Bookmarker tag: for/pq (81 notes)

The moon. There’s no other moon like one on a clear New Mexico night. It rises over the Sandias and soothes the miles and miles of barren desert with all the quiet whiteness of a first snow. Moonlight in Liza’s yellow eyes and the chinaberry tree.

The world just goes along. Nothing much matters, you know? I mean really matters. But then sometimes, just for a second, you get this grace, this belief that it does matter, a whole lot.

Jesse came out with some guacamole and chips, a fresh drink for me, beers for them. She slid to the ground and he sat. She leaned back against his knees. He held her throat with one fine long-fingered hand, drank his beer with the other.

I will never forget it, the way he held her throat. The two of them were never flirtatious or coy, never made erotic or even demonstrative gestures, but their closeness was electric. He held her throat. It wasn’t a possessive gesture; they were fused.

She laughed. “None of them are young. Ben was never young. I was never young. You probably were an old child too, and you like us because you can act out. It is heaven to play, isn’t it? You like coming here because the rest of your life vanishes. You never mention your wife, so there must be troubles there. Your job must be troubles. Jesse gives everybody permission to be themselves and to think about themselves. That it’s okay to be selfish.

“Being with Jesse is sort of a meditation. Like sitting zazen, or being in a sensory deprivation tank. The past and future disappear. Problems and decisions disappear. Time disappears and the present acquires an exquisite color and exists within a frame of only now this second, exactly like the frames we make with our hands.”

I saw she was drunk, but still I knew what she meant, knew she was right.

Mexican tankers were just the opposite. We could hear the music, smell the smoky engines before we saw the rusty ships. The whole crew would be hanging off the sides, waving to girls on terraces of restaurants. The sailors were all laughing or smoking or eating. I couldn’t help it, once I called out Bienvenidos! to them, and the watchman heard me. He came over and shone his flashlight at us.

“I seen you two here a coupla times. Figured you weren’t hurtin’ nobody, and weren’t stealing, but you could get me in a mess of trouble.”

Jesse motioned for him to come down. He even said, “Welcome aboard.” We gave him a sandwich and a beer and told him if we got caught, we’d be sure to show there was no way he would have seen us. His name was Solly. He came every night then, for dinner at eight, and then he’d go on his rounds. He’d wake us early in the morning, before light, just as the birds were starting to whirr above the water.

502 was the clue for 1-Across in this morning’s Times. Easy. That’s the police code for Driving While Intoxicated, so I wrote in DWI. Wrong. I guess all those Connecticut commuters knew you were supposed to put in Roman numerals. I had a few moments of panic, as I always do when memories of my drinking days come up. But since I moved to Boulder I have learned to do deep breathing and meditation, which never fail to calm me.

I’m glad I got sober before I moved to Boulder. This is the first place I ever lived that didn’t have a liquor store on every corner. They don’t even sell alcohol in Safeway here and of course never on Sundays. They just have a few liquor stores mostly on the outskirts of town, so if you’re some poor wino with the shakes and it’s snowing, Lord have mercy. The liquor stores are gigantic Target-size nightmares. You could die from DTs just trying to find the Jim Beam aisle.

You are a republic of voices tonight. Unfortunately, that republic is Italy. All these voices waving their arms and screaming at one another. There’s an ex cathedra riff coming down from the Vatican: Repent. Your body is the temple of the Lord and you have defiled it. It is, after all, Sunday morning, and as long as you have any brain cells left there will be a resonant patriarchal basso echoing down the marble vaults of your churchgoing childhood to remind you that this is the Lord’s Day. What you need is another overpriced drink to drown it out. But a search of pockets yields only a dollar bill and change. You paid twenty to get in here. Panic gains.

Hollywood films rely on a distancing strategy that is absent from Faces. They comment on experience; they judge it; they tell us what to think about it; they offer interpretations. Cassavetes doesn’t provide any of these abstract ways of understanding. This is what makes all of his films so emotionally and intellectually demanding (and drives some viewers out of the theater). A viewer is not given a short-cut around unedited, raw experience. He is not given an interpretation that allows him to stand above, beyond or outside of the characters and experiences; he must muddle through them, be involved with them, be actively engaged with them, make sense of them and change his mind about them as he goes along. Faces captures the extent to which Cassavetes honestly enjoyed his characters and appreciated the performances of the actors who played them, without making distancing judgments about them. The result is a movie that takes away the characteristic interpretive ‘aboutness’ of other films and plunges a viewer into an intellectually unglossed, unsimplified, uninterpreted experience. Cassavetes himself felt the difference when he watched Faces.

The film is utterly without interest and the action-centered plot allowed Cassavetes to do almost no memorable acting, with the single exception of his final scene on screen – in which he came up with the idea of playing the most evil lines he has in the entire film with diabolical gentleness. As proof that he was under no illusions about the nature of the project, during a scene in which Amy Irving said she needed a few minutes to ponder the ‘motivation’ for one of her speeches, Cassavetes turned to Kirk Douglas and sarcastically remarked loud enough for everyone to hear: ‘She thinks she’s playing Joan of Arc.’

Nora stands in the door and says: “I don’t know what will become of me. I don’t know where I am going. I only know that I can no longer bother about what others say. I must find my own way.”

Is this not where life’s possibilities lie? Not necessarily to arrive, but always to be on the way, in movement.

Also in love.

Also with the same hand in mine—if I am lucky.

In the stadium the music was joyful and LuAnn walked to its beat. They passed the boys playing basketball, and she said: “I’ll go to confession today.”

“Really?”

“It’s at four on Saturdays.”

“I didn’t know you did that.”

“Not much.”

“Do you think you need to?”

“Yes.”

“To be forgiven?”

“No. I’m always being forgiven. But I’ll get strength from it. We do it face-to-face now. I’ll just go sit with the priest and tell him.”

“If you tell him like you told me, you’ll have another struggle on your hands.”

“It’s a very simple language. I’ll say I placed myself in the occasion of sin, and I nearly committed adultery, and I don’t want that to happen, ever.”

"There isn't time for cakes," said Dritto, pushing him aside. "We've got to hurry." And he went ahead, twisting the beam of his flashlight around in the dark. Everywhere it touched it lit up rows of shelves, and on the shelves rows of trays, and on the trays rows of cakes of every conceivable shape and color, tarts filled with cream that glittered like candle wax, piles of sugar-coated buns, and castles of almond cakes.

It was then that a terrible worry came over Baby, the worry of not having time to eat all he wanted, of being forced to make his escape before he had sampled all the different kinds of cakes, of having all this land of milk and honey at his disposal for only a few minutes in his whole life. And the more cakes he discovered, the more his anxiety increased, so that every new corner and every fresh view of the shop that was lit up by Dritto's flashlight seemed to be about to shut him off.

He flung himself at the shelves, choking himself with cakes, cramming two or three inside his mouth at a time, without even tasting them; he seemed to be battling with the cakes, as if they were threatening enemies, strange monsters besieging him, a crisp and sticky siege which he must break through by the force of his jaw. The slit halves of the big sugared buns seemed to be opening yellow throats and eyes at him, the cream horns to be blossoming like flowers of carnivorous plants; for a horrible moment Baby had the feeling that it was he who was being devoured by the cakes.

But the next day, standing in the meadow, he invites Anna to visit the trailer, and she hesitates, thinking the offer is a commitment on his part, even a tentative one. It implies too much knowledge of the other—his home could be a capsule of the past or of a possible future. Her own hesitation at breaking their formality is interpreted by Rafael as shyness, or modesty, or a desire not to take the relationship further. And in some way this is not a misinterpretation of Anna. For she too has lived a stranger’s life. There are layers of compulsive secrecy in her. She knows there is a ‘flock’ of Annas, and that the Anna beside this unnamed river of Rafael’s is not the Anna giving a seminar at Berkeley on one of Alexandre Dumas’ collaborators and plot researchers, is not the Anna in San Francisco walking into Tosca’s or eating at the Tadich Grill on California Street.

I WAS in Carly Wharton’s office, going over our casting problems, when a secretary came in and said, “Turn on the radio.” It was December 7, 1941, and that was how I heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor. A couple of weeks later, after I’d waited for some kind of call to arms, I went to my draft board and asked where I stood. I was eager to go, not because I was burning with patriotism but because entering the service would free me from the terrible tangle of my personal life. I believe many men who quickly entered the ranks had similar reasons. My draft board informed me that I was 3-A, by reason of my age, my marriage, and my two kids. I would have to deal with my personal problems personally.

Constance had one sure defense; she’d “see” (that all-purpose girl word) another man. Don’t forget, I told myself, how quickly she found Capa when you were on the road with Golden Boy. And just now, a weekend with Jack Houseman. And some others for sure. The back seat of a Pontiac, for chris-sake! If I left her now, she’d be out with another man tomorrow night. They all want to fuck her, and isn’t that the ultimate compliment to a woman like Constance? Isn’t it? One of her suitors will be attractive to her immediately. I’ll have to be with her, guarding her, all the time. I don’t trust her to be alone.

Her sister moved out—to be with Billy Wilder, I assumed—and I moved in. We were now recognized as a couple. I gave her address as my own (but not to Molly). Every time we made love, with the excitement and all, I’d say, “I love you, baby, I truly do love you.” And she’d say—after she’d cooled off—“I don’t believe you. If you did we’d be married by now.” After which I’d back into silence or change the subject, and Constance would look at me, nod her head, show her teeth, and say, “All right then, all right then, all right!” I didn’t know what that meant but did recognize the tone. Threatening.

I MOVED back into the Garden of Allah. Constance’s mother had come west; the clan was gathering. Her sister was poisoning Constance against me by telling her the truth: that I was hesitating. Doris was the established girlfriend now of Billy Wilder, and I was waiting to see if she would prevail on him to marry her. Talk is cheap.

“I’m going to Reno,” I said to Constance. “Stop bothering me about it.”

“When?”

“As soon as I’m finished with the picture.”

“Did you sign what you said you were going to?”

“No, but they’re drawing up the papers, and I will.”

“When?” Then she was silent. “Oh, God, I hate this. The way you’ve got me. And the way I have to talk to you. I hate it.”

Later she said, “I wish we were alone in the world. That there was no one else on earth, anywhere. Anywhere.”

We were in our “tent,” of course, when she said that.

I didn’t say anything about the “no one else” line. That would truly drive me nuts.

I said very little to Molly about the purpose of my trip—she would have tried to talk me out of it. All I told her was that I needed a vacation alone. In Athens I found what I wanted and rented it, the Stormie Seas, a forty-foot caïque, flying the Union Jack. It had a crew of two social rebels, a young married couple—navigator and captain, mate and cook. I told them the kind of islands I wanted to see and they understood. We cleared Piraeus’s channel on our five-horse motor, then shut it off and, relying on cloth, turned south toward those islands of the Cyclades that tourists don’t trample. Quiet at last, my load of tensions eased, I asked myself a question I’d asked before, but now in earnest: Could I disappear from the world where I’d trafficked all my life and become someone else? Could I start over again? You will certainly say that is the most foolish of questions, but in time—it did take time—that is what I did: disappear from the world I’d inhabited all my adult life, to become someone else.

I watched the beginning of La Règle du jeu on video. It’s marvellous but I’ve never been able to sit still long enough to get to the end. Renoir’s love of people, that unfashionable thing: the sense of a rich, three-dimensional, teeming life away there beyond the flat screen and spreading out from it in all directions. A kind of fizzing and bubbling that goes on. Everyone busy living.

You think about it. Food is the basis for everything. Without food, it’s all over. Kaput. They don’t lie when they say you are what you eat. If you can’t get nothing to eat, you are nothing. Nothing. They also don’t lie when they say you eat to live. And you live to eat. What’s someone’s culture but the way he eats? Everybody living from meal to meal, even if it takes somebody three days to get to the next one. Call that the culture of poverty. Maybe you a nomad or you tied to the land. It’s how you get your food. It’s how you organize to get your food. Keep your food. Keep your food for yourself. Who grows it? Cultivates it? Sells it? Cooks it? Who gets fed and does not get fed? Who throws it away? Who eats the leftovers?

What’s the story of the world? How come Magellan comes to bother folks like us in faraway islands? It’s to make their food taste better. Once you taste a secret, you go running after your tongue. It can’t be helped. Once you know this principle of the world, then everything becomes clear. You take Marx. You take Freud. You take Einstein. You take Suzuki. The politics of food. The sex of food. The relativity of food. The Zen of food.

I tell these radical kids, eventually all the answers can be found in food. Are they listening? Follow the food, I say. You born in the city. You forget your connection to the earth. And I don’t mean just Watsonville or Delano. That’s what guys like me have, the knowledge. We never stop. Everywhere we go, we touch the food right at the source. We digging the earth, sowing the seed. We pulling the weeds. Then cutting cane or slicing pineapple. Shucking lettuce or cutting asparagus. Dirt under the nails, under the blisters, in the grooves of our hands. It never washes out.

Then harvesting grapes. When grapes are ready, there’s nothing more beautiful and luxurious. I don’t say this like I’m the grower. I say this because who cannot appreciate the miracle of planted food comes back every year with your encouragement? These grapes are my grapes, my children. The small, sour, purple ones crushed for Gallo wine. Large, green, seedless Thompson for Dole fruit cocktail. The reds for Sun-Maid raisins. But that’s just the earth.

After we had worked together for our beliefs in twenty-four-hour days without rest, bonded ourselves to each other through the inner struggles of self-criticism within our groups, confessed our social sins to our brother- and sisterhoods and lost our individual selves to our collective purpose, we finally could only be with each other. And we found ourselves fighting if we should collude with the so-called system and its elected liberal officials, if our struggle should be defined as working with the working class or our oppressed Asian communities, if this or that hotel tenant was an advanced worker, if gay lib protestors were bourgeois degenerates, if our loyalties were with the PRC or the USSR, if any of us were reformists, revisionists, or sellouts, if our art and writing must always have political purpose, and we were very sure that depending on our correct analysis of these definitions, we could then make decisions to act that would be ultimately unbeatable. But however we may have accounted for our thinking and our actions in these years, this was how we fought and spent our youth.

Strange people circulate in this valley: literary agents awaiting my new novel, for which they have already collected advances from publishers all over the world; advertising agents who want my characters to wear certain articles of clothing and drink certain fruit juices; electronic technicians who insist on finishing my unfinished novels with a computer. I try to go out as little as possible; I avoid the village; if I want to take a walk, I choose the mountain trails.

When you write, you feel how it must be, you know that at such a spot a certain thing is needed, at another spot something else; you compose pictures for yourself that you see, you have rather the feeling that you are going to bring something to flower; you feel it in your heart like the distant echo of all the passions you are going to create; and the inability to render all that is the eternal despair of those who write; the poverty of languages, which have scarcely one word for a hundred thoughts; the weakness of man, who cannot find approximations -- and to me it is an eternal anguish.

Oh my God, my God, why did you cause me to be born with so much ambition? [...]

As symbol, or as the structuring of symbols, art can render intelligible—or at least visible, at least discussible—those wilderness regions which philosophy has abandoned and those hazardous terrains which science’s tools do not fit. I mean the rim of knowledge where language falters; and I mean all those areas of human experience, feeling, and thought about which we care so much and know so little: the meaning of all that we see before us, of our love for each other, and the forms of freedom in time, and power, and destiny, and all whereof we imagine: grace, perfection, beauty, and the passage of all materials to thoughts and of all ideas to forms.

The task, then, of all the arts in each century is to rescue the clichés, not to turn from them, and to dedicate themselves each new decade to more comprehensive forms of beauty and understanding. It is to expand those arts’ purviews, to expand the arc of the comprehended world, and not to restrict any vision according to the demands for purity set by theory. Purity of practice guarantees that the artist will not err, and that superficial critics will find no flaw in the work, and that nothing has been ventured. Within the bare pantry of purity, stocked solely with what the mind knows to be essential, symbol, which is itself material and which requires a chaotic wealth of materials, can neither grow nor flourish. Symbols arise from material messes.

In excellent fettle, in the pink or the blue of boyish good health during their absence, Marmaduke sickened dramatically within a few hours of their return. Evenhandedly he dabbled with every virus, every hatching, afforded by that early spring. Recovering from mumps, he reacted catastrophically to his final whooping-cough shot. Superflu followed superflu in efficient relay. Doctors now visited him, unasked and unpaid, out of sheer professional curiosity. At this point, and for no clear reason (Sir Oliver asked if he might write a paper about it), Marmaduke's health radically improved. Indeed, he seemed to shed his sickly self as if it were a dead skin or a useless appendage: from the feverish grub of the old Marmaduke sprang a musclebound wunder-kind, clear-eyed, pink-tongued, and (it transpired) infallibly vicious. The change was all very sudden. Guy and Hope went out one day, leaving the usual gastroenteritic nightmare slobbering on the kitchen floor; they returned after lunch to find Marmaduke strolling round the drawing-room with his hands in his pockets, watched by several speechless nannies. He had never crawled. Instead, he appeared to have worked it out that he could cause much more trouble, and have much more fun, in a state of peak fitness. His first move was to dispense with that midnight nap. The Clinches hired more help, or they tried. An ailing baby was one thing; a strappingly malevolent toddler was quite another. Up until now, Guy and Hope's relationship, to the child and to each other, had been largely paramedical. After Marmaduke's renaissance, it became, well — you wouldn't say paramilitary. You'd say military. The only people they could get who stayed longer than an hour or two were male nurses sacked from lunatic asylums, Around the house, these days there was a kind of swat team of burly orderlies, as well as a few scarred nannies and au pairs. Dazedly yet without bit­terness, Guy calculated that Marmaduke, now in his ninth month, had already cost him a quarter of a million pounds. They went away again.

Marry young, and a melancholy comes over you at thirty, which has to do with thwarted possibilities. It was worse for Guy. Hope was a little older, and had had her fair share of guys at Oxford, earlier on, and at NYU, and for that matter in Norfolk, Virginia. So a new adventure: they overcame their ecopolitical anxieties and decided to go ahead and have a baby. Even then there were difficulties - Guy's difficulties. A process that began with him equably switching from jockey pants to boxer shorts ended up with him out cold and his legs in stirrups while a team of Japanese surgeons and a particle-beam laser rewired his nethers. Thus, after half a decade of 'trying': Marmaduke. For years they had worried about the kind of world they were bringing their child into. Now they worried about the kind of child they were bringing into their world. The gap or hollow that the baby had been meant to fill — well, Marmaduke filled it, and more; Marmaduke could fill the Grand Canyon with his screams. It appeared that from here on in a mixture of fatigue, depression and incredulity would be obliged to keep them faithful. Most of the psychiatrists and counsellors agreed that Hope's unreasonable fear of getting pregnant again might soon start to fade. Their last attempt at lovemaking had featured the pill, the coil, the cap, and three condoms, plus more or less immediate coitus interruptus. That was July. This was September.

The Harley Street doctor they had just consulted was an expert on infant hypermania. He had seen Marmaduke at his surgery and had also paid a stunned visit to the house, where, as promised, Marmaduke was able to relax and be his normal self. Absolutely impossible at the surgery, Marmaduke had been absolutely unbel­ievable at home. Even today, nearly three weeks later, the doctor was still wearing a patch of gauze over his right eye. All parties agreed that the legal matter need not affect their professional relationship. Recently, Guy had taken out insurance on Marmaduke-related personal-injury suits, on what seemed to be highly advantageous terms. More recently, he had taken out insurance on the insurance.

Of course, I keep trying to tone Marmaduke down. I thought he was funny at first - but really that kid is no joke. He devastates his parents twenty times a day. I censor him. I bowdlerize him too. There's some stuff you just can't put in books.

Turn your back for ten seconds and he's in the fire or out the window or over in the corner, fucking a light socket (he's the right height for that, with a little bend of the knees). His chaos is strongly sexual, no question. If you enter his nursery you'll usually find him with both hands down the front of his diaper, or behind the reinforced bars of his playpen leering over a swimsuit ad in one of the magazines that some nanny has thrown in to him. He goes at that bottle like a top-dollar Vegas call-girl, like a grand-an-hour sex diva. Yeah, that's it. Marmaduke looks as though he is already contemplating a career in child pornography: he knows it's out there, and he can tell that there's a quick buck in it. Naturally he's hell with the help and any other woman who strays within range. He's always got a hand up the nurse's smock or a seigneurial tongue in the au pair's ear.

Guy looked down and gave a smile—not of affection but of wonder. He loved Marmaduke. He would joyfully die for Marmaduke. He would die for Marmaduke, not next week, not tomorrow, but now, right now. He loved Marmaduke despite the clear sense, constantly refreshed, that Marmaduke had no lovable qualities. Marmaduke gave no pleasure to anyone except when he was asleep. When he was asleep, you could gaze down at him and thank the Lord that he wasn't awake.

He was now faced with the task of equipping Marmaduke for the outside world - of dressing him entirely, from soup to nuts, with the child throwing all he had at him every inch of the way. In the nursery Guy took off Marmaduke's nappy and despairingly wedged him into the potty. 'Are you going to make a present for daddy?' he asked, again quite hopelessly. Twenty minutes later, following Marmaduke's reliable failure to make a present for daddy, Guy wrestled him into nappy-liner, nappy, nappy pants, vest, shirt, trousers, socks, shoes, jumper and, downstairs, anorak, gloves, face mask, bobble hat, scarf. As he was dragging him towards the front door and reaching out to free the doublelock, Marmaduke 'went supervoid', in the local phrase (the phenomenon usually marked the end of Marmaduke's experi­ments in week-long, white-lipped constipation). The child, in other words, had swamped himself in ordure. When Guy unravelled Marmaduke's scarf he saw that some of it was even peeping over the collar of his shirt. In the nursery again Guy wrestled him out of bobble hat, face mask, gloves, anorak, jumper, shoes, socks, trousen, shirt, vest, nappy pants, nappy and nappy-liner, waved away the game but gagging nannies, hosed Marmaduke down in the master bathroom, and wrestled him back into nappy-liner, nappy, nappy pants, vest, shirt, trousers, socks, shoes, jumper, anorak, gloves, face mask, bobble hat and scarf. During these struggles, Marmaduke's lifelong enthusiasm for hurting his father- and, within that, his specialization in hurting his father's genitals — was given play only twice. A flying headbutt to the testicles, and an unrestrained blow with a blunt instrument (a toy grenade-launcher) to the sensitive tip. The new pains joined and reinforced and starred in all the ensemble pains that were there already. This time, he actually got the front door open before Marmaduke was noisily and copiously sick.

I sat down in a booth to wait. I felt the clock pressing on me. Now I had less than two hours to rest at home before I had to be at the Italian restaurant where I worked nights. I closed my eyes. Can you help run some stock? barked Marlo. No, I thought. Sure, I said. If it got close to one hour there wasn’t much point in going home, and I kept my other uniform in my car because sometimes that happened. But sometimes even if I could only be home for five minutes I would make the drive. I would sit on the floor in the bathroom and close the door, even though I lived alone. To feel like there was something between me and all that for a few moments.

Jimmy plays at The Restaurant three nights a week, from seven until eleven or until the last guest leaves, whichever comes first. When he sees the last guests cross the threshold of the door out of the dining room into the lobby he’ll stop in the middle of his chill Jobim or his John Williams show tune, right in the middle of an arpeggio, stand up, shut the lid, grab his bag, walk out. The effect is as abrupt as turning off a stereo except that sometimes the last note he played drifts there in the air, along with the smells of butter and salt.

I’m good enough to get the once-over in the bar at The Restaurant, I see them thinking my smallness is appealing, my ass and face are cute enough, I see them thinking that short haircut might be sexy. I’m always in a backless cocktail dress and heels, I’m flat chested and a tad muscular so they ask me if I’m a dancer and say Call me sometime, let’s have a drink. It took me a while to understand you’re supposed to work that for your money but you can let the willingness fall right off your face when you turn around. It took me a while to understand that of course men fling their entreaties out in swarms, like schools of sperm, hoping one will stick. They’re expecting to be turned down so you shouldn’t feel any obligation.

But believe me that move is not original in the business. I knew a guy who did that in Morton’s one night, they have a spiel with a cart and all these props, and there’s a part where you have to hold up a potato and talk about what they can do with it. He held up the potato and—I can’t do this, he said, and put the potato down and left. He told me After you do it it feels like the stupidest thing because most likely you just end up in some other restaurant holding some other potato but way behind on your rent.

Not having any money gives a sharp clarity to everything. 100ft2, two pairs of jeans, three T-shirts, an old leather jacket and my old Rolex, just for a laugh, a single espresso to go, a baguette, a packet of cigarettes, my swimming pool pass. The world is turning into a skeleton without any flesh. I'm getting stronger, more focused. It's important to have limits so you don't lose yourself in the chaos. I've been stealing from Franprix and Bio c’ Bon, I don't pay my train fare, I jump the barrier, I've learned to ask my friends for a hundred euros, let them pay for my drinks, thank you friends, there are thousands of things I can do without, the doctor for example (but not cigarettes), I'm living on nothing, learning the techniques, getting through the days. Sometimes I steal to eat, sometimes it's just for the sake of it, for the beauty of the gesture. I'm training myself to be indestructible, I need to know that I am.

Enter Mr Bates. Mr Bates is the bowel specialist who operates with Mr Wong in cases of ovarian cancer, the pattern of whose metastases typically involves the bowel. A former Rhodesian, Mr Bates is large, alternately bluff and jovial; he belongs to a Scottish malt whisky fraternity. I first met him when I found myself in intensive care after the first operation. An unknown man, dressed in brightly coloured sports clothes (it was a Sunday), was bouncing up and down beside my cot. He enquired breezily, “How are you, young lady?” Through the haze of pain, I replied with outrage, “How dare you call me ‘young lady,‘” and demanded that the intruder introduce himself. This act of gross impropriety on my part in the mode of address, or rather, return of address, to a very senior consultant surgeon, who, moreover, like Mr Wong and the anaesthetist, was treating me gratis in a private hospital, enhanced my kudos in Mr Wong’s eyes, and he took every opportunity to remind me of this picaresque solecism. Mr Bates and I became wary sparring partners. I always greeted him with the appellation “Young Man,” and I presented him with unwanted volumes of Marx so that he might correct the vulgarity of his right-wing misapprehensions of the socialist theory of politics and society.

[...] I was, I think, eight years old. The old folks gossiped and entrusted me to a young girl, who was to show me the park. We walked along the paths, crossed some little bridges which had railings made of birch poles - I remember that well. Then it happened. I looked at her thin bare shoulders, the narrowness of her arms above the elbow, and an emotion I had never experienced, a tenderness, a rapture, unnamable, welled up in my throat. I had no idea that this is called love. I think she must have said something, explaining, but I said not a word, strucky dumb by what had suddenly come over me.

I had my reasons. Do you want to hear the good news first, or the bad news? The good news is that Martina called this morning and we’re having lunch tomorrow. The bad news is that the good news made me feel so relieved and excited that I ran out to a bar and drank a bunch of big ones. Yeah? you’ll say. And? Nothing new in that. Agreed, but the bad thing about the bad news is that the alcohol had a really bad effect on me. It didn’t make me drunk, which was what I was confidently expecting it to do. It made me hungover instead. It did. I kept incredulously ordering more drinks, in a doomed bid to stave off this conclusion. That’s why I had so many. All the more ironic, too, because I woke up this morning feeling bloody marvellous after a really late and heavy night with the TV and the B & F. Was the phenomenon a new jet-lag deal, or the terminal mutiny of my whole bodybag? Oh man, I’d better get to California soon, while the transplant people still have something to work on. Maybe I’d better wing out there right away and have them fix me up with a temporary. And the mind was suffering too. Yes, the mind had its sufferings also. It was crammed with sin and crime, the thoughts nowhere, all in freefall and turnaround. I’ve got to get this stuff out of my system. No, more than that, much more. I’ve got to get my system out of my system. That’s what I’ve got to do.

So what can a poor boy do? You come out of the hotel, the Vraimont. Over boiling Watts the downtown skyline carries a smear of God’s green snot. You walk left, you walk right, you are a bank rat on a busy river. This restaurant serves no drink, this one serves no meat, this one serves no heterosexuals. You can get your chimp shampooed, you can get your dick tattooed, twenty-four hour, but can you get lunch? And should you see a sign on the far side of the street flashing BEEF-BOOZE – NO STRINGS, then you can forget it. The only way to get across the road is to be born there. All the ped-xing signs say DON’T WALK, all of them, all the time. That is the message, the content of Los Angeles: don’t walk. Stay inside. Don’t walk. Drive. Don’t walk. Run! I tried the cabs. No use. The cabbies are all Saturnians who aren’t even sure whether this is a right planet or a left planet. The first thing you have to do, every trip, is teach them how to drive.

6/22/41

There are some people we like instantly, before they have even had a chance to flatter us (which is the greatest encouragement to liking a person), because they have that quality of seeing in us what we desire to be, what we are trying to be, and of not seeing that which we are at the moment. We feel that they understand us, we begin to feel that we have attained what we desire ourselves to be, and being made happy by this we inevitably are very fond of the people who can make us feel this way.

Reading aloud from Jean-François Lyotard’s viciously difficult 1974 book, Libidinal Economy, Fisher relishes the work’s most polemical passages, as Lyotard seems to prophesy the patronising gaze cast upon James Turner Street, putting the producers on blast, who “dare not say the only important thing there is to say, that one can enjoy swallowing the shit of capital, its materials, its metal bars, its polystyrene, its books, its sausage pâtés, swallowing tonnes of it till you burst”. As far as Lyotard is concerned:

the English unemployed did not become workers to survive, they — hang on tight and spit on me — enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity that the peasant tradition had constructed for them, enjoyed the dissolution of their families and villages, and enjoyed the new monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs in the morning and evening.

[...] Andreas was overwhelmed by the contrast between love and lust. Love turned out to be soul-crippling, stomach-turning, weirdly clasutrophobic; a sense of endlessness bottled up inside him, endless weight, endless potential, with only the small outlet of a shivering pale girl in a bad rain jacket to escape through. Touching her was the farthest thing from his mind. The impulse was to throw himself at her feet.

I felt deeply ashamed and told him so. He said, “If this film is everything we want it to be, maybe, if we are very lucky, it will affect two or three people for a little while. The only thing that is certain is that the experience of making it will be with all of us, it will become a part of us, forever. So we must try our best to make it a good experience. It’s the most important thing.” He put his arm around me, ushered me away from set, and found a new way to shoot the scene. As we walked away from the set, something in me that had been stuck came loose.

So much of coming to terms with hard things from the past seems to be about believing our own accounts, having our memories confirmed by those who were there and honoured by those who weren’t. Why is it so hard for us to believe our own stories or begin to process them without corroborating witnesses appearing from the shadows of the past, or without people stepping forward with open arms when echoes of those stories present themselves again in the present?

A few years ago, I travelled back to Rome. I sat on the cobblestones at the far end of Largo dei Librari. The store where I used to buy my little chocolate ice cream balls had closed a long time ago. Now there were tables and chairs filling the small square, and tourists eating in the open air. I looked over their heads to the apartment we had lived in for those months in 1988. The air in the square had the same smell. Centuries old. Romantic and disgusting. As though something was rotting, beautifully. I wondered if the tourists could smell it too.

A cross didn't fall on me
when I went for hot dogs
and the all-night Greek
slave in the Silver Gameland
didn't think I was his brother
Love me because nothing happens

I believe the rain will not
make me feel like a feather
when it comes tonight after
the streetcars have stopped
because my size is definite
Love me because nothing happens

Do you have any idea how
many movies I had to watch
before I knew surely
that I would love you
when the lights woke up
Love me because nothing happens

Here is a headline July 14
in the city of Montreal
Intervention décisive de Pearson
a la conference du Commonwealth
That was yesterday
Love me because nothing happens

Stars and stars and stars
keep it to themselves
Have you ever noticed how private
a wet tree is
a curtain of razor blades
Love me because nothing happens

Why should I be alone
if what I say is true
I confess I mean to find
a passage or forge a passport
or talk a new language
Love me because nothing happens

I confess I meant to grow
wings and lose my mind
I confess that I've
forgotten what for
Why wings and a lost mind
Love me because nothing happens

(This is a family tradition that filters through the generations. We hate things, so we drink. We love things, so we drink. We have bad luck, so we drink. We fear good luck, so we drink. It has to do with a kind of sadness that is blood-born. My mother keeps a scrap of paper taped to her diary, a quote from Yeats that reads: “Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy,” and the first time I read that line it hummed over my mind like a diviner’s stick.)

This description of the five elements that make up our image of love, however superficial it may be, does seem to demonstrate love’s contradictory, paradoxical, mysterious nature. I discussed five, but they can be reduced to three: exclusivity, which is love for only one person; attraction, which is one’s fate freely accepted; the person, who is a soul and a body. But these elements cannot be separated; they exist in constant struggle and reconciliation with themselves and with others. Contrary, as though they were the planets of the strange solar system of the passions, they revolve around a single sun. This sun, too, is twofold: the couple. There is continual transmutation of each element: freedom chooses servitude, fate becomes choice, the soul is body and the body is soul. We love a mortal being as though he or she were immortal. Lope said it better: “To call what is eternal temporal.” Yes, we are mortal, we are the children of time, and no one is spared death. We know not only that we will die but that the person we love will die. We are the playthings of time and accident; sickness and old age disfigure the body and cause the soul to lose its way. But love is one of the answers that humankind has invented in order to look death in the face. Through love we steal from the time that kills us a few hours which we turn now into paradise and now into hell. In both ways time expands and ceases to be a measure. Beyond happiness or unhappiness, though it is both things, love is intensity: it does not give us eternity but life, that second in which the doors of time and space open just a crack: here is there and now is always. In love, everything is two and everything strives to be one.

In the desert the most loved waters, like a lover’s name, are carried blue in your hands, enter your throat. One swallows absence. A woman in Cairo curves the white length of her body up from the bed and leans out of the window into a rainstorm to allow her nakedness to receive it.

She was a willow. What would she be like in winter, at my age? I see her still, always, with the eye of Adam. She had been these awkward limbs climbing out of a plane, bending down in our midst to prod at a fire, her elbow up and pointed towards me as she drank from a canteen.

A few months later, she waltzed with me, as we danced as a group in Cairo. Though slightly drunk she wore an unconquerable face. Even now the face I believe that most revealed her was the one she had that time when we were both half drunk, not lovers.

All these years I have been trying to unearth what she was handing me with that look. It seemed to be contempt. So it appeared to me. Now I think she was studying me. She was an innocent, surprised at something in me. I was behaving the way I usually behave in bars, but this time with the wrong company. I am a man who kept the codes of my behaviour separate. I was forgetting she was younger than I.

She was studying me. Such a simple thing. And I was watching for one wrong move in her statue-like gaze, something that would give her away.

The first time she dreamed of him she woke up beside her husband screaming.

[...]

She wouldn’t move. Wouldn’t lie back into that zone they had been in.

The dream had taken place in this room – his hand on her neck (she touched it now), his anger towards her that she had sensed the first few times she had met him. No, not anger, a lack of interest, irritation at a married woman being among them. They had been bent over like animals, and he had yoked her neck back so she had been unable to breathe within her arousal.

[...]

That had been the first recognition. She remembered it sometime during the next day, but she was busy then and she refused to nestle with its significance for long, dismissed it; it was an accidental collision on a crowded night, nothing more.

A year later the other, more dangerous, peaceful dreams came. And even within the first one of these she recalled the hands at her neck and waited for the mood of calmness between them to swerve to violence.

Who lays the crumbs of food that tempt you? Towards a person you never considered. A dream. Then later another series of dreams.

He said later it was propinquity. Propinquity in the desert. It does that here, he said. He loved the word – the propinquity of water, the propinquity of two or three bodies in a car driving the Sand Sea for six hours. Her sweating knee beside the gearbox of the truck, the knee swerving, rising with the bumps. In the desert you have time to look everywhere, to theorize on the choreography of all things around you.

When he talked like that she hated him, her eyes remaining polite, her mind wanting to slap him. She always had the desire to slap him, and she realized even that was sexual. For him all relationships fell into patterns. You fell into propinquity or distance. Just as, for him, the histories in Herodotus clarified all societies. He assumed he was experienced in the ways of the world he had essentially left years earlier, struggling ever since to explore a half-invented world of the desert.

Nothing can keep him from her.

When he is not in the desert with Madox or with Bermann in the Arab libraries, he meets her in Groppi Park – beside the heavily watered plum gardens. She is happiest here. She is a woman who misses moisture, who has always loved low green hedges and ferns. While for him this much greenery feels like a carnival.

From Groppi Park they arc out into the old city, South Cairo, markets where few Europeans go. In his rooms maps cover the walls. And in spite of his attempts at furnishing there is still a sense of base camp to his quarters.

They lie in each other’s arms, the pulse and shadow of the fan on them. All morning he and Bermann have worked in the archaeological museum placing Arabic texts and European histories beside each other in an attempt to recognize echo, coincidence, name changes – back past Herodotus to the Kitab al Kanuz, where Zerzura is named after the bathing woman in a desert caravan. And there too the slow blink of a fan’s shadow. And here too the intimate exchange and echo of childhood history, of scar, of manner of kiss.

He sweeps his arm across plates and glasses on a restaurant table so she might look up somewhere else in the city hearing this cause of noise. When he is without her. He, who has never felt alone in the miles of longitude between desert towns. A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something that feeds him more than water. There is a plant he knows of near El Taj, whose heart, if one cuts it out, is replaced with a fluid containing herbal goodness. Every morning one can drink the liquid the amount of a missing heart. The plant continues to nourish for a year before it dies from some lack or other.

He lies in his room surrounded by the pale maps. He is without Katharine. His hunger wishes to burn down all social rules, all courtesy.

Her life with others no longer interests him. He wants only her stalking beauty, her theatre of expressions. He wants the minute and secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book.

In the apartment there is light only from the river and the desert beyond it. It falls upon her neck her feet the vaccination scar he loves on her right arm. She sits on the bed hugging nakedness. He slides his open palm along the sweat of her shoulder. This is my shoulder, he thinks, not her husband’s, this is my shoulder. As lovers they have offered parts of their bodies to each other, like this. In this room on the periphery of the river.

In the few hours they have, the room has darkened to this pitch of light. Just river and desert light. Only when there is the rare shock of rain do they go towards the window and put their arms out, stretching, to bathe as much as they can of themselves in it. Shouts towards the brief downpour fill the streets.

Gianni approached them almost by instinct, he’s a generous man. I said there’s no room, we have the children, how are we going to fit. The two got in, they were English, he graying, in his forties, she surely less than thirty. At first I was hostile, taciturn, it complicated the trip for me, I would have to work even harder to make the children behave. It was mainly my husband who talked, he liked to establish relationships, especially with foreigners. He was cordial, he asked questions without paying much heed to conventions. It came out that the two had abruptly left their jobs (I don’t remember what they did) and, along with their jobs, their families: she a young husband, he a wife and three small children. They had been traveling for several months through Europe with very little money. The man said seriously: the important thing is to be together. She agreed, and at a certain point said something to this effect: we are obliged to do so many stupid things from childhood on, thinking they’re essential; what happened to us is the only thing that has happened to me since I was born that makes sense.

[...] Q was a friend of mine who was also very well furnished in the breast department (the other woman, O, perhaps wins the prize – but I have no valid excuse to involve her breasts in this novel, at least not for the time being. Which is a shame, because they deserve a novel all to themselves). Although our friendship (my friendship with Q, that is) has been very long, our romance was fairly short, for many reasons, and fundamentally, I think, for one: because before making love she took off all her clothes except for an enormous crucifix, with Jesus on it and everything, which she left hanging around her neck; and a particularly tormented Jesus, too, all writhing and anguished-looking – for which you can’t blame him, of course, given the circumstances. If I suggested that it would all be much easier and more comfortable if she took off her crucifix as well, she’d say: ‘Isn’t He the God of love?’ – and that was that. You just try, sir – and for once, the female reader will forgive me the obligatory exclusion – you just try, sir, to maintain a good erection face to face with the image of the suffering Redeemer, however well appointed he might be between a pair of magnificent tits. Perhaps you – as a good atheist – could do it. But I could not. It was hard work, believe me. The girl was lovely, sweet, gentle, warm, fragrant – a real delight. I’d close my eyes and get lost in the moment and for a while I could forget everything, but then, crack, the crucifix would end up in my mouth, or in my eye, or give me a scratch on the cheek. Or I’d open my eyes – since you have to open them, of course, and open them wide – and there they’d all be, parading past: the Sacred History, Death and the Resurrection, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday; the three denials of Peter, the Sermon on the Mount, the wedding at Canaan, the raising of Lazarus … and the Apocalypse. The image of the Redeemer, which demands, even if you’re not exactly a saint, a kind of supernatural respect that pushes you to examine your conscience and confess your sins, set against those erect nipples wet with saliva and … anyway: I generally managed to bring things to a satisfying conclusion, but afterwards my head, spine and kidneys were a mess. I don’t think these things should mix, despite the fact that ‘He’s the God of love’, which He certainly is, and despite the intimate, profound connection there is between religion and sex. Goodbye, Q. Sometimes I worry my luminous novel will turn into a similar mixture. I want to believe it won’t. I want to believe I’ve been able to balance the two poles of what is, I think, a unique phenomenon. I’m also afraid people will consider me a cynic, a liar or a heretic. I might be a heretic, but I have a theory in my defence (it’s very simple, too: if Christianity was imposed through blood and fire and money and the Inquisition and other things like that, and now here we are, brought up with no alternative and within the cage of dogma – and, worse, of popular superstition deriving from badly digested dogma – we surely have the right to make all the adjustments we need in order to carry on believing – and, at the same time, to be free). But whether I like it or not, I seem to be arriving – via some erect nipples – at my conversion. Or ‘conversion’, since this is something I’m not very clear about either. I don’t know what my exact relationship with the Church is nowadays – and I’m also writing this, partly, in an attempt to find out. Nor do I know what my relationship with the Church will be in the future: I’m in the dark, or the half-light. But did a conversion take place? Yes, it did. And was it luminous? It was.

Film as dream, film as music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul. A little twitch in our optic nerve, a shock effect: twenty-four illuminated frames a second, darkness in between, the optic nerve incapable of registering darkness. At the editing table, when I run the strip of film through, frame by frame, I still feel that dizzy sense of magic of my childhood: in the darkness of the wardrobe, I slowly wind on one frame after another, see the almost imperceptible changes, wind faster —a movement.

I didn’t know what was happening. Gun was four months’ pregnant. I behaved like a jealous child. She was alone, deserted. There are moving pictures with sound and light which never leave the projector of the soul but run in loops throughout life with unchanging sharpness, unchanging objective clarity. Only one’s own insight inexorably and relentlessly moves inwards towards the truth.

I persuaded the veteran director and actor, Victor Sjostrom, to take on the main role in Wild Strawberries. We had worked together before in To Joy without feeling any irresistible need to do so again. Victor was tired and ill, and his work had to be fenced round with various considerations. Among other things, I had to promise he would be back home with his habitual whisky punctually every day at half-past four.

Our collaboration began appallingly. Victor was nervous and I was tense. He overacted and I drew his attention to the fact that he was playing to the gallery. He at once shrouded himself in surly withdrawal, then said there was sure to be someone else who could play the part according to my wishes, and that his doctor would give him a sick note any day.

When the girls put in an appearance, the situation brightened. The old charmer delighted in the affectionate bantering attentions of the ladies, flirted with them and bought them flowers and small presents. Unnoticed and privately, I had filmed Bibi Andersson in a slightly decollete turn-of-thecentury dress sitting on a meadow bank feeding Victor with wild strawberries. He snapped at her ringers and both of them laughed, the young woman clearly flattered, the old lion obviously delighted.

He was by no means in a better mood, but he did his duty. As he walked through the sunlit grass with Bibi in a long shot, he was grumbling and rejecting all friendly approaches. The close-up was rigged up and he went to one side and sat with his head sunk between his shoulders, dismissing scornfully the offer of a whisky on the spot. When everything was ready, he came staggering over, supported by a production assistant, exhausted by his bad temper. The camera ran and the clapper clacked. Suddenly his face opened, the features softening, and he became quiet and gentle, a moment of grace. And the camera was there. And it was running. And the laboratory didn’t muck it up.

Meanwhile, the administration was understaffed and over-worked. The theatre director’s secretary was also the press officer. The costume studios were disintegrating and the permanent stage designers were ill or alcoholics. Communication was an unknown concept.

[...] . The force comes from the stomach, don’t cheat with your posture. There’s no instrument, never will be, that can render the dynamism Beethoven imagined in his silent world. See, now it sounds lovely. You who have so much beauty in you, you must learn to bring it out. Let’s go on then. Here you have a premonition of what will happen to us twenty-nine bars later; you hardly notice it, but it’s important. No padding in Beethoven, he speaks persuasively, furiously, sorrowfully, cheerfully, painfully, never mumbling. You mustn’t mumble, never produce common stuff! You must know what you want even if it’s wrong. Meaning and context. Go ahead now. That doesn’t mean everything has to be emphasized; there’s a differencebetween emphasis and significance. Now let’s go on, be patient, practise patience. When you want to stop, you have to connect up to a special battery that doubles your effort. There’s nothing so awful as a guilty conscience in art. Stop there. A C. My friend Horowitz went to the piano every morning after breakfast and played a number of C-major chords. He said he was washing his ears.’

I listened to Andrea and thought about theatre, about myself and actors, our sloppiness, our ignorance, the damned common stuff we produce in exchange for payment.

A production stretches its tentacle roots a long way down through time and dreams. I like to imagine the roots as dwelling in the special room of the soul, where they lie maturing comfortably like mighty cheeses. Some, reluctantly or quite enthusiastically and quite often, come into view; others do not emerge at all. They see no necessity to take part in this perpetual production.

This store of slow ideas and swift flashes of inspiration begins to ebb away now, but I feel no sense of sadness or loss.

Sometimes I probably do mourn the fact that I no longer make films. This is natural and it passes. Most of all I miss working with Sven Nykvist, perhaps because we are both utterly captivated by the problems of light, the gentle, dangerous, dreamlike, living, dead, clear, misty, hot, violent, bare, sudden, dark, spring like, falling, straight, slanting, sensual, subdued, limited, poisonous, calming, pale light. Light.

I high-handedly moved to the Savoy Hotel and swore I was prepared to pay whatever it cost. Lord Olivier offered me his pied-a-terre at the top of a high-rise in one of the more genteel areas of the city. He assured me I would not be disturbed. He and his wife, Joan Plowright, lived in Brighton, and he might spend the odd night in London occasionally, but we would not embarrass one another. I thanked him for his thoughtfulness and moved in, to be welcomed by a Dickensian character who was his housekeeper. She was Irish, four feet tall and moved crabwise. In the evenings she read her prayers so loudly, I first thought it was a service being broadcast through a loudspeaker in her room.

The truth in our interpretations is bound by time. Our theatre productions do indeed disappear into merciful obscurity. But individual moments of greatness or misery are still illuminated by a mild light. And the films still exist and bear witness to the cruel fickleness of artistic truth. A few steles rise above the crushed pebbles.

However satisfying writing is—that mix of discipline and miracle, which leaves you in control, even when what appears on the page has emerged from regions beyond your control—it is a very poor substitute indeed for the joy and agony of loving.

The philosopher Gillian Rose wrote this in her last complete book before she died of ovarian cancer, but I didn’t know anything about Rose when I picked up the copy of Love’s Work that Sara had left in the living room. I was awake early that day, glad to be alone but also wondering how long I was going to be this glad to be alone. As if it was urgent business I needed to take care of, I surrendered most of the day to this short, circuitous mediation on love and death and sex and longing.

There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy. To be at someone’s mercy is dialectical damage … You may be less powerful than the whole world, but you are always more powerful than yourself.

Yet there remains even in Lasch’s late books, and especially in his final book, True and Only Heaven, hints and portents of what a truly engaged and “radical” social criticism might look like. A test for this criticism would be its ability to provide a vision of the good life that rejected a progressive fantasy of abundance without sliding into nostalgia for yesteryear. Already in the early Seventies, Lasch had begun to explore how Americans could be made to wake from the dream of perpetual progress:

It is only therefore when we find ourselves imprisoned in our private cars, marvelously mobile but unable to go anywhere because the highways are choked with traffic; when we find ourselves surrounded by modern conveniences but unable to breathe the air; provided with unprecedented leisure to fish in polluted rivers and swim at polluted beaches; provided with the means to prolong life beyond the point where it offers any pleasure; equipped with the power to create human life, which will simultaneously destroy the meaning of life—it is only, in short, when we are confronted with the contradictions of individualism and private enterprise in their most immediate, unmistakable, and by now familiar form that we are forced to reconsider our exaltation of the individual over the life of the community, and to submit technological innovations to a question we have so far been careful not to ask: Is this what we want?

By connecting the big questions of liberal progress and perfectibility to an even larger, more pressing question—“Is this what we want?”—Lasch challenged his readers to search for a way out of the impasse where the only two options seemed to be a crackpot realism that insisted on technological degradation as a necessary corollary of progress, and a glazed-over utopian drive for perfection. As was so often the case, Lasch looked to the past—and to the populist past—for help articulating such a path. In place of the idea of history as linear progress, he argued for “concepts like nemesis, fate, fortune, or providence.” Instead of “luxury for all,” he endorsed “competence, as [American populists] would have called it—a piece of earth, a small shop, a useful calling.” Competence, Lasch believed, “was a more reasonable as well as a more worthy ambition” than consumerism or perfectionism, embodying “a humbler set of expectations” in addition to “a more strenuous and morally demanding definition of the good life.”

“One night after a meeting she asks me if she can talk to me. I nod sure, she sits down and starts to tell me, very hesitantly, that there’s this man she’s in love with. I think she’s about to tell me she’s afraid to sleep with him, and I start to tell her if you’re in love there’s nothing wrong with. . . . ‘Oh no, no, no,’ she interrupts me, ‘it’s nothing like that. Of course, we’ve been sleeping together. It’s that he’s Chinese. I’m terrified to tell my father we want to get married.’

“I stare at her. What the hell do I do with this? Finally, I say to her, ‘Look, if you’re afraid to tell him alone I’ll go with you.’ ‘You’ll go with me?’ she says. ‘Not only me,’ I say, ‘we’ll take a delegation if that’ll make you feel any better.’ ‘A delegation?’ she says. ‘Sure,’ I say, getting into the swing of it, ‘we’ll take the whole damned Communist Party. Why not? You got a right.’ ‘I’ll think it over,’ she says, and she goes away.

“Well, of course, I forgot all about it, the work went on, and a month later, after another meeting, Lilly suddenly comes up to me again, and she’s beaming from ear to ear. What happened?’ I say. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘it took me all this time to get up the nerve to say anything to my father, but last week I came home from work one night and I marched into his room and I stood in the doorway and I said: “I’m getting married.” He looked up at me and he just stared at me for a long time. Then he said: “Is he Jewish?” “No, Pa,” I said, “he’s not, he’s Chinese.” My father stared at me in such a way I knew he was thinking one of us had lost his mind and he wasn’t sure which one it was. But after a while he was sure. “I’ll kill you,” he said. My knees started to buckle. Then all of a sudden it was like you were there in the room with me. I saw you and my branch organizer and all the people I work with and I felt like the whole Communist Party was right there in the room with me. I looked at my father and I said to him: “If you kill me, who’ll cook your eggs?” He hasn’t said a word to me since. Li and I are getting married next week.’

An executive of the United Fruit Company, a Mr. something Stites—she couldn’t remember his first name and simply called him “you”—took her east to Oriente in his private plane. She’d been hesitant to go. He seemed like a person who was dangerous because he didn’t know which parts of him were rotten, or even that he harbored rot. “All this belongs to us,” he said, as they hedgehopped over green cane fields. “Three hundred thousand acres. Those are our boats, anchored off shore there. You see them?” Maybe he wasn’t dangerous after all, she decided. He simply wanted a showgirl to marvel over his sugar empire. They landed at company headquarters and she ran through a canopy of banana groves near the airport, trees with long, flat leaves, taller than she was and loaded with dank and heavy clusters of bananas, a strange purple flower dangling off the end of each cluster. She put her hand around a banana stalk. “They’re full of water, pure water,” the executive said. It felt like a chilled human limb with a cold pulse.

Vovô Lipo would be the leftwing governor of the State of Pernambuco three times. As history books say, in 1962 he was elected by a coalition of rural sugar cane workers, urban workers and the leftwing bourgeoise of which he was himself a member. Vovô Lipo’s great promise was land reform and literacy. Workers, who were at that point tenants of the sugar cane landowners, wanted to own their own land. They wanted to work their own land. After five hundred years of serfdom and slavery and early deaths and beatings and eating dirt to try to die (approximately: generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation) they wanted their own land. No masters and no slaves. And they wanted education. More than half of Pernambuco was illiterate. There were fires over the sugar cane fields.

When Vovô Lipo became the new governor of the State of Pernambuco he was strong in his body; thick limbed and thick furrow-browed and thirty-nine years old. For two years, he governed with his sleeves rolled up and, for the first time in the history of the state, union leaders stepped into the governor’s palace. Feet on the marble. The landowners called him a communist.

It was the year that Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, the year he wrote his sonnets, and the year Shakespeare returned to London after he had fled the plague which killed over 20,000 people. It was the year that an English sailor called James Lancaster left the court of Queen Elizabeth of England not knowing he would return a year later, sunburnt and seaworn and bringing with him the richest, largest haul Queen Elizabeth of England would ever see. Gold and rubber and rubies and wood. Billions in today’s money. Taken from a port on the northeast coast of a Portuguese colony in the new world. A port called Recife adjacent to a bustling and wealthy settlement called Olinda.

[...]

Shakespeare was writing in the time of empire and theft and genocide and slavery and this was when the world we know was built – and therefore you must understand its machinations and its magic.

Sônia there are things I regret, that I think about at night. Can I tell you? Yes? We were at a congress, in the South at a university in the Southeast. There were three hundred or four hundred of us there. It was right before the amnesty, right when we were thinking Meu Deus we have finally done it. We are this close to democracy. I was just out of – prison. The dictatorship is this close to finished – and we have finished it. We were asking for amnesty. You know the slogan. We were asking for amnesty. Ampla. Geral. Irrestrita. We were asking for amnesty. Recíproca. We were discussing this three hundred or four hundred of us at the meeting. Many students and I was there because I had been in the South during that time, it was before the amnesty before I came home to you Sônia. And there was one man who made a presentation. He was so anxious to speak in front of us you could see it in his hands. He had to wait several hours because the meeting was all day and for hours he was there he was so anxious to speak in front of us. He had dark skin. He was older, he was shaking in his hands as he waited to speak. He wore a brown suit, a white shirt although no one else was wearing smart clothes. And then he said to us, I am from the movement of people in prison. Not political prisoners. Common prisoners. They torture us there too, they beat us, they abuse us, they starve us, they make us work, they kill us in there too. There are thousands of us. I speak on behalf of the common prisoners to ask that we are included also in the amnesty. That was what he said. That was what he asked of us. And Sônia we voted no. We voted no because common prisoners were in prison for common reasons, not political reasons, and this was a political amnesty, that would complicate things and we wanted to keep things simple because we were this close to democracy and oh his hands were shaking when he spoke

Sônia there are things I regret

Maria and Ana go to the meeting where Edivânia who used to be a union leader speaks about conditions at the iron ore mine where they work and then they go to another meeting about conditions at the factory that processes the iron where Jorge works. They print pamphlets for the meetings on a mimeograph at night in the local school which Diana who is a teacher gives them access to. The pamphlet has a list of the names of the workers who have died at the factory and the names of the workers who have died in the mine. It is also true that wages have not increased in six years while profit and productivity have doubled though they do not write this. It is also true that there are military police on the factory floor and even a room where they take people. They do not write this either. Maria knows how to work a mimeograph. Maria and Ana sit in the school together at night. They hope there are no boots outside, no knock on the door. The mimeograph makes this sound: plec plec plec. They hold a meeting in the room of their house. Edivânia who used to be a union leader is speaking. Dust in the air. Sweat on their foreheads. When the police come the first time Maria and Ana say they do not know what the police are talking about. It was a birthday party, see here are the leftover brigadeiros, would you like one senhor? When the police come the second time, they are gone and so is Edivânia and so is the blue beetle car.

A communist who arrived recently to the forest says to Clitemnestra killer of kings –

The truth is that everyone is gone. All of our comrades are in prison or exile or dead. When I joined the revolution there were a hundred of us in a room and now there are ten. The new leader is a twenty-three-year-old boy who cannot grow a moustache. Young, like you. No one else is left. Even before Marighella died. The urban guerrilla is tired. In prison or the torturer’s basement. In the cities they are disarming. The unions are dead. The fight is here. Without the support of the masses there will never be liberation or a liberated zone. And the fight of Brazil has always been the fight of the masses against the powerful, in Canudos, in Contestado, of the slaves against slave masters to create quilombos, in Canudos, in Contestado

Clitemnestra killer of kings I must tell you now why I am running. Something happened to me, it was two months before we met. For years I had been in the same working cell in Recife. With my friend Paulinho, he was also younger than me. We were working together since the beginning. Sixty-four to sixty-nine. When we started we thought that it might all be over soon and by the end we thought these are the worst years the heaviest years, years like hands and feet of lead. I had just finished studying at the university, I was studying history but by that time I did not care about the diploma. Even before the coup I did not care about the diploma; I was a communist, a revolutionary, I thought my father was a liberal for believing that elections could change anything, I believed that the duty of every good revolutionary was to make revolution. The library was for revolution and revolutionary knowledge. The classroom was for revolutionary teaching! The campus was for revolutionary organising! I was not a big reader but my mother had said to me, Read Marx, read José Martí, Rosa Luxembourg, and so I did read, because it was a revolutionary thing, do you understand? It must have happened to you when you were recruited – you had to read the books. So I read the books. I had been reading them already, books from all over, books from Europe, novels from Russia. [...]

[...] My brothers did not dream of leaving and neither did my father although maybe my mother did. We used to go to meetings in the small town and everybody knew I was the policeman’s daughter with the policemen brothers and so I had to be twice as militant twice as always ready to show them that I was a revolutionary. So I read all the books. I said train me, give me a gun, I’ll do anything. I was afraid of nothing but also I was always afraid of my father and my brothers and sometimes I could not sleep in the nights (I still do not sleep always in the nights). When I left I wrote my family a letter saying forget my name, do not look for me, I have no regrets, and this is the life that I have chosen because I believe that the people should own the fruits of their labour, that the factory worker should not toil for the capitalist to profit, that the Brazilian gold and iron and coffee and sugar and wood from the forest and oil must not be extracted for the profit of the North American imperialists and the landowners in their pockets when there are children without shoes without food or art or books, I believe that no one should be poor, I believe that no one should be unfree or unloved or shackled, I believe you know I believe in the armed struggle. If they are armed then are we to lie on the floor? Like kittens. Let ourselves be shot in the face. [...]

Remember? You know what happens next. You’ve heard the story. In September 1974, Laura the famous revolutionary the infamous eldest daughter of the exiled governor of Pernambuco State, was taken into police custody to a building in the Zona Sul de São Paulo where she was tortured until she could not speak. The revolutionary student with the small moustache was disappeared by the military police and they never found his body despite the solidarity campaigns in London and in Berlin. There would be no more strikes or meetings and the union leaders were killed in so-called suicides or arrested and tortured or like Edivânia they were put on blacklists so that they had to move from state to state to find work taking new names everywhere they went not underground but alone so that they would not go hungry. And the communists in the forest were killed by government soldiers. The commander told them to fight. Every single one but the six who were imprisoned and the two who escaped 1000 kilometres through the forest. The commander with the grandsons in Salvador was killed and his son was killed. The commander who was 2m tall and had studied in Prague and whose parents had been born enslaved was killed and his body was hung from a helicopter and flown over the forest. [...]

Those were the darkest years, heavy like lead. The movement disarmed. The demands changed; amnesty, elections, democracy. And five years later, in 1979, the amnesty came, and the torturers were forgiven and all the people who had been communists were forgiven. And Laura the famous revolutionary went home, back to Recife, back to Sônia and Olga and Lúcia and Lamis and Lygia and the rest of her life. And she did not know if Clitemnestra killer of kings had been killed or disappeared or if she was alive. And she did not know how to find her because she did not know her real name. And it was a grief the size of the earth, as big as a life.

[...] By leafing through these magazines together we shared a mood of sweet latency, imagining the films we had in store, like provincials dreaming of life in the capital. Cinema was a wave originating elsewhere, which we waited to break over us. The waiting had something to do with the nature of adolescence itself; it also reflected the resurgence of European films at the time.

To be young and in love with films in the early 1960s was to participate in what felt like an international youth movement. We in New York were following and, in a sense, mimicking the cafe arguments in Paris, London and Rome, whee the cinema had moved, for a brief historical movement, to the center of intellectual discourse, in the twilight of existentialism and before the onslaught of structuralism.

He said, You know, I’m 67 years old and I’ve never stuck my pecker in a woman’s mouth. My wife wouldn’t let me. Not that I didn’t try. Jesus, I tried. You know something else? We haven’t had sex in eight years. I doubt we’ll ever have sex again. I envy you, buddy. You’ve got all the good stuff ahead of you.

[...]

I felt bad for the old man. It hadn’t occurred to me that anyone over the age of about 40 still felt sexual desire. Trying to picture him acting on it made me think of some freak carnival act.

When I eventually made it there a few years later, Carbone was exactly as advertised: an exercise in pure kitsch, a kind of theater restaurant offering the food, decor, and waiterly patter of an Italian American dining hall of the 1960s, only at many times the price and with none of the neighborly bonhomie. The restaurant existed as a riff on the Cockaignian theme of abundance: a long, leather-bound menu, carts carrying cocktails and condiments, shrimp and lobster and steak done “as you like it.” But it was all for show; transformed into culinary cabaret, these “moves” illustrated only the chasm between a true society of abundance and the reality of an American economy tailored to the whims of the rich. “What can I get for youse?” the waiter asked after my dining companion and I were seated, and for the two rote and underwhelming hours that followed it remained difficult to detect the line between reality and simulacrum. Was this guy really a crotchety Italian American wiseass, or just playing one? There was something joyless and cynical about Carbone’s evocation of the American restaurant’s—and by extension, America’s—bountiful history. Here stood a restaurant with the self-confidence to treat its patrons like idiots. Here was all the richness of the Land of Cockaigne, but only for those who could afford it. Here was America as a land of plenty, whose best and most generous days were firmly in the past.

Government officials come to the narrator’s workplace to warn his students of various sects operating contrary to Marxist-Leninist doctrine, the most dangerous of which is the mysterious Picketists, whose secret sign is an extended hand with an insect in its palm. Through Caty, one of his fellow teachers and a Picketist convert, he learns of their nighttime meetings, where they dress in black and march on local hospitals, cemeteries, and morgues, carrying signs reading Down with Aging!, Down with Cancer, No to Eternal Disappearance! It is an ongoing, recurrent, futile protest against the realization that:

you are living in a slaughterhouse, that generations are butchered and swallowed by the earth, that billions are pushed down the throat of hell, that no one, absolutely no one escapes. That not one person you see coming out of the factory gates in a Méliès film is still alive. That absolutely everyone in an eighty-year-old sepia photograph is dead.

[...] Watching her alternate between naked woundedness and vehemence, I was reminded of Louise Glück’s description of the aspiring poet’s debased yearning — her “adamant need which makes it possible to endure every form of failure.” The harshness of that failure is as little veiled by Julie’s face as a flush.