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Twenty years ago when I moved to Washington and went to Don Giovanni starring Erwin Schrott, I did not know that I was destined for a decade of increasing heartaches culminating in a bonanza of heartache that ultimately calibrated my soul with insight my soul had been waiting for its whole life. Till then I never understood the adage that failure and despair can be elucidating and strengthening. All that was unbeknownst to me twenty years ago.
<3
The cherry blossoms were duly out in the cool gray evening. Cherry blossoms don’t ordinarily grab me but I will admit they looked nice. Giant pandas don’t really grab me either, even though everyone is constantly raving about how adorable they are. There were no cafés to stop at as I proceeded on my way to the opera hall. That’s the nature of this town—all business. Methodical, plodding, no cafés for boulevardiers and bohemians. There are no bohemians or boulevardiers in Washington. So I just sat and read for an hour in the hall, being early.
heh
Ever since I started keeping my diary of remorse, my remorse has evaporated. The answer to a personality problem or spiritual malaise is to keep a diary of it because then the quantity you are quantifying seems to disappear. Therefore I should go on to keep a diary of other troubling quantities. Such as Diary of Lassitude, Lack of Motivation, Failure to Act, etc.
cute
The last time I saw Walker Percy, who lived across Lake Pontchartrain in Covington, a giant storm was rolling in over the bridge—the longest bridge in the world—that I would be driving on to get back home. We looked out at the gathering storm and he said, “Delery, the next half hour is going to be good for your soul.”
Because fear is good for the soul? The way despair can make you notice things more? That is the whole point of everything—to notice things more. But I don’t know exactly what he meant, as I suspect his comment had a religious connotation; he was a zealous Catholic convert. Good for the soul like the bracing fear of the wrath of God? Or when you think you are lost, salvation is near?
Adelaide was in town working at an anarchist bookstore. We met for coffee after work. I had spent most of the day in Judge Blanchard’s courtroom. His comportment was dignified and sincere and he kept order and was respected and everything ran smoothly in his courtroom. It’s just that he has no charisma.
Judge Blanchard was associated with vastly lowering the bail bonds of gang members, which would make Adelaide proud but many others worried.
Things sometimes got dicey when Adelaide’s inability to modulate her crusade against injustice in a social setting clashed with certain members of the establishment—such as my stepmother—and I had to mediate or gloss things over.
Adelaide says I have Stockholm syndrome for my stepmother.
Then she rushed off to a leftist picnic.
heh
INTERVIEWER
How are you going to cancel someone who writes, “The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled”?
HAYES
Beauty can’t be canceled. O’Connor is problematic, but she’s indispensable. I think of Calvino’s “Uses of Literature,” his notion of a universal library that’s always expanding around a core of canonical books. The core may be less fixed for those of us looking for alternatives to a white, male, Eurocentric canon—but the important thing is that infinitely expanding shelter, which is tethered to history but always gravitating toward what’s still outside it, toward what Calvino calls the “apocryphal.” No books are removed from this library. No books are burned. I’m not going to remove Faulkner. I’m not going to remove Wallace Stevens. I see them as flawed, complicated, dimensional people.
It was something. Out of nowhere, I didn’t give a shit about anything for like a month. Like nothing. I mean yeah, there’d been plenty of times where I didn’t give a shit about something. Oh that thing? Yeah, fuck that thing. I did it all the time. Multiple things even. Had to. It was part of life, sure. But this time it transcended all things and applied to everything. Like your brain after a severe blow, turning off all functions except what’s needed—breathing, but that’s about it. I just didn’t give a shit, for better or worse. Things I liked / things I didn’t like, didn’t matter. Didn’t want to paint. Didn’t want to write. Didn’t want to talk to anyone. Respond to emails or texts. None of it. I barely went outside even. Just baseline survival. And sure, I had also fake “not given a shit about anything” before, in the way many do—to prompt the world to say, “But I give a shit about you!”—sure. Still this was different. Now there was no desire, no disappointment. I didn’t want anything. I wasn’t angling. Just flatlining alive. It was something. The world had been on a rampage trying to get me to give a shit, too. All kinds of shit, you wouldn’t believe it. More and more. On TV, on the radio, the bench ads outside the grocery store, they all expected me to give a shit about something. I was asked to give a shit by video screens at gas pumps even. Yard signs accused me of shit. There were flags! Everywhere, everyone wanted me to give a shit. And it had to be the right kind of shit, or people would give a shit about how I gave a shit, and then I had to give a shit about that. It was an endless cycle. A terrible ceremony. So I fought back with nothing. Like air to an incoming blow. No dodging, blocking, or absorbing. Just gone. Not even there. I witnessed transparent versions of myself slowly exit my body and float away, at the grocery store, in the post office, bumping up against the ceiling. Birthed from my head and floating away, trapped somewhere in the atmosphere. Bumping the undersides of clouds while the real me waited below. I’d sit by my bedroom window looking outside, like a cat, just staring. Days, ate that way. I watched cars go by. People biking. Clouds. I used my binoculars to look at birds on power lines. I watched the man with the sores on his leg walk slowly to and from the liquor store every day. I watched the sun go down. Watched it come up. Days, ate. It was something. Made me realize I had gotten too good at what I’d been doing. You can get too good at something that’s meant as a temporary solution, and then it becomes the problem. You start living in it. And the worst part is, it’s not bad.
heh
His real life, outside of our destination, was complicated by ambivalence. Since childhood, his basic needs had been met as if by an invisible force. At first, he believed his mother and father were providing for him, but when they died, he was surprised to feel that he had suffered no loss. He envied the fact that people like me didn’t have desires, as we were still struggling to fulfill our basic needs. His own desires felt paralyzing, because none of them were motivated by need. Everything was available to be possessed, which made it impossible to quantify any particular object’s allure. He wished he felt more lust for his mistress. I tried to relate to him and understand his concerns.
lol
I asked the woman if she liked the president and his wife. She told me that she didn’t like them or dislike them, because she wasn’t interested in them as individuals but as representative historical actors. I didn’t know what she meant by that, “representative historical actors,” so I asked her to clarify. She told me that politicians pretended to have personalities, but their idiosyncrasies were just traits they developed in order to get elected. For most voters, it was less important for a candidate to have a coherent ideology than it was for them to have a dog, a second home, or a sense of humor. It was necessary to cut through all of that, she said, if one wished to have a grasp on one’s place in history. She seemed excited by that idea, having a grasp on one’s place in history, but then she sighed, so I wasn’t sure if she was excited or felt some other emotion. Unfortunately, she said, the American people had no sense of history. They believed that everything that came before them was irrelevant, except insofar as it had given them what they needed. They hoped that their children would have children, and that those children would believe in hardship the way they themselves had once believed in fairy tales.
In the early seventies, when my daughter was two, I moved into the first of these hippie houses—what were called communal houses—in the inner suburbs of Melbourne. It was while I was living there that I had an affair with a guy who was addicted to heroin, and as it rolled on over a year or so, the chaos of it became painful and obsessive-making. I’d been keeping a diary for a couple of years and was enjoying it—I needed to write it, and I was learning to write through it, by means of it—and as this relationship grew in complexity, as my life thickened up and became more eventful, I could see that my experiences were forming themselves into the kind of curve that we call a “story.” Story is a chunk of life with a bend in it, and I could feel this one coming. I suddenly thought, Maybe I could write about this while it’s still happening, as it’s coming into its bend.
I decided to look back in the diary to the moment when I first fell in love with the guy. I skipped over all the boring stuff, and transcribed the interesting bits into another notebook. I wanted to see if I could shape it into something. For about a year in the mid-seventies I sat every day in the state library with my two notebooks and kind of blindly thrashed along. So the truth is that Monkey Grip really was my diary, with links between passages and with some passages expanded.