Reader's Block (14 page)

Frans Hals was eighty-five when he painted
The Regents of the Old Men
^y
s Almshouse.

And living on charity himself.

Delenda est Carthago.

Tacitus was an anti-Semite.

How would the woman have lost her leg?

Does Reader remember with any certainty which leg it was?

Was Santorin also the origin of the Atlantis myth?

In Walter Scott’s
The Antiquary,
there are two Tuesdays in one week.

And the sun once sets in the east.

Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief

The name of the slough was Despond.

Blake was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave.

Kavitavali.

For six years, in his twenties, Edward Elgar conducted a band in a lunatic asylum.

Rilke wrote most of the
Duino Elegies,
and the
Sonnets to Orpheus,
in less than one month.

Thera.

Enrico Caruso was once arrested for pinching a woman in the monkey house of the Central Park Zoo.

Has it crossed Reader’s mind to let someone Protagonist had known be buried at the cemetery?

Who?

Protagonist drawn there out of what unlikely sentiment?

Wastebasket.

Nordahl Grieg failed to return from a bombing mission over Berlin in 1943.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery failed to return from a reconnaissance flight over occupied France in 1944.

V. Gordon Childe committed suicide.

The bass arias of Sarastro in
The Magic Flute.
Which Shaw called the only music that would not sound out of place in the mouth of God.

San Pedro de Macon’s, Dominican Republic. Where Leroy Paige and Joshua Gibson, Jr., and James Bell and others spent a winter in 1937.

Erastus Corning II.

Colley Cibber. Nicholas Rowe. Laurence Eusden. Nahum Tate. Thomas Warton. William Whitehead. Thomas Shad-well. Henry J. Pye.

Laureates, all.

Someone nodded hello to Raskolnikov on the street yesterday.

Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.

Or of no describable genre?

A seminonfictional semifiction? Cubist?

Also in part a distant cousin innumerable times removed of
A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake?

Obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax in any case.

And as an incidental personal challenge, letting none of its intellectual
mishegaas
be material Reader has ever used anywhere else.

Lector Ludens.

Henry Purcell was Gerard Manley Hopkins’s favorite composer.

Bricolage.

Yeats could never finish reading
Ulysses.

Poetry is not written with ideas, Degas, it is written with words.

Mohammed was an anti-Semite.

Literate people who can spend hours in one’s home without a single glance at the titles on the bookshelves.

F. R. Leavis was so severely shell-shocked as a stretcher-bearer in World War I that for a time he was incapable of speech.

Gypo Nolan.

Ite, missa est.

You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.

Said Charles Darwin’s father.

Robin Hyde committed suicide.

Evelyn Waugh was found dead on a bathroom floor.

Protagonist having come upon his own name on one of the graves, though with meaningless remote dates?

And?

Wastebasket.

The Lord of the Flies
was rejected by twenty-one publishers.

The first time I saw Wystan Auden his socks didn’t match.

Herophilia, the Sibyl at Cumae, who lived a thousand years. And wished to die.

As Eliot discovered in Petronius.

Though how is Reader aware that while Cumae no longer exists the Sibyl’s cave still does?

Where Aeneas visited it. Northwest of Naples.

Johan Emanuel Schikaneder.

Spatial Form in Modern Literature.

Protagonist’s friends. From that life that was.

And among those who had moved to distant places and one had gradually ceased to hear from even then?

At Protagonist’s age, how long before one begins to suspect that some of them, also, are even now dead?

We are now able to suggest an explanation for the proverb There are many Manii in Aricia.

Hemingway: I just called to tell you I got that thing.

General Buck Lanham: That thing? What thing?

Hemingway: That Swedish thing, you know?

That Swedish thing. The Nobel Prize for Horses’ Backsides.

Voltaire was illegitimate.

Late in her career, Kirsten Flagstad recorded a
Tristan und Isolde
in which the high Cs she had been missing repeatedly on stage were all reached magnificently.

Having been sung by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and dubbed in.

August Heat.

At Protagonist’s age, how long before one realizes that more of the people one had ever known anywhere are in fact now dead than alive?

Mary Powell.

Katherine Woodcock.

Elizabeth Minshull.

A title for all this, has Reader by chance yet given any thought to?

Thomas Heggen committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills.

I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail.

Tess Durbeyfield.

Mr. Flood’s Party?

Not Waving but Drowning?

The Shrine of the Little Flower. Royal Oak, Michigan.

The Temptation to Exist?

In 1666, a committee in the House of Commons was ready to call both the Plague and the Great Fire God’s retribution against England for harboring an atheist such as Thomas Hobbes.

Who played tennis until he was seventy-five.

Jung was an anti-Semite.

Antony threw himself on his sword after the defeat at Actium and the subsequent desertion of most of his troops.

Go faster, Jesus, why dost thou linger?

I indeed am going, but thou shalt tarry till I come.

Right Views.

Right Intentions.

Right Speech.

Right Conduct.

Right Livelihood.

Right Effort.

Right Remembrance.

Right Contemplation.

Avicenna studied Aristotle’s
Metaphysics
so exhaustively and for so long that when he believed he finally fully understood it he handed out gifts to the poor in celebration.

Joaquin Rodrigo was blind from the age of three.

Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Now and again, an image, still, flitting into Protagonist’s consciousness? Tanaquil Le Clercq, Ravel’s
La Valse?

At thirty-nine, when his first wife died, Monet was so poverty-stricken he could not afford the few centimes to redeem a
pawned locket that he knew she wished to be buried with, and had to borrow.

Heifetz was playing the Mendelssohn E minor concerto by the age of six.

Joyce had lost all his teeth by the age of forty-one.

More than one owner of a significant personal library, in the early years after Gutenberg, made it plain that no
printed
volume would ever be a part of it.

The
Times
of London officially listed Robert Graves as killed in action in 1916.

Graves would live until 1985.

Ella Sagersdorf.

For most of his life, Beethoven changed addresses on an average of more than twice a year.

And was more than once sued by landlords for having scribbled notations all over his walls.

All men by nature desire to know.

Krakatoa.

Eliot was sixty-eight when he married his second wife Valerie. Who was thirty.

Du musst dein Leben andern.

Leigh Hunt once went to jail for libel.

Virginia Hill committed suicide.

Concierto de Aranjuez.

You wanna walk in a parade? Everybody’s lonely.

Xerxes, invading Greece, halted at the site of Troy in homage to its heroes. Looking on the Trojan War as a European invasion of Asia which justified Persia’s own present aggression.

Seven centuries afterward.

Karl Barth was an anti-Semite.

Là ci darem la mano.

How is Protagonist’s eyesight?

Apparently no one has ever believed Vasari’s story that Filippo Lippi was once held prisoner by Barbary pirates but released when he astonished their leader by drawing his portrait.

Has Reader at least made a decision about giving Protagonist some sort of literary past?

Even if only from a good number of years back?

The leprosy of letters, Flaubert called critics.

Man shall be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior. All else is folly.

Arshile Gorky hanged himself.

Initially, the word
metaphysics
meant only that which
came behind
the
Physics
in the Aristotle canon. An early editor made use of it for lack of better.

Tertullian has it that Democritus deliberately blinded himself in old age by staring into the sun. So as not to suffer the sight of beautiful women he could no longer possess.

But O that I were young again

And held her in my arms!

Two years after that condemnation of Hobbes, Samuel Pepys would find
Leviathan
selling, secondhand, for four times its original price:

It being a book the Bishops will not let be printed again.

Gidon Kremer.

For Protagonist’s literary past:

Protagonist: Isn’t it awfully long since Caitlin went to the ladies’ room?

Dylan Thomas: She’s probably in that other saloon across the street. Go buy her a drink and tell her I apologize for ignoring her, will you? She’ll let off less steam if it’s you instead of me.

William Ernest Henley lost a leg to bone disease.

Mikhail Bakhtin lost a leg to bone disease.

Melville’s older son Malcolm committed suicide at eighteen.

Sarah Gamp was William Faulkner’s favorite fictional character.

Dirty stinking Degenerate Bobs was here from Boston, North End, Mass. Warp son of a bitch.

The Duchess of Medina Sidonia. Whom Reader once saw at
zparador on
the Costa del Sol, being escorted to jail after political protest.

Young Lochinvar.

Frank O’Hara died after being hit by a jeep on the beach at Fire Island.

Unquestionably, Protagonist will have spent time in Spain.

Wolf Solent.

La Duquesa Roja.

Claude Lorrain was very nearly illiterate.

John Greenleaf Whittier to the contrary, the woman in Frederick, Maryland, who displayed a Union flag when Stonewall Jackson entered the town was a Mrs. Mary Quantrell.

Pushkin’s dramatic poem in which an envious Salieri poisons Mozart.

Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera based on same.

Dan Pagis. Nathan Zach.

Frank Stella: What you see is what you see.

Georg Buchner died of typhus in 1837, at twenty-three.
Woyzeck
would not be published until forty-two years later.

Who touches a hair of yon grey head

Dies like a dog! March on! he said.

Malcolm Melville had played on a local baseball team. This when Melville himself was already in the customs sheds, and with virtually all of his fiction ten and fifteen years behind him.

No image arises of the somber, disregarded author rooting on the sidelines at a game.