Siri Hustvedt - The Blazing World

II. Burden is paraphrasing Husserl. The philosopher discusses listening to music as a primary example of the subjective experience of time, which includes more than is immediately present. It also includes succession and duration. The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966).

I am going to build a house-woman. She will have an inside and an outside, so that we can walk in and out of her. I am drawing her, drawing and thinking about her form. She must be large, and she must be a difficult woman, but she cannot be a natural horror or a fantasy creature with a vagina dentata. She cannot be a Picasso or a de Kooning monster or Madonna. No either/or for this woman. No, she must be true. She must have a head as important as her tail. And there will be characters inside that head, little men and women up to various pursuits. Let them write and sing and play instruments and dance and read very long speeches that put us all to sleep. Let her be my Lady Contemplation in honor of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, that seventeenth-century monstrosity: female intellectual. Author of plays, romances, poems, letters, natural philosophy, and a utopian fiction, The Blazing World . I will call my woman The Blazing World after the duchess. Anti-Cartesian, in the long run anti-atomist, anti-Hobbesian, an exiled Royalist in France, but she was a hard-bitten monist and a materialist who didn’t, couldn’t quite leave God out of it. Her ideas overlap with Leibniz. Had my father known about Cavendish and her links to his hero?

Mad Madge was an embarrassment, a flamboyant boil on the face of nature. She made a spectacle of herself. Allowed once as a visitor to the Royal Society to watch experiments in 1666, the duchess in all her eccentric glory was duly recorded by Samuel Pepys, who recorded everything. He called her a “mad, conceited, ridiculous woman.” It was easy. It’s still easy. You simply refuse to answer the woman. You don’t engage in a dialogue. You let her words or her pictures die. You turn your head away. Centuries pass. The year the first woman was admitted to the Royal Society? 1945.

The duchess sometimes wore men’s clothes, vests and cavalier hats. She bowed rather than curtsied. She was a beardless astonishment, a confusion of roles. She staged herself as mask or masque. Cavalier hat off to you, Duchess. May its plumage wave.I

Cross-dressers run rampant in Cavendish. How else can a lady gallop into the world? How else can she be heard? She must become a man or she must leave this world or she must leave her body, her mean-born body, and blaze. The duchess is a dreamer. Her characters wield their contradictory words like banners. She cannot decide. Polyphony is the only route to understanding. Hermaphroditic polyphony. “What noble mind can suffer a base servitude without rebellious passions?” asked Lady Ward. But the ladies always win in her worlds. Through marriage, beauty, argument, and rank wishful fantasy. Lord Courtship is thunderstruck by the woman’s lucidity and feeling. He is reborn instantly.

Is this not what I want? Look at my work. Look and see.

How to live? A life in the world or a world in the head? To be seen and recognized outside, or to hide and think inside? Actor or hermit? Which is it? She wanted both — to be inside and outside, to ponder and to leap. She was painfully shy and suffered from melancholia, a drag on her gait. She bragged. She adored her husband. A few sages called her a genius.

I am a Riot. An Opera. A Menace! I am Mad Madge, Mad Hatter Harriet, a hideous anomaly who lives at the Heartbreak Hotel near Sunny’s Bar on the water in Brooklyn with people straight from the funny papers. Bruno says there are those in the neighborhood who call me the Witch. I take it on, then, the enchantment of magic and the power of night, which is procreative, fertile, wet. Isn’t that where their fear lies? Don’t women give birth? Don’t we push those squalling babes into the world, suckle them, and sing to them? Are we not the makers and shakers of generations?

Tiny Gulliver in Brobdingnag looks up at the giant nurse who gives suck to an infant. “No sight disgusted me so much as her monstrous breast. Its size is alarming, and every imperfection of the skin visible.” A Swiftian conflation of microscope and misogyny. But isn’t every infant a dwarf at the breast?

Mother said, “He ran away from me.”

I want to blaze and rumble and roar.

I want to hide and weep and hold on to my mother.

But so do we all.

I. On the occasion of Cavendish’s visit to the Royal Society, John Evelyn, a diarist of the period and a friend of Samuel Pepys, composed a ballad: “God bless us! / When I first did see her: / She looked so like a Cavalier, / But that she had no beard.” Quoted in Emma L. E. Rees, Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Genre, Exile (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 13.

May 24, 2001

We have made the pact, or at least I think we have made it. He looked into my eyes and he said it would be fun.

I have bought a Rune multiple — a video work. The New Me . I am curious to see how it holds up over time.

His apartment: a plumber’s dream of Baroque splendor. I didn’t dare ask him if the gold tassels were tongue in cheek or not, but he is too smart not to know. He indulges himself in contradictions and expects everyone to go along with him; and this is paradoxically charming because it is childlike. Look at my toys. Aren’t they cool? He strutted through the rooms, giving me the tour, as his arm shot out in the direction of each object, but he did not pause to examine a single trophy: “pot from Cambodia, 2000 B.C., Diane Arbus photo — killed herself in ’71,—the shoes Marlene Dietrich wore in Morocco .” When a girl with a pixie cut suddenly appeared in a doorway, he flung out his arm and barked “Jeannie,” after which he grinned at me to make sure I understood he was joking. An “assistant,” one of a team of “helpers” roaming about, mostly competent-looking young women with telephones.

Robot photos in heroic display, taken in various labs around the United States and in Geneva, but also “filmbots,” imaginary machines, a movie still of Hal from 2001 and Woody Allen as the robotic waiter in Sleeper . Give me Woody Allen’s bumbler any day, I said, but Rune did not smile.

He has ideas, but they are jumbled. He never read a single page of the books I recommended. But a demon called the Singularity has possessed him, the grandiose offspring of one Verne Vinge, mathematics professor and science fiction writer, who in 1993 predicted a monumental, revolutionary shift in time, the moment we poor mortals will manufacture machine intelligences greater than our own. Our technical devices will race ahead of us, and a posthuman, postbiological world will dawn. We will all be machine-organic hybrids. We will “upload” ourselves and become immortals, although the trick remains elusive. Vinge, a techno-Frankenstein, writes: “Large computer networks may ‘wake up’ as a superhumanly intelligent entity.”I

Wake up?

I grunted and guffawed and waggled my finger, but Rune tells me with a straight face that it will all happen by 2030. How I would love to bet on it, but I’ll be dead. Harriet Burden will be dust, bones ground to ashes. Does Rune really believe it? Has he really embraced this article of faith founded on a false theoretical model: computational theory of mind?II The boys in the labs and some of their cohorts in analytical philosophy have been kneeling in obeisance to the sacred machine that processes information at ever-increasing speeds, that plays chess well but translates from one language to another so badly it hurts, and which doesn’t feel anything at all. Don’t you know that others are writing about paradigm change, that information processing as a model for brain function fails at many levels? Rune wants to believe. It is a form of salvation.