#69: The Testament of Orpheus

(originally published Dec. 8, 2010)

Towards the end of The Testament of Orpheus, two children feed autographs of two “intellectuals in love” into the mouths of a three-headed statue. Cégeste, the resurrected poet from Orpheus, explains that the statue is an “instant-celebrity machine” that guarantees “fame for anyone in a minute or two.”

“Beyond that,” he continues, “of course, it becomes more difficult.”

After devouring the autographs, the machine spews forth long strips of paper: “novels, poems, songs and so forth,” Cégeste says. “It stops until it’s fed by new autograph hunters.”

In the room that Matthew and I refer to as the ‘library,’ I have more than 100 signed books stashed in a corner unit that we bought off the street. Back home, in Colorado, I have about 300 more. I’ve been to readings where the bookstore staff handed out tickets for signings that went into the high four-hundreds. I’ve been to readings where I felt the need to act extra-enthusiastic to make up for the vacant seats around me.

I’ve recruited friends to wait with me when the line proctor for Salman Rushdie announced, Only five books per person. I’ve chased Orhan Pamuk down the National Mall after ending up on the wrong end of his cut-short signing line. I’ve stood behind the rare-books dealers wheeling book-laden luggage with them, pulling out ARCs and foreign editions, first-editions with dust jackets lovingly Mylared—Signature only, they say.

Book dealers have a financial incentive to have their books signed. My modest collection, on the other hand, would yield only a meager retirement account. When asked if I want my books personalized, I waffle mentally before answering, Sure—not that I intend ever to sell my books.

Paul Bloom, in How Pleasure Works, suggests that, on a basic, cognitive level, people “assume that things in the world—including other people—have invisible essences that make them what they are.” Works of art, in particular, have an essence that is “rooted in an appreciation of the human history underlying its creation.” A painter signs his work to validate it; the signature embodies this essence of the work.

When I gave Matthew an inscribed copy of Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution, he was speechless. He, of course, had already read it many times, but the fact that, at some point, Arendt had touched this book, held it, rendered him speechless. Her essence now mingled with his.

There’s an old canard about how certain African tribes ban cameras because they believe that photographs can capture their souls. Is this any different than the baseball memorabilia collector who believes that part of Joe DiMaggio resides in his glove? Does he smell DiMaggio’s sweat in the creases of the leather? If the collector slips his hand into the glove, does he taint DiMaggio’s essence or does DiMaggio’s essence infuse his hand?

I am a lepidopterist, pinning an author’s name into his own work.

#68: Orpheus

(originally published Nov. 28, 2010)

Death, in Orpheus, is an aristocrat. She drives a black Rolls-Royce and cruises outside the Café Poete for young, handsome poets. When she finds one to her liking, she runs him down to invite him to her decrepit villa, where she puts him to work, reciting aphorisms into a shortwave radio. She watches Orpheus in the dark with unblinking, lidless eyes. When he finally embraces her, and she embraces him back. She moves through time and space via mirrors. As her manservant Heurtebise explains, “Look at yourself in a mirror all your life, and you’ll see death at work, like bees in a hive of glass.”

In Tanith Lee’s “Elle Est Trois (La Mort),” Death takes on three forms: the Thief, the Butcher, and the Seductress. Under these guises, she stalks bohemian artists—friends, patrons of the same café—living in 19th Century Paris. It’s La Bohème with gore. Death sings the aria.

For The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman posits Death as a black-cloaked entity, a chess-player with a deadpan sense of humor. In this form, he doesn’t crack a smile until he appears in Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.

Neil Gaiman, in his Sandman series, pictures Death as a Goth-punk girl, with spiky hair and Egyptian eye make-up. Her skin is pale, keeping with tradition, and she wears a black tank top. A silver ankh hangs around her neck. She has pets: two goldfish. Sometimes, on particularly strenuous cases, she wears leg warmers.

In Aurora, Colorado, Elisabeth was a year behind me in high school. She was an adoptee from Laos, and she had severe eczema on her hands which turned them white and scaly, curled into claws. When she stretched her fingers, raw pink flesh peeked out from between the scales. I don’t recall shaking her hand, but I remember giving her hugs. She wrote me my first year of college, talking about how excited she was to graduate high school and go to college, where life would spread out before her, a hotel hallway with innumerable doors to open. I learned later, through a mutual friend, that death came for her at her birthday party. A guest brought a snack that either contained peanuts or had come into contact with peanuts, and she went into anaphylactic shock. Here, death is — what? A cookie? A slice of cake? Would death in this form be any more or less ridiculous? Would I have had a chance to respond to Elisabeth’s letter?

We give death a form in order to understand her. If, we think, death can be personified, then we can put our arms around her. She won’t appear so fearsome. We can reason with her; we can make her fall in love with us, and she’ll turn back time, a film played in reverse, figures in the background stepping backwards, trying to un-remember the Tartarean landscape through which they pass.

It’s not her finality that they fear; it’s her abstraction.

#67: The Blood of a Poet

(originally published Nov. 24, 2010)

I:  The wounded hand or the scars of the poet

The image of a writer typing until his fingers bleed is, I’m afraid, a fabrication attributable, perhaps, to Bryan Adams.

II:  Do the walls have ears?

Next door lives Jimmy, who has Tourette’s. Sometimes, late at night, he screams, and the screams penetrate our shared wall, and it almost sounds as if the wall is screaming. The walls say, Ahh!  Jimmy!, an unbroken howl, as if they had done something unspeakable. In the mornings, Jimmy nods and say hello, and the walls stay silent about the previous night.

III:  The snowball fight

In Colorado, the snow is wholly unsuitable. It’s crisp and powdery, impossible to pack together. The balls disintegrate in your mittens, and if you manage to get one to cohere, upon contact, it evaporates, a whiff of ice, a halo, a cloud. On the East Coast, however, the snow is wet and slushy, as if it had already partially melted on the way down. It clings to branches and cements itself to the sidewalks and will, overnight, in a feat of treachery, turn to ice. The crystals are and thick and gristly. The snow tastes of salt and metal; in other words, like war.

IV:  The profanation of the host

Jean Cocteau, speaking before a 1932 screening of his film: “One can’t tell the story of film like this. I could give you my own interpretation. I could say: the solitude of the poet is so great, he lives out his own creations, so vividly that the mouth of one of his creations is imprinted on his hand like a wound; that he loves this mouth, that he loves himself, in other words; that he wakes up in the morning with this mouth against him like a chance acquaintance; that he tries to get rid of it, that he gets rid of it, on a dead statue; that this statue comes to life; that it takes its revenge; that I sends him off into terrible adventures. I could tell you that the snowball fight represents the poet’s childhood and that when he plays the card game with his Glory, with his Destiny, he cheats by drawing from his childhood instead of from within himself. I could tell you that afterwards, when he has tried to create a terrestrial glory for himself, he falls into that ‘mortal tedium of immortality’ that one always dreams of when in front of famous tombs. I’d be right to tell you all that, but I’d also be wrong, for it would be a text written after the images.”

This is Orpheus, who, with a glance over his shoulder, sees the image of Eurydice, now fading from view, now disappearing back into darkness.

#6: Beauty and the Beast

(originally published Mar. 3, 2010)

A Beauty and the Beast marathon: this afternoon I taught Angela Carter’s “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” to my fiction class, and in the evening, sat down with Jean Cocteau’s version. And while my students easily identified the fairy tale as the inspiration for Carter’s story, their more common frame of reference was the Disney animated version. Only one or two had seen Cocteau’s version. What, no one remembers the TV show with Ron Perelman and Linda Hamilton from the 80s?

But this is the way with the retelling stories:  one version supplants the other, even as it informs it, influences it. The original, written in the 18th century by a governess, Mme. Leprince de Beaumont, is presumed to be an allegory about arranged marriage—how a woman forced into a relationship can discover the soft, cuddly interior of an otherwise ugly husband. Bruno Bettelheim, in The Uses of Enchantment, suggests that the original story was an Oedipal tale, as Beauty must overcome her fixation on her father and move into adulthood. Cocteau emphasizes the Beast’s interior struggle as he wrestles with questions of identity: is he a man (courtly, noble) or a beast (overly sexualized, fond of ripping out deer throats and appearing in her bedroom)? Carter transforms the story into one of feminine empowerment: Beauty, after all, is the one with the power, living a full life while a shy, weakened Beast withers without her. And Disney… well, Disney used it to  help usher in the cash cow Princess marketing scheme.

Cocteau’s own vision—of flowing, diaphanous curtains; of living statues; of surreal opulence and rough country life—still enchants. For instance, where can I buy a ‘hunky arm’ candelabra? But nowadays, it reminds me of Bonnie Tyler’s video for “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” I know, I know: from the sublime to the ridiculous. But, honestly, I am more familiar with the Disney version myself. I was in high school when it came out, and at the time, my sister and I had a standing promise to see all the animated Disney movies together, and we watched a good run, from The Little Mermaid to Mulan.

So, yes, my memories of Beauty and the Beast are of dancing flatware, Angela Lansbury in teapot form, and the scene of Beauty and the Beast dancing, while a computer-enhanced constellation circles above them. Yes, that damned theme song is stuck in my head, and I’m attempting to dislodge it right now. And, yes, I might have gotten a little weepy at the very end, as Beauty hunches over the dying Beast before he transforms into, as Sir Christopher Frayling says on the commentary, “a Chippendales dancer.” But from Cocteau, I will remember the carefully framed tableaus, the fairy tale smoke and fog, the mirror effects, the tree branches opening up like a curtain. And, of course, those moving statues that seem to whisper, “Turn around, bright eyes.”