Wonderful
Piece of Modern Music
Caroline Shaw’s “Partita for
Eight Voices,” as sung/voiced/chanted by the group Roomful of Teeth.
What will that group of eight be called when they get old, say 85?
Roomful of What Used to Be Teeth.
[excerpted from the book by U.R. Bowie, Here We Be. Where Be We?]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDVMtnaB28E&list=RDNDVMtnaB28E&start_radio=1&t=157s
U.R. Bowie
Book Review Article
Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through (Riverbend
Books [Penguin Random House], 2020), 210 pp.
Fake and Genuine
Solicitude
Note that there is no question mark in the title, although
the epigraph to Part One, taken from Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use
of School Studies, with a View to the Love of God,” has it:
“The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means
being able to say to him, ‘What are you going through?’” Only half way through
the book do we learn that Simone Weil asked the question in her native French: Quel
est ton tourment?
The lack of the question mark in the title, perhaps,
suggests a different (better?) title: What You (We) Are Going Through,
for that is really the subject matter of this fiction, and the subject matter
of countless other fictions written all over the world and in all historical
times. Something else suggested by the missing question mark: that when we
people say these words we are not exactly asking a genuine question, since most
of the time we do not expect, and would not welcome a detailed answer. It’s something
like saying, How are you? which, at least in American English has become
nothing more than an empty phrase. Few are the persons who expect a detailed
answer: “Oh dear, let me tell you all about it.” And few are the persons who
would welcome a detailed account of your woes.
Then again, What are you going through? is not a
question that, in fact, anybody ever asks anybody else, at least not in those
exact words. People being truly solicitous, when seeing a friend in distress,
will say, “Are you all right?” Or “What can I do to help you?” Nunez’s main
point, perhaps, is that there are few of us these days who are genuinely
caring. When the narrator blurts out to the trainer at the gym that she has a
friend who is dying, his immediate reaction is, “I’m sorry. Is there anything I
can do?”
“Said it reflexively, as people always do, this formula that
nobody really wants to hear, that comforts nobody. But it was not his fault
that our language has been hollowed out, coarsened, and bled dry, leaving us
always stupid and tongue-tied before emotion.”
Later, during the same interaction, the trainer says to the
narrator, “I’m so sorry for what you’re going through.” This sounds more
genuinely solicitous, although even here we may have more fake caring than
genuine caring; after all, the trainer barely knows the narrator and has never
even met her dying friend. Late in the novel her ex-husband says, “I can’t
imagine what you’re going through,” and that sounds genuine. But near the end
of the novel the ex turns on her when she expresses her reluctance to be a silent
participant in what is a suicide pact.
Once again, the main point may be that much of the caring we
express is not that genuine, and the words that we use to express it give us
away. Quite frequently we react to another person’s distress with statements
such as, “Let me know if there is anything I can do.” This is another piece of
fakery, a “formula that nobody wants to hear.” A person who utters such a
sentence may be genuinely surprised, taken aback, if you phone her and say, “Yes,
there is something you can do for me.”
The End of the Human
Race
On the first page of the book we learn when the action is
set: September, 2017. Here is the first line of the book: “I went to hear a man
give a talk.” Only later do we learn that this man is the narrator’s
ex-husband. On the poster advertising his appearance there is a photograph that
prepares us for the man and the talk. He has “the look that comes to many older
white men at a certain age: stark-white hair, beaky nose, thin lips, piercing
gaze. Like raptors. Hardly inviting. Hardly an image to say, Please, do come
hear me speak. Would love to see you there! More like, Make no mistake,
I know a lot more than you do. You should listen to me. Maybe then you’ll know
what’s what.
The subject of the talk: “Bye-bye, folks. It’s all over for Homo
sapiens.”
“It was all over, he said. He quoted another writer,
translating from the French: Before man, the forest; after him, the desert.
Whatever must be done to forestall catastrophe, whatever actions or sacrifices,
it was now clear that humankind lacked the will, the collective will, to
undertake them. To any intelligent alien, he said, we would appear to be in the
grip of a death wish.”
The grim message: it’s too late to do anything now, “our
world and our civilization would not endure.” “We, our own worst enemy, had set
ourselves up like sitting ducks, allowing weapons capable of killing us all
many times over not only to be created but also to land in the hands of
egomaniacs, nihilists, men without empathy, without conscience.” No matter what
we do now we “will still be faced with the perils that generations of human
stupidity, shortsightedness, and capacity for self-delusion have produced.”
Climate change denial. When “the most powerful nation in the
world . . . swaggered to the very forefront of denial, what hope did Planet
Earth have. To think that the masses of refugees fleeing shortages of food and
clean water caused by global ecological disaster would find compassion anywhere
their desperation drove them was absurd, the man said. On the contrary, we
would soon see man’s inhumanity to man on a scale like nothing that had ever
been seen before.”
“Cyberterrorism. Bioterrorism. The inevitable next great flu
pandemic, for which we were, just as inevitably, unprepared. Incurable killer
infections borne of our indiscriminate use of antibiotics. The rise of
far-right regimes around the world. The normalization of propaganda and deceit
as political strategy and basis for government policy. The inability to defeat
global jihadism. Threats to life and liberty—to anything worthy of the name
civilization—were flourishing, the man said. In short supply, on the other
hand, were the means to combat them.”
“Again, how had a supposedly freedom-loving people allowed
this to happen? Why were people not outraged by the very idea of surveillance
capitalism? Scared right out of their wits by Big Tech? An alien one day
studying our collapse might well conclude: Freedom was too much for them. They
would rather be slaves.” On this last point see, e.g., Dostoevsky in the
nineteenth century, who covered this business thoroughly (Notes from the
Underground). It’s not as if all the revelations about hapless humanity
presented in the Nunez novel are exactly new.
“How sad, he said, to see so many of the most creative and
best-educated classes, those from whom we might have hoped for inventive
solutions, instead embracing personal therapies and pseudo-religious practices
that promoted detachment . . . equanimity in the face of worldly cares. (This
world is but a shadow, it is a carcass, it is nothing, this world is not real,
do not mistake this hallucination for the real world.)”
The time has come to stop having children. “Perhaps it was a
mistake to bring human beings into a world that had such a strong possibility
of becoming, in their lifetimes, a bleak and terrifying if not wholly unlivable
place.” The perhaps here has no real place in this man’s lecture; for him
there is no perhaps about it.
I’ve quoted by far not all of this speech, which takes up
ten pages of text and makes a convincing argument that the human race is doomed
to extinction in the not-distant future. The action of the novel is set in
2017, early on in the Trumpian Era, but, given the man’s re-election and his
present efforts to transform our country into a right-wing dictatorship, the
malaise that hangs over the U.S.A. in the year 2025 is much more pronounced
than it was just eight years ago.
One blurber writes that “it takes something more than
intelligence to be able to write intelligently. . . . Whatever it is, Sigrid
Nunez has it.” One thing SN has is a flair for sticking in little bits of humor
throughout her fictional works, which treat, sometimes, the darkest of subjects.
Among those departing the room after the lecture is a man mocking the
hopelessness of the message by imitating Roy Orbison, singing “It’s Over.”
Another man walks away whistling the supremely optimistic, if trite, song, “My
Favorite Things” (“Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens”). When the man
who gave the lecture (the narrator’s ex) shows up again late in the book, he is
presented as a sad and somewhat comic creature. Nothing that once appealed to
him throughout his life—art and culture—has the least appeal anymore. He is
convinced that “great art is a thing of the past.” “The last creative artist on
a level with, say, Mozart or Shakespeare was George Balanchine, who was born in
1904.” Interesting idea; could it be true? I doubt it. What I suspect is that
there are plenty of creative geniuses out there still today. But nobody pays
any attention to them. In other words, modern man is mired is such triviality
and banality that he is incapable of looking at the creativity all around him.
The unnamed ex (Nunez has a fondness for not naming her
characters) takes a grim satisfaction in spreading his message of Doomsday,
although there seems little point in his going around making speeches about
humanity’s fecklessness. Now he is universally hated and gets frequent death
threats. “A lot of friends have dropped me. My own son is barely speaking to me
because I didn’t hide how appalled I was that his wife is expecting their third
child. Doesn’t want me anywhere near her. Says I’m enough to scare her into a
miscarriage.” Ha.
Lucy and Ethel Do
Euthanasia
The main plotline of the novel features a female friend of
the narrator, like her, a writer (journalist), who is afflicted with cancer.
This woman has few close relatives. Her only daughter is “unnatural,” having
expressed blatant hostility toward her mother for the whole of their lives.
Many are the parents, it seems, afflicted with a child who has a trait like
“illness or disability, lack of affection, bad behavior.” Of all the persons in
the book described as “going through” one or another distressing situation,
this friend with cancer has the worst “going through” to face.
Like the ex-husband convinced of humanity’s incorrigibility and
imminent demise, the friend with cancer finds little solace in anything that
once enthralled her. Once a good writer, she has no interest in writing
anything now: “I’m done with languaging. I’m sick of writing, sick of word
searching.” She notes that great writers seem much less impressive when you reread
them late in life, and totally beside the point when you read them while dying
of cancer. She is annoyed by pop songs that sound all the same and, inevitably,
contain nothing but inane lyrics.
The woman with cancer has a plan. She has obtained the pills
necessary to do herself in, declaring that “cancer can’t get me if I get me
first.” Halfway through the book she tells the narrator, “I will not go out in
mortifying anguish.” The big surprise of the narrative will be that at this
point she has one hundred pages of text in which to die and never does. Of
course, if she went ahead and took the pills there would be no story to be told
and no book for us to read.
The story that we are told involves this woman’s asking her
friend, the narrator, to help her die. “What I need is someone to be there with
me,” she says. Two of her better friends have already declined to take up this
duty. “You were not my first choice,” she tells the narrator. The trick of this
whole business—a trick that allows for a hundred pages of the story to be
told—involves the woman’s decision that she will not tell her helper exactly
when she plans on taking the pills. The helper will be with her as companion of
her waning days, but will not be informed when the big act is about to occur. The
act, though expected, will come as a surprise, a shock. How much this is
similar to the quotidian workings of death. We know someone is severely ill, we
know that someone is moribund, but when she/he dies we, nonetheless, gasp at
the news: Oh, no! I can’t believe it!
The dying woman—so obsessed with herself—never stops to
think how selfish she is acting, in asking someone to help her die under such
circumstances. At this point the story becomes that of “two different
adventures,” that of the dying woman and that of the friend helping her die. By
the end of the book the narrative is perhaps less about the dying woman and her
prospective euthanasia and more about the agonizing position in which she has
placed her friend. Only very late in the novel (p. 173) does the truth finally
dawn on the dying woman: “I’ve been so selfish, I never thought about you.”
The woman with terminal cancer takes her friend with her to
a sylvan environment, an Airbnb in a coastal town. There the two go about
“doing euthanasia” together, or, rather, not doing it. The grim ex-husband
later describes their misadventures as “Lucy and Ethel Do Euthanasia.” The
first big setback comes when the cancer patient realizes that she has forgotten
to bring the pills with her. She chalks this up to “Chemo brain,” but we
suspect a Freudian slip, the workings of some neuron deep in her
brain—protesting against what she plans to do.
As the two women spend their time together on the brink of
eternity they grow ever closer to each other. They become, in fact, almost like
lovers. I find myself wondering if this part of the plot is believable. Much
more likely—a plotline that is actually suggested—is that the woman asked to
shepherd the cancer patient for an indefinite time would crack under the
pressure. Would, in fact, grow resentful at being placed in such a stressful
position. At any rate, the story concludes with the would-be suicide still not
dead and the helper in a state of nervous collapse. The “going through” story
becomes, largely, that not of the woman going through cancer but that of the
friend recruited to help her die.
d
Sigrid Nunez is a fine writer, and the book teems with
lovely writing. Lots of scenes involve secondary characters, who make brief
appearances and never show up again. This reminds me somewhat of films by the
Coen Brothers, in which some of the best scenes involve characters with just
that one scene in the movie. I like the parts describing the Airbnb hostess
with the dead cat, and, later in the story, the part where the cat tells his tale.
Another nice little interlude describes a woman at the fitness center who loves
reading Infinite Jest because, so she says, she’ll get her money’s worth
out of the time spent reading such a long and complex novel. Later on, reminded
that when she and the narrator first spoke to one another she was reading Infinite
Jest, she denies ever having read the book; she has forgotten that she ever
possessed a copy. After all, she tells the narrator, who has the time to read
such dense and challenging literature? This same woman has lost her youthful
good looks as she ages into middle age. Her departure from her once beauteous
self has become the great personal tragedy of her life—what she is going
through. Nobody looks up anymore when she walks by.
Nunez has a wonderful feel for the hypocrisies of academia.
Here is her description of her ex-husband’s appearance as lecturer in a
university setting.
“A woman introduces him. The head of the department that has
invited him to speak. She is a familiar type: the glam academic, the
intellectual vamp. Someone at pains for it to be known that, although smart and
well-educated, although a feminist and a woman in a position of power, the lady
is no frump, no boring nerd, no sexless harridan. And so what if she’s past a
certain age. The cling of the skirt, the height of the heels, the scarlet mouth
and tinted hair (I once heard a salon colorist say, I believe it’s got to hurt
a woman’s ability to think if she has gray hair), everything says: I’m still
fuckable. A slimness that almost certainly means going much of each day feeling
hungry. It crosses such women’s minds with some sad regularity that in
France intellectuals can be sex-symbols . . .
“I can see them, this man and this woman, at the department
dinner that will surely follow the event, and which, because of who he is, will
be a fine one, at one of the area’s most expensive restaurants, and where it’s
likely they’ll be seated next to each other. And of course the woman will be
hoping for some intense conversation—no small talk—maybe even a bit of
flirtation, but this will turn out to be not so easy given how his attention
keeps straying to the far end of the table, to the grad student who’s been
assigned as his escort, responsible for shuttling him from place to place,
including after tonight’s dinner back to his hotel, and who, after just one
glass of wine, is responding to his frequent glances with increasingly bold
ones of her own.”
In reconsidering that familiar scene I cannot help thinking
that no, neither the “glam academic” nor the grad student—despite the usual physical
attraction to fame and notoriety—will have any interest in sleeping with this
morose buzzard of a man disseminating his grim message. The glam academic may
be still “fuckable,” but this man has pontificated his dreary way out of any
possible “fuckability.” His message of “it’s all over” has made him into an “incel.”
Nunez has not only the intelligence demanded of a good
creative writer, but also the ability to look unflinchingly at all aspects of
human life—the sharp keen edge to her literary pen that enables her to slice
unmercifully without compunction. The passage about the woman “still fuckable”
is a good example. Here is another. She imagines a woman’s imaging herself, at
some point, “in due time, settling down with the One.” Note the perfect (almost
painfully accurate) description of the generic old man toddling through his
dotage.
“But long before this could happen, now and then when she
happened to see a certain type of couple—an elderly woman accompanied by some
geezer with rounded shoulders and sparse white flyaway hair, his belt riding
high on his ribs [belted in above the obligatory pot belly]—she would feel a
sort of ache for the old man she herself was going to end up with one far-off
day.”
The most poignant part of this whole long description turns
out to be that the ideal old man who is to be the companion of this woman’s
elderly years never does materialize. Like so many other women, and men, she is
fated to spend her last years in loneliness. “We’re asked to accept the
unacceptable. It’s unacceptable that people, and other beings, have to go
through what they go through, and there’s almost nothing that they can do about
it.” Those are the rules of the game, for those who venture into life in flesh.
Why, God?
Иван Бунин
(1870-1953)
A rasping in his chest, the dust from highroad’s sizzle
Blows hot and dry, wafts up and swirls, then sinks;
He clears his throat, removes his pince-nez, thinks,
Vaudeville, there’s the ticket, folks; all the rest is drivel.
ЮРИЙ ЛЕВИТАНСКИЙ
(1922-1996)
ЯЛТИНСКИЙ
ДОМИК
Вежливый доктор в старинном пенсне и с бородкой,
вежливый доктор с улыбкой застенчиво-кроткой,
как мне ни странно и как ни печально, увы, —
старый мой доктор, я старше сегодня, чем вы.
Годы проходят, и, как говорится, сик транзит
глория мунди, — и все-таки это нас дразнит.
Годы куда-то уносятся, чайки летят.
Ружья на стенах висят, да стрелять не хотят.
Грустная желтая лампа в окне мезонина.
Чай на веранде, вечерних теней мешанина.
Белые бабочки вьются над желтым огнем.
Дом заколочен, и
все позабыли о нем.
Дом заколочен, и нас в этом доме забыли.
Мы еще будем когда-то, но мы уже были.
Письма на полке пылятся — забыли прочесть.
Мы уже были когда-то, но мы еще есть.
Пахнет грозою, в погоде видна перемена.
Это ружье еще выстрелит — о, непременно!
Съедутся гости, покинутый дом оживет.
Маятник медный качнется, струна запоет...
Дышит в саду запустелом ночная прохлада.
Мы старомодны, как запах вишневого сада.
Нет ни гостей, ни хозяев, покинутый дом.
Мы уже были, но
мы еще будем потом.
Старые ружья на выцветших старых обоях.
Двое идут по аллее — мне жаль их обоих.
Тихий, спросонья, гудок парохода в порту.
Зелень крыжовника, вкус кисловатый во рту.
1976
d
Literary Translation/Adaptation by U.R. Bowie
courteous doctor with diffident
smile somewhat fey;
how strangely it moves me, and
renders my sad thoughts askew—
to think, dear old doctor, that
now I am older than you.
The years hasten by, and sic
transit the glory, they say,
and we feel peeved, for we’d like
all the glory to stay.
The years are borne off, while the
seagulls to new heights aspire,
and rifles on walls go on hanging,
reluctant to fire.
A sad yellow lamp in the mezzanine
window burns doggedly.
Tea-time on veranda in gloaming’s
mishmash-gallimaufry.
Whitish small moths hover over the
yellow lamp-glow.
Boarded up is the house, left
behind by relentless time’s flow.
The house is deserted, and we in
the house are forgotten.
We’ll come here again, to this
place where we feel misbegotten.
Letters in dust on the mantle;
they lie there unread.
We once had our being, but we are
still living, not dead.
The air smells of rainstorms, a
change in the weather it seems.
That rifle will fire at long last,
oh yes, by all means!
The guests are assembling, the
house with new life will soon ring.
The pendulum swings and the taut
string when broken will sing . . .
In desolate garden the cool of the
evening breathes.
We are old-fashioned, like smell
of a cherry grove’s leaves.
The house is forsaken, no guests
and no residents home.
We once had our being; we’ll be in
a new monochrome.
Wallpaper faded with pictures of
rifles antique.
Two persons strolling in allée
through pity most bleak.
Soft hoot sleepy-toned of a
steamship in port faraway.
The green of a gooseberry, tasting
of sour decay.
Second Stanza: "seagulls" allusion to Chekhov's play "The Seagull"
Rifles that don't fire: allusion to Chekhov's famous remark that if you have a gun on the wall in the first act of your play it must fire by the final act (see also Fifth Stanza).
Fifth Stanza: Chekhov uses the sound of a broken string offstage in his play, "The Cherry Orchard." The actual orchard is mentioned in the following (Sixth) stanza.
Seventh Stanza: allusion to Chekhov's story "Gooseberries."
“There are persons who exist
in the world not as objects, but as extraneous specks or spots on an object.”
Gogol, Dead Souls
In fact, most of us who are
living, who have lived, and who will live in the future are precisely such
specks. In further fact, all of us are.
If I had my choice I’d rather
not be a dry speck or spot, but a tiny wet droplet of dew on a hydrangea leaf,
on a cloudy day in May—and then the sun comes out and I can feel myself slowly
evaporating into the sky above and into the resplendence that envelops God’s
green earth. Ah, yes . . .
After all, that’s what we do,
isn’t it? We live for a brief time, and then we evaporate.
[excerpted from the book by U.R. Bowie, Here We Be. Where Be We?]
Cон об уходящем поезде
Один и тот же сон
мне повторяться стал.
Мне снится, будто я
от поезда отстал.
Один, в пути, зимой,
на станцию ушел,
а скорый поезд мой
пошел, пошел, пошел.
И я хочу бежать
за ним — и не могу,
и чувствую сквозь сон,
что все-таки бегу,
и в замкнутом кругу
сплетающихся трасс
вращение земли
перемещает нас —
вращение земли,
вращение полей,
вращение вдали
берез и тополей,
столбов и проводов,
разъездов и мостов,
попутных поездов
и встречных поездов.
Но в том еще беда,
и, видно, неспроста,
что не годятся мне
другие поезда.
Мне нужен только тот,
что мною был обжит.
Там мой настольный свет
от скорости дрожит.
Tам любят лечь — так лечь,
а рубят — так с плеча.
Там речь гудит, как печь,
красна и горяча.
Мне нужен только он,
азарт его и пыл.
Я знаю тот вагон.
Я номер не забыл.
Он снегом занесен,
он в угле и в дыму.
И я приговорен
пожизненно к нему.
Мне нужен этот
снег.
Мне сладок этот дым,
встающий высоко
над всем пережитым.
И я хочу за ним
бежать — и не могу.
И все-таки сквозь сон
мучительно бегу,
и в замкнутом кругу
сплетающихся трасс
вращение земли
перемещает нас.
1970
