The Blazing World (21 page)

A small plastic-surgery work popped up at the lodge a couple of months later. Most of “the collection” Felix Lord had accumulated was in storage, but she had Rune’s screen mounted on the wall upstairs, and we could all watch the artist’s little film:
The New Me
. It began with multiple versions of “before and after” ads, including the old drawings of a scrawny wimp on the beach transformed into a muscleman. We saw the fat, sagging, lumpy, and drooping metamorphosed into the slender, tight, smooth, and lifted. Rune, however, included “during” as well—films from facial surgery with blood-soaked gauze, knives slicing cheeks, skin flayed open, as well as flashes from an instructional video in which a row of practicing physicians bent over heads that had been severed from cadavers. The movie had a music video feel to it but played in silence, with fast cuts, clever edits that juxtaposed gore and loveliness. After about five minutes, the transformations became fantastical, a visual science fiction journey with animated bits of molded, airbrushed, robotic body-beautifuls. Rune himself was all over it in brief stills, close-ups, and long shots, some flattering, some not.

I liked it.

When Ethan saw it, he told to his mother that the work was a side effect of celebrity culture. He called it “life in the third person,” a phrase I liked. He said that’s what people want, to lose their insides and become pure surfaces. He told Harry she had wasted her money. She could have written out a check for the homeless. (We could always give it to the homeless or the environment or disease research.) Harry defended Rune. Ethan called it a pandering piece of shit for the stupid class. He didn’t raise his voice, but he argued steadily. He reminded me of my hero Levolor, that pious adolescent crusader, bumping along on his high horse. Ethan’s brand of Puritanism had a left-wing coloring, but that didn’t soften it any. Harry muttered that it was all right for the two of them to disagree, but her voice had turned husky. She reached out for him with her long fingers, but hesitated when they neared his shoulders. He stepped backward and blurted out, “Felix would have hated it.”

Harry flinched. Then she closed her eyes, inhaled loudly through her nose, and her mouth stretched flat and tight in preparation for tears, which did not come. She nodded as she tried to hold her face still. She put her fingers to her mouth and just kept nodding. I wanted to vanish in a puff of purple smoke. Ethan had a paralyzed look about him. Say something, I thought, come on, say something. He was speechless, but he flushed to his ears, and his eyes had lost their focus. Soon after, Ethan left, and Harry sequestered herself in the studio. The scene had made me sad, and I knew I would be on my way before too long. The lodge was transitional, a temporary hideout, one of the strange turns in a strange life.

There is one other story I have to tell. There are times when I’ve thought to myself, Phinny, you must have dreamed it, but I didn’t. One night, I came home from the club. It was about five in the morning, maybe a little later. The night was cold, and before I went inside, I stood by the water and looked up at a skinny little moon with some thin clouds over it. When I walked into the hallway, I immediately knew something was wrong. I heard a retching sound, a cry, then loud cracks and thuds. The acoustics were strange in that building and tracing noises wasn’t easy. I checked on the Barometer, but he was in his sleeping bag. Burglars are quiet, I thought. I heard gasps, more choking sounds. They’re coming from Harry’s studio, I thought. I rushed to the door, opened it, and at the far end of the room, about twenty-five yards away, I saw Harry kneeling on the floor. She had a big kitchen cleaver in her fist and was ripping open one of her metamorphs. I couldn’t tell which one. The huge space was dark except for a single light that shone down on her. She didn’t hear me, because she groaned each time she thrust the knife into the padded body. There were also broken fragments of wood around her, and I guessed she had torn apart one of her little rooms or boxes.

I closed the door as quietly as I could and tiptoed to my room. I’m sure there are scads of artists over the centuries who have kicked, beaten, and mangled their own works in despair and frustration—it was no crime. Looking at her through the door frightened me, though. I told myself I was a queasy oaf—oh-so-sensitive Phinny. The figure wasn’t a person. It was no more than a stuffed doll. It felt no pain. That was all true. The police were not going to come around and make an arrest for metamorph murder. Later, I realized that, despite all that, what scared me had been real. Harry’s rage had been real.

An Alphabet Toward Several Meanings of Art and Generation

Ethan Lord

1. Artist A generates artwork B. An idea that is part of the body of A becomes a thing that is B. B is not identical to A. B does not even resemble A. What is the relation between A and B?

2. A does not equal B, but B would be impossible without A, therefore B is dependent on A for its existence, while at the same time B is distinct from A. If A vanishes, B does not necessarily disappear. The object B can outlive the body of A.

3. C is the third element. C is the body that observes B. C is not responsible for B and knows that A is B’s creator. When C looks at B, C does not view A. A is not present as a body, but as an idea that is part of the body of C. C can use A as a word to describe B. A has become one of the signs to designate B. A remains A, a body, but A is also a shared verbal tag that belongs to both A and C. B cannot use symbols.

4. What happens when A makes B, but A vanishes as both body and sign from B? Instead of A, D becomes attached to B. C observes B created by A, but the idea of D has replaced A. Has B changed? Yes. B has changed because the idea in the body of C when observing B is now D rather than A. D does not equal A. They are two different bodies, and they are two different symbols. If the bodies of D and A are no longer there, B, the thing that cannot use signs, is not changed. Nevertheless, B’s meaning lives only in the body of C, the third element. Without C, B has no significance in itself. C now understands B through the sign D, all that remains of D after D’s body no longer exists.

5. D is not the generator of B, but this ceases to matter. A is lost. A’s body is gone, and A does not circulate as a collective sign for B. Where is the idea that was in A’s body that created B? Is it in B? Can C observe the idea that was once in the body of A in the object B? Can A’s idea be found somewhere in B, despite the fact that C does not know A was there and believes in D?

6. B’s value is also an idea, an idea that is transformed into a number. After observing the thing, C wants to own B. A number is attached to B, and those numbers are dependent on the name connected to its genesis, which is D. D = $. C buys B because the idea of D enhances C’s idea, not about B or D, but about C. B is now a circulating thing, which also inspires ideas about C and D, but which once was an idea inside the body of A, now burned to a fine powder that was put into a box and buried in the ground.

7. There were many ideas that were part of A’s body when it was alive, but they did not begin with A. They were part of other bodies—too many others to be listed. They were in other living bodies that A knew, and they were in signs that had been inscribed by living bodies that had stopped living generations before A was born: E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z. Had A not taken these other ideas into the body that was A, B would not exist. B now circulates as an object known as D’s B. A is underground. A is the sign of ABSENCE.

Harriet Burden

Notebook B

January 15, 2000

Self-examination results in confabulation.

Confabulation is the falsification of episodic memory in clear consciousness, often in association with amnesia, in other words, paramnesias related as true events.
^I

But the neurologists are wrong; we all confabulate, brain lesions or not.

I wonder if I am explaining things away now, remembering my life all wrong. I look at Dr. F. I try to remember. I can’t remember. So much has disappeared from the past or appears altered to me now. Remembering is like dreaming unless it was yesterday. Dreams are memories, too, anyway, hallucinatory memories. And the doctor is himself and others at the same time.

When you don’t remember, you repeat.

But in reality I would not know that I possess a true idea if my memory did not enable me to relate what is now evident with what was evident a moment ago, and through the medium of words, correlate my evidence with that of others, so that the Spinozist conception of the self-evident presupposes that of memory and perception.
^II

That is all there is—perception and memory. But it’s ragged.

Why do you always walk with your head down?

Elsie Feingold said this to me on the telephone.

I didn’t know I walked with my head down.

Why do you always say you’re sorry? I’m sorry this, I’m sorry that. Why do you do that? It’s so annoying. You’re so annoying. That’s why the other kids don’t like you, Harriet. I’m telling you this as your friend.

This happened, words very close to these were spoken. Lung constriction. Pain in vicinity of ribs. I remember I had pulled the telephone into my room and am lying on the floor just inside the door. I say nothing. I listen. A litany of crimes—my clothes, my hair. I use too many big words. I am always answering in class, brown-nosing Harriet. As your friend . . .

You must be quiet. Your father is reading. I am so quiet and so good. I hardly breathe.

What are you doing in here, Harriet?

I am smelling the books, Mother.

She is laughing, letting out her high chiming sounds. She leans over and kisses me. Does she kiss me? I see myself as small. Observer memory.