The Blazing World (6 page)

Hadn’t S.K., under his pseudonym Notabene, written a series of prefaces that were followed by no text?
^VI
What if I invented an artist who was all art criticism, all catalogue copy, and no work? How many artists, after all, had been catapulted into importance by drivel written by all those hacks who had taken the linguistic turn? Ah,
écriture
! The artist would have to be a young man, an
enfant terrible
whose emptiness generates page after page after page of text. Oh, the fun of it! I gave it a shot:

The aporia in the work of X is achieved through the processes of auto-induction into absence. The implied, hence invisible, autoerotic acts with a sexual origin facilitate an abysmal collapse, the phantasms of rupture and the withdrawal of the object of desire.

Dead end. I knew that manufacturing this pretentious, hackneyed prose would kill me.

I, Harriet Burden, hereby confess that my diverse fantasies were driven:

1. by a general desire for revenge against twits, dunderheads, and fools,

2. by an ongoing, wrenching intellectual isolation that resulted in loneliness because I roamed in too many books that no one could talk to me about,

3. by a growing sense that I had always been misunderstood and was madly begging to be seen, truly seen, but nothing I did made any difference.

In my frustration and misery I would wind myself up every day as if I were my old toy monkey with the cymbals, listen to myself crash them, and then,
nota bene
, I would cry and, when I cried, I would long for my mother, not the small dying mother in the hospital but the big mother of my childhood, who had held and rocked me and tutted and stroked and taken my temperature and read to me. Mommy’s girl, except Mommy was not oversized but short and curvy and wore high heels.
Your father likes my legs in heels, you know.
But then, after I had wailed for a while, I would remember the wet shine of two fallen tears on my mother’s shrunken cheeks and the IV in her blue-veined hand many years later. I did not say, You’ll get well, Mommy, because she would not get well.
Who knows how long I’ll last? Not long
. And yet in hospice, my mother fussed about the food, the sheets, her pajamas, the nurses. A week before she died, she asked me to open her purse and apply a little lipstick because she was too weak to do it herself, and when she lapsed into a morphine haze at the very end, I took out the gold tube and dabbed her thin mouth with the rose-colored stick.

Orphaned.

What I am trying to articulate is that my self-imposed exile in Red Hook was not uneventful from an internal point of view. Time was forever collapsing in on me. Dead and imaginary people played a larger part in my quotidian reality than the living did. I lurched backward to recover shreds of memory and forward to fashion an imaginary future. As for the actual breathing people in my life, I faithfully kept my weekly appointment with Dr. Fertig, with whom I was making “progress,” after which I would meet Rachel for tea or a glass of wine somewhere near her office on Park Avenue and Ninety-First, and the old intimacy between us never seemed to lessen even when we bickered and she accused me of being “obsessive.” Maisie worried about me. I could see it in her eyes, and she worried aloud about Aven and about Oscar, and I worried in turn that she would give up too much for the family and her own work would suffer, and Ethan wrote stories in cafés and ran his very small magazine,
The Neo-Situationist Bugle
, with Leonard Rudnitzky, his good friend from Oberlin. My son talked a lot about commodification and the spectacle and alienation and the visionary Guy Debord, who served as his Romantic hero.
^VII
Ethan didn’t seem to understand the man’s hyperbole, only that his thought had come true on the Internet:
Everything that was directly lived has moved into representation
. What about a stomachache?

My son, the revolutionary, was secretive about his private life (girls) and, I feared, a little angry at me for taking on a new life at my age, which I suspected he viewed as vaguely indecent and something of a betrayal of his father’s memory, although he could not say it. He was, I’m afraid, alienated from himself. The little boy who used to hide in the closet with his stiff little figures and narrate their battles and truces had grown up. He could not remember his baby self and how his mother had walked him back and forth and jiggled and rocked him for hour after hour and had sung in his ear very softly because it had been so hard for him to settle into sleep. But then, none of us remembers infancy, that archaic age in the land of the mother giant.

Anton Tisch looked right. He was tall, almost my height, a skinny kid in loose jeans with a significant nose and searching eyes that seemed unable to fix on anything for long, which gave him a distracted air that could be interpreted as restless intelligence under the right circumstances. And he was an artist. I met him at Sunny’s in early ’97 on a very cold night. There was snow. I remember the rhythmic presence of cold air as the door opened and closed, the pounding of boots, and lamp-lit white beyond the window. I had the Barometer with me, ambulatory weather vane and exquisite draftsman, whom I had harbored for some weeks. Not only did the Barometer register every incremental rise and drop in air pressure through his bodily instrument—his preternaturally sensitive head—at some juncture he had actually gained control over this aspect of the environment and would lower or raise it by a hectopascal or two. I knew nothing of hectopascals until the Barometer entered my life, but I loved the term, named after Blaise, that genius of the much and the many. The Barometer and I got along rather well, although the man lived in a cocoon of his own making, and dialogue—true back-and-forth exchanges—was nearly impossible.

By then I had become a Sunny’s regular. In gratitude for services rendered and reliable camaraderie, I had presented the establishment with a framed ink drawing of the bar and some of its lurid and not-so-lurid characters, and the gift had been mounted on a wall. I mention this because Anton Tisch had paused in front of it. The vanity of the artist is such that I knew the identities of those who had even glanced at the small work in my presence—they were few indeed—and my happiness at the sight of the angular young man with short brown curls inspecting my rendition of Sunny’s knew no bounds, well, perhaps a few bounds, but it definitely swelled.

Still, I was shy. The Barometer had been highly excitable because of the snow, but for some reason he, too, saw the young Tisch ogling the drawing and, in a voice quite unlike his own and in a manner entirely out of character, he shouted at the stranger:
Harry did it!
As I recall, it took a little time to establish that I was Harry, but once that business was cleared away, Anton Tisch, whom the Barometer took to calling “Table” almost immediately, sat down with us and we settled in for an evening of alcohol and chitchat. The content of that talk has vanished. Over time, however, I learned that the boy had attended the School of Visual Arts, did not know who Giorgione was but considered Warhol the most important artist of all time, which must have explained his silk-screen obsession. Rather than celebrities, Tisch did silk screens of his friends, presumably because their proverbial fifteen minutes had or would come. He explained that his art referred directly to Warhol while also pointing to the phenomenon of reality TV, although it was difficult to glean this information from the banal images he showed me. He liked the term
conceptual
and used it a lot, not unlike the way Edgar used
man
. Anton was not a bad kid. He was just stupendously, heartbreakingly ignorant.

I.
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). German philosopher who founded phenomenology, the study of the structures of consciousness from a first-person perspective. In Notebook H, Burden writes about the “affinities of mind” between Descartes and Husserl, their love of mathematics and logical certainties, and their shared radical doubt. “Husserl’s doubt,” she writes, “is not Descartes’ doubt. Descartes’ cogito is bedrock for deduction, which rises up from within the mental cave. Husserl’s
cogito me cogitare
is consciousness as relation to and toward the world.” Husserl was influenced by William James’s idea of consciousness as a stream, and he understood empathy as the path to intersubjectivity. See Dan Zahavi,
Husserl’s Phenomenology
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003).

II.
Edith Stein (1891–1942) wrote her doctoral dissertation under Husserl, but her ideas depart from his and in certain instances resemble the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whom Burden quotes extensively in the notebooks. See Edith Stein,
On the Problem of Empathy
, trans. Waltraut Stein (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1989). Stein edited Volume 2 of Husserl’s
Ideas
for publication. She was born a Jew, but she had a conversion experience after reading St. Theresa of Avila’s autobiography, converted to Catholicism, and became a Carmelite nun. Although she moved to the Netherlands to escape the Nazi threat, she was deported to Auschwitz and died there in 1942. In 1987, she was beatified by the Catholic Church.

III.
Anthony Flood, “A Muddy Aesthetic,”
Art Lights
, January 1979.

IV.
The organization was founded in 1985 in reaction to the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition
International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture
, showcasing 169 artists, only seventeen of whom were women. The Guerrilla Girls stage anonymous protests and actions to call attention to sexism and racism in the visual arts.

V.
In Notebook K, Burden devotes seventy-five pages to Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms and his “indirect communications.” From S.K.’s posthumously published
The Point of View for My Work as an Author: A Direct Communication, A Report to History
, Burden records the following quote: “One can deceive a person out of what is true and—to recall old Socrates—one can deceive a person into what is true. Yes, only in this way can a deluded person actually be brought into what is true—by deceiving him” (
Kierkegaard’s Writings
, vol. XXII, trans. Howard and Edna Hong [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989], 53). Burden writes, “The path to the truth is doubled, masked, ironic. This is my path, not straight, but twisted!”

VI.
Kierkegaard wrote eight satirical prefaces under the pseudonym Nicolaus Notabene. Søren Kierkegaard,
Prefaces, Writing Sampler
, ed. and trans. Todd W. Nichol (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).

VII.
Guy Debord (1931–1994), self-proclaimed leader of the Situationist International (SI), founded in 1957. This small group of Parisian artists and intellectuals (it never had more than twelve members) initially hoped to integrate art and life into an indistinguishable whole and eliminate the distinction between actor and spectator. By the 1960s, the group’s anticapitalist critique, inspired by the anarchist movement, extended beyond art to society in general. In Debord’s most famous work,
Society of the Spectacle
, published in 1967, he argues that images have come to dominate life, that they have become the “currency” of a society that is continually creating “pseudo needs” in its populace. The group disbanded in 1972 due to internal strife. In 1994, Debord committed suicide. Although the French press had largely ignored both the Situationists and Debord’s work, after his death, he became a celebrity.