Mark Leyner - Gone with the Mind

I don’t know how long I went on like this. It was like a fugue state…as if I were back in my bedroom in Jersey City holding forth for my orangutan and my Civil War soldiers…and when I “returned” to the classroom in Waltham, all the students had left, only Strand remained. “Y’know,” I said to him, “I was originally going to entitle the poem ‘Kamikaze,’ but I thought that might be a little too on the nose.” “Nonsense!” he said, with a snort of laughter. “With the possible exception of ‘Eat Me. I Hate Everyone in This Fucking Class,’ what else could you possibly call it?!” And then he said — and this is something I remember so vividly, something I really appreciated and would ruminate upon for a long time to come — he said, “The explanation of your poem is a better poem than the poem. It’s even more insane.” He was a charming, congenial, exceptionally sweet person, very generous, very gracious, very receptive and encouraging, with this quick, mischievous sense of humor. Just a really, really good guy. I remember feeling that so much at the time, even though, deep down, I suspected that he was just humoring me, and was probably saying vastly different things at the off-campus coffee klatches that I was always much too shy and insecure to ever attend. But he also knew — and that he knew is something I’ve surmised in retrospect — that there was something up with me, that there was something going on psychologically. Why else would I insist on entitling poem after poem “Shit in a Ramekin”? “Shit in a Ramekin II,” “Shit in a Ramekin III,” “Shit in a Ramekin IV,” etc. No matter what they were about. I wrote a poem that was just a very standard, sort of elegiac reminiscence about taking a nap on a summer afternoon in Deal, New Jersey, and hearing, through the open window, the sound of lawn mowers and birds singing and children playing, and I called it “Shit in a Ramekin V.” Another one I remember was inspired by one of those automated promptings you hear at airports. It went something like:

The moving walkway

Is now ending.

Please look

Down.

This was called “Shit in a Ramekin VI” or “Shit in a Ramekin VII” or something.

I was full of anger back then, but obviously so desperate for people to like me, and so predisposed to loathe anyone who did in fact like me, that whole routine…of rapid-cycling neediness and misanthropy…And as arbitrary as it might seem to think of oneself purely in terms of Teds, I think, inside, I was definitely feeling more like Ted Bundy or Ted Kaczynski than Ted Hughes or Ted Berrigan back then.

I have to say that, after all these years, I’m still vain enough to prefer having enemies over friends. It’s still consoling to me to feel embattled and anathematized. I’m still grateful for anything that drives me back into my little corner of the world (this is my innate, roach-like thigmotropism), for anything that forces me to seek refuge in my ancestral village…what the Imaginary Intern used to call “Studio Mizuhō” or “Around the Corner Where Fudge Is Made”…the primordial matrix of the mind, the ancestral home of the mind, what the fifteenth-century Noh playwright Komparu Zenchiku called the “circle of emptiness” ( kurin ) — the stage at which the actor transcends distinctions between pure and orthodox styles and improper styles, achieving a return to the beginning ( kyarai ), the highest, indescribable experience, which expresses nothing. And, of course, this is that very place within one’s mother’s arms, that very circle formed by one’s mother’s arms. And I still believe that there are two basic kinds of people — people who cultivate the narcissistic delusion of being watched at all times through the viewfinder of a camera, and people who cultivate the paranoid delusion of being watched at all times through the high-powered optics of a sniper’s rifle, and I think I fall — and have always fallen — into this latter category.

But the ridiculous thing about being an angry young man, or at least an angry young Brandeis freshman, is that you don’t even know yet how much there is out there to actually be angry about. Things are still fairly idyllic at that age. You have no idea yet the extent to which life really is shit in a ramekin.

A week or so later, I had one last meeting with Strand, just the two of us in his office. “Do you know that the band Roxy Music has a song out now called ‘Do the Strand’?” I asked him. He seemed genuinely perturbed by this. “What?! I need to contact my attorney immediately!” he said, waiting for my distress to register before cracking up. He really could be such a funny guy. I told him I wanted to quit the class, and he said, “I don’t blame you.” I felt so relieved, so “safe” at that moment, that I confessed to him my lifelong love of Mickey Mantle and Jackie Gleason. And I remember I started to cough, and Strand asked me if I was okay, and I said, “I’ve been choking on the same stupid piece of barley since lunch,” and he opened a small bottle of Pellegrino for me, and…no…I’m sorry…I’m sorry…my God, they’re going to confiscate my Nonfiction at the Food Court membership card here…it was Orangina, not Pellegrino…one of those little ten-ounce bottles of Orangina…So, I took a couple of sips, which helped a lot…and I, uh, don’t remember how we got around to the subject of Popeye, maybe it was via Ashbery’s sestina “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape.” And I’m not sure if I actually mentioned this to Strand at the time or not, but I think when most people visualize Popeye, the first thing that probably comes to mind is his can of magic spinach (which made him, for all intents and purposes, the first celebrity user of performance-enhancing drugs), or the battleships and the turbines and the atomic bombs superimposed on his swollen biceps, or his cri de guerre “I yam what I yam, and that’s all what I yam,” which, in its concision, transparency, and tautological plenitude, remains the first and greatest constructivist autobiography; but he also had a very beautiful way of speaking, particularly of speaking to himself — his muttering. It was this streaming, autobiographical play-by-play overlaid with all sorts of commentary and theorizing, this meta-mutter, the soliloquy of an electrolarynx, a sort of free-jazz didgeridoo solo. It’s kind of like what Strand had said to me the previous week in class, about how the explanation of my poem was a better poem than the poem. I think Popeye’s muttering is the explanation of his poem. (This is very similar to something the Imaginary Intern and I used to call “singing all the parts.” If you ask someone — and I’m just picking a song I happened to hear on the radio in the car on the way over here tonight—“Do you like that Michael Jackson song ‘Black and White’?” and she’s like, “I don’t know it, how’s it go?” you’d try to do the song for her, to re-create it for her. You’d try to approximate some of the percussion with your mouth, to whatever extent you could do that, a little bit of beatboxing…and then you’d lay in that guitar riff…De-de-de-de-de-duuh, de-de-de-duuh…De-de-de-de-de-duuh, de-de-de-duuh…High-pitched yelp…De-de-de-de-de-duuh, de-de-de-duuh…De-de-de-de-de-duuh, de-de-de-duuh…High-pitched yelp…“I took my baby on a Saturday bang / Boy is that girl with you / Yes we’re one and the same…” That’s “singing all the parts.” In the actual song, it’s all layered, like a pastry, like a…like a mille-feuille…a napoleon. But when you’re just doing it by yourself, you have to take all of it apart…it becomes more like an Ikea exploded diagram…and what’s simultaneous, what’s synchronic in the music, becomes sort of flattened out and sequential in the representation. And this was something the Imaginary Intern and I used to always talk about trying to do in Gone with the Mind, trying somehow to express the chord of how one feels at a single given moment, in this transient, phantom world, standing in the center of a food court at a mall with your mom, but in the arpeggiated exploded diagram of an autobiography.) So then, Strand asked if I’d liked comics when I was a kid, and I said that Popeye was a relatively recent interest, but that, yes, when I was a little boy there were comics I liked very much. “Which ones?” he said. “I’m curious.” And I remember he was rotating his wrist as if he might have hurt it sailing or playing tennis. And I explained to him that most boys I knew who were into comics at that age were, y’know, either into Marvel, things like Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, X-Men, or into DC, stuff like Superman and Batman and Green Lantern. But somehow I got steered into Harvey Comics, and Harvey Comics…their roster of “heroes” consisted of an assortment of, uh…of, basically, pathetic, feckless, feebleminded pariahs. (These were, come to think of it, actually the first misfits I “befriended.”) A couple of them were clearly psychotic, but, for the most part, they were just fantastically stupid — I mean like mentally defective, low-grade-moron stupid…a bunch of guffawing, gullible half-wits who just wanted everyone to be their friend, who’d get into a car with anyone, sell their souls for a cupcake literally made out of crap, follow a fucking balloon off the ledge of a building…But I just found myself identifying with them in a particularly intense way. I felt that they related uncannily to everything I was going through in my life at that time, and I guess I also thought, even at that age, that they were, in some sense, the most poetic of all the comic-book characters — Sad Sack, the luckless, disaffected, humiliated soldier; Baby Huey, the ungainly, naive, dimwitted, friendless, anthropomorphic duck; Little Lotta, a homely, obese girl whose insatiable gluttony gave her superhuman strength which she’d use to help people who still found her completely revolting; Hot Stuff, a devil-baby who wore asbestos diapers; and, of course, Casper, the friendly, cloyingly obsequious ghost…I just really connected, on a very deep level, with these characters. And the question is: What was it inside me, what gnawing void or strangulated loop of psyche had produced such a strong feeling of fellowship with a lonely, anomic army private with latent spree-killing tendencies, a retarded duck, a bullied fat girl, an incontinent demon, and a desperately ingratiating dead child? And I think the answer has to be, for reasons that are all too apparent, my PTSD from being force-fed beets, from being abandoned on an out-of-control merry-go-round operated by some depraved drifter, the brutality, the inhumanity of the Ferbering, having my fingers deliberately mangled in a carpet cleaner, being left in a filthy, stinking, cacophonous, violent hospital ward all by myself after a tonsillectomy that I’m pretty sure was performed without anesthesia…and also from just having to watch my mom vomit and hemorrhage all over the place— (MARK winks at his MOM, who’s shaking her head, smiling with forbearance.)