Lynne Tillman - Someday This Will Be Funny

— George Eliot, Middlemarch

Before appearing on TV, politicians were commanded: Don’t move around too much in your chair, don’t be too animated, you’ll look crazy, don’t touch your face or hair, don’t flail your arms, don’t point your finger. Their handlers advised them: keep to your agenda, make your point, not theirs. The talking heads tried to maintain their pose and composure, but these anointed figures faltered in public, and, with the ubiquity of cameras, their every wink, smirk, awkwardness, or mistake was recorded and broadcast on the Internet, the worse the better.

At a political leadership forum led by his son, Jeb Bush, former President Bush wept when he spoke about Jeb losing the 1994 governorship of Florida. Madame Realism took a seat next to him after he returned to the table, still choked up. “Did you cry,” she asked, “because you wish Jeb were president, not your namesake?” President Bush ignored her for the rest of the evening.

Why are presidents so short?

So senators can remember them.

A happy few were born to be poker-faced. A rare minority suffered from a disease called prosopagnosis, or face blindness; the Greek prosopon means face, and agnosia is the medical term for the loss of recognition. An impairment destroys the brain’s ability to recognize faces, which usually happens after a trauma to it; but if the disease is developmental or genetic, and occurs before a person develops an awareness that faces can be differentiated, sufferers never know that it is ordinary to distinguish them. They see no noses, eyes, lips, but a blur, a cloudy, murky space above the neck. What is their life like? Their world? How do they manage? But she couldn’t embody their experience, not even in fantasy.

He wants power

He has power

He wants more

And his country will break in his hands,

Is breaking now.

— Alkaios, ca. 600 BC, from Pure Pagan, translated by Burton Raffel

Those who ran for president, presumably, hungered for power, to rule over others, like others might want sex, a Jaguar, or a baby. Winning drives winners, and maybe losers, too, Madame Realism considered. Power, that’s what it’s all about, everyone always remarked. But why did some want to lead armies and others want to lead a Girl Scout troop, or nothing much at all? With power, you get your way all the time.

She wanted her way, she knew she couldn’t get it all the time, but how far would Madame Realism go to achieve her ends? She wasn’t sure. And, why were her ends modest, compared, say, with Hadrian’s? Like other children, she’d been trained not to be a sore loser, to share, not to hit, but probably Hadrian hadn’t. And, what a joke, she laughed to herself, the power of toilet training.

“Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.”

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

Thought bubbles gathered over her head, and she attempted, as if in a battle, to thrust into those airy-fairy daydreams fates that she didn’t crave, like serving as a counselor in a drug clinic or checking microchips for flaws. In fantasy only, Madame Realism ruled her realm, and she could go anywhere, anytime. She would be lavished with awards for peace and physics and keep hundreds of thousands of stray animals on her vast properties. Fearlessly and boldly, she would poke holes in others’ arguments, and sometimes she did influence a president. She did not imagine having coffee with the owner of the local laundromat, she didn’t make beds or sweep floors. Though she believed she didn’t care about having great power, her wishes, like jokes, claimed their own special truths.

“The King of Kings is also the Chief of Thieves. To whom may I complain?”

— The Bauls

There was a story standup comic Mort Sahl told about JFK and him. Mort Sahl was flying on Air Force One with Kennedy, when they hit a patch of rough turbulence. JFK said to Sahl, “If this plane crashed, we would probably all be killed, wouldn’t we?” Sahl answered, “Yes, Mr. President.” Then JFK said, “And it occurs to me that your name would be in very small print.” The comic was put in his place, power did that. Madame Realism wondered how wanting power or wanting to be near it was different, if it was. Maybe, she told herself, she would give up some of her fantasies and replace them with others. But could she?

Out of nothing comes language and out of language comes nothing and everything. Everything challenges the tenuous world order. Every emotion derails every other one. One rut is disrupted by the emergence of another. I like red wine, but began drinking white, with a sudden thirst, and now demand it at 6 P.M. exactly, as if my life depended upon it. That was a while ago.

What does a life depend upon? And from whom do I beg forgiveness so quietly I’m never heard? With its remarkable colors and aftertastes, the wine, dry as wit, urges me to forgive myself. I try.

Life’s aim, Freud thought, was death. I can’t know this, but maybe it’s death I want, since living comes with its own exigencies, like terror. In dreams, nothing dies, but birth can’t be trusted, either. I remember terrible dreams and not just my own. Memory is what everyone talks about these days. Will we remember, and what will we remember, who will be written out, ignored, or obliterated. Someone could say: They never existed. It’s a singular terror.

The names of the dead have to be repeated daily. To forget them has a meaning no one understands, but there comes a time when the fierce pain of their absence dulls and their voices become so faint they can’t be heard.

And then what do the living mean by being alive, how dare we? The year changes, the millennium, and from one day to the next, something must have been discarded, or neglected, something was abandoned, left to wither or ruin. You didn’t decide to forget. People make lists, take vitamins, and they exercise. I bend over, over and over.

I’m not good at being a pawn of history.

The news reports that brain cells don’t die. I never believed they did. The tenaciousness of memory, its viciousness really — witness the desire over history for revenge — has forever been a sign that the brain recovers. But it’s unclear what it recovers.

Try to hang on to what you can. It’s all really going. So am I. Someone else’s biography seems like my life. I read it and confuse it with my own. I watch a movie, convinced it happened to me. I suppose it did happen to me. I don’t know what I think anymore. I don’t know what I don’t think. I’m someone who tells things.

Once, I wanted to locate movie footage of tidal waves. They occurred in typical dreams. But an oceanographer told me that a tidal wave was a tsunami, it moved under the ocean and couldn’t be seen. This bothered me for a long time. I wondered what it was that destroyed whole villages, just washed them away. In dreams, I’m forced to rescue myself. This morning’s decision: let life rush over me. The recurring tidal wave is not about sexual thralldom, not the spectacular orgasm, not the threat of dissolution and loss of control through sex — that, too — but a wish to be overcome by life rather than to run it. To be overrun.

I don’t believe any response, like invention, is sad. The world is made up of imagining. I imagine this, too. Things circle, all is flutter. Things fall down and rise up. Hope and remorse, beauty and viciousness, and imagination, wherever it doggedly hides, unveil petulant realities. I live in my mind, and I don’t. There’s scant privacy for bitterness or farting or the inexpressible; historically, there was an illusion of privacy. Illusions are necessary. The wretched inherit what no one wants.