William Gaddis - The Recognitions

The sole way, it seemed to her often enough when she was working at writing a poem, to use words with meaning, would be to choose words for themselves, and invest them with her own meaning: not her own, perhaps, but meaning which was implicit in their shape, too frequently nothing to do with dictionary definition. The words which the tradition of her art offered her were by now in chaos, coerced through the contexts of a million inanities, the printed page everywhere opiate, row upon row of compelling idiocies disposed to induce stupor, coma, necrotic convulsion; and when they reached her hands they were brittle, straining and cracking, sometimes they broke under the burden which her tense will imposed, and she found herself clutching their fragments, attempting again with this shabby equipment her raid on the inarticulate.

So for instance she stole comatulid, and her larceny went unnoticed by science which chose it to mean "a free-swimming stalk-less crinoid. ." and crinoid: lily-shaped (though this word belonged to the scientists too, Crinoidea, a large class of echinoderms). And the phylum Echinodermata she left far behind, left the starfishes, the sea urchins, and their allies to grope in peace in the dark water of the sea. Comatulid lay on the paper under her pen; while she struggled to reach it through the rubble amassed by her memory.

It was through this imposed accumulation of chaos that she struggled to move now: beyond it lay simplicity, unmeasurable, residence of perfection, where nothing was created, where originality did not exist: because it was origin; where once she was there work and thought in causal and stumbling sequence did not exist, but only transcription: where the poem she knew but could not write existed, ready-formed, awaiting recovery in that moment when the writing down of it was impossible: because she was the poem. Her hand tipped toward the paper, black stroke the pen made there, but only that stroke, line of uncertainty. She called her memory, screamed for it, trying to scream through it and beyond it, damned accumulation that bound her in time: my memory, my bed, my stomach, my terror, my hope, my poem, my God: the meanness of my. Must the flames of hell be ninety-story blazes? or simply these small sharp tongues of fire that nibble and fall to, savoring the edges and then consume, swept by the wind of terror at exposing one's self, losing the aggregate of meannesses which compose identity, in flames never reaching full roaring crescendo but scorch through a life like fire in grass, in the world of time the clock tells. Every tick, synchronized, tears off a fragment of the lives run by them, the circling hands reflected in those eyes watching their repetition in an anxiety which draws the whole face toward pupiled voids and finally, leaves lines there, uncertain strokes woven into the flesh, the fabric of anxiety, double-webbed round dark-centered jellies which reflect nothing. Only that fabric remains, pleached in the pattern of the bondage which has a beginning and an end, with scientific meanness in attention to details, of a thousand things which should not have happened, and did; of myriad mean events which should have happened, and did not: waited for, denied, until life is lived in fragments, unrelated until death, and the wrist watch stops.

The pen quivered over the paper, added inae to comatulid, and then carefully crossed out that free suffix; and then brought comatulid into the tangle of black ink, as she moved toward that world not world where the needle took her. It was the uncircumscribed, unbearable, infinitely extended, indefinitely divisible void where she swam in orgasm, soaring into a vastness away from the heaving indignity of the posture she shared; the world of music so intensely known that nothing exists but the music; it was the world of ecstasy they all approximated by different paths, one world in which temporary residence is prohibited, as the agonies of recall attest: "Love's dart" that wounds but does not kill; the ill complained of, but prized above every joy and earthly good; "sweet cautery," the "stolen heart," the "ravished understanding," the "rape of love": in Provencal, conoscenza. Thus Saint Teresa, quadrupedis, "dying of not being able to die."

What did the devil teach Gerbert, Archbishop of Ravenna, in exchange for his soul which Gerbert bartered to learn all, and become Pope? The devil taught him algebra and clock-making, for a world where there is no space, only distances; no time, only minutes and hours; where things are numbered, and even Christ bowed with finite care when he gave SS Elizabeth Matilda Bridget a written account of the kicks, blows, and wounds he had received, numbered the skull fractures 100, the drops of blood 38,430 (though another girl was later to receive a letter through her guardian angel numbering those drops of blood 3,000,800). The world in which the Virgin's titles number 305; and Sir Arthur Eddington decides that the electron is not subject to scientific law. The cosmos of Sir James Jeans, reigned over by a deity whose symbol is the square root of minus one, where in closed rooms they argue the weight of the crucified man sufficient to cause strangulation, and the Irish mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton calculates that Jesus in assumption, being drawn up through space at a moderate rate, would not yet have reached the nearest of the fixed stars.

When the devil appeared to Gerbert, to claim his soul, Gerbert resisted; and disappeared in a fork of flame.

The tracking point of the pen moved on the paper, and it was gone, Esme had lost it, and lay in the agonized exhaustion of this recovery of her temporal self. Still, on the edge of the chasm into which she could not fall, Esme quivered with anticipation of a sound which would interrupt, waiting fearfully for the signal to recall her from that edge. In the silence of waiting, she recovered herself; slow, she stepped back; silence, she began to talk with herself; stillness, she moved with exaggeration as though she were being watched, needed to be watched suddenly, to have another consciousness present, aware of her, containing her, to assure her of her own existence. There was no one. Even her voice sounded with a disembodied quality which frightened her. She sat there quiet again with the pen over paper, reduced in despair, her face expressing nothing but empty misunderstanding at being alone.

Across the air shaft from her closed window a woman ironed on a board. A man in underclothes appeared to stand beside her for a moment, talk silently and disappear. Then with no change in her expression Esme was crying and she turned her face from the window where she had been watching unbeknown. On the paper she wrote,

In a nicely calcimmed

Apartment is a left-behind Opera chair against the wall Masquerading for a ball, an exercise as significant as those ceremonies carried out at the insistence of the people during papal interdicts in the medieval Church, when saying the Mass was forbidden, but "the brethren had only to ring their bells, and play their organ in the choir; and the citizens in the nave were quite happy in the belief that Mass was being said behind the screen." Esme wrote regretfully, pouting,

Your name is said in a far-off place By someone alone in a room You do not hear it but it was spent. And the miracle of transubstantiation? only a glimpse; and only the fragrance of its death remained, the heavenly fragrance, as of lilies, which rose from the body of Saint Nicolas of Tolentino, after he had reproved his sorrowing brethren who brought him a dish of doves on his sweltering deathbed, and with a pass of his hand restored their plumage and sent them flying out of the window of his cell; only the scent of lilies, rotting in the fruit jar beside her.