When his e-mail arrived, I felt giddy with hope, for the end of exile in my own head, for someone who will understand me, someone who will see what I know and talk back to me about it. Is this so ridiculous? Isn’t it possible?