On a wall in a room in a museum in Amsterdam, in colors that seemed to me muted, or unobtrusive, though not without a harmony that impressed itself on my mind, was a painting of a woman whose figure was visible to the viewer, but whose back was turned, so that one saw her face only in profile, and could only guess at the thoughts or expressions that might’ve been evident if she’d swiveled around, or that would’ve been suggested if there had been objects beside her, on a table or a washstand, for instance, to give us insight into her personality and circumstances, in whatever interior she may have been in, depending on where the painter had worked when he’d painted the model this woman was based on, assuming she was based on a model at all, and was not, instead, conceived in his imagination, and portrayed as she was, in this foreground that had no features and no context, but rather was dark, so that even if there had been a thought or an expression on her face, it wouldn’t have occurred in actuality, or have been experienced by a person who’d existed, but would only have been invented, as the entire woman had been, for the effect the painter wanted to convey.
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Happy New Year!
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On a shelf above the TV in this flat where I am staying, in this city I’m not from but that I’ve visited before, and would like to visit again, is one of those Matryoshka dolls that can be unscrewed at its midsection to reveal, once you’ve separated the top from the bottom, and lifted it, as you would the lid of a jar, another wooden doll, of smaller size, but equal proportion, that itself can be unscrewed, at its midsection, to reveal, once you’ve opened it, another wooden doll, also smaller, but also containing another doll, and so on, until, several dolls later, if you keep going, removing dolls and taking them apart, so that you surround yourself with their shells, or halved bodies, you reach the final one, which is no bigger than your thumb, and which is also hollow, but which cannot be unscrewed, so that it holds only air, or empty space.
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I once read a novel about a man who wakes one morning to discover that he no longer looks the way he remembered he did, and he can’t understand why, though his friends and acquaintances don’t notice any difference, or, if they do, don’t register surprise, which at first causes the man to think that they are messing with him, or joking, but then, when he sees that they are serious, to begin to lose his mind, by which I mean to quit his job, and abandon his relationships, and wander the streets of the city where he lives, with an aimlessness that’s out-of-keeping with what people ordinarily do, although, because we know what he is going through, even if we don’t know for certain that what he thinks has happened to him has happened to him, the behavior doesn’t seem unusual, or, anyway, inexplicable.
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I brought a book by Turgenev onto the plane with me, and started reading it, and, as I did so, I recalled how the main character in a different novel, The Sun Also Rises, reads the very same work of fiction one night, in a hotel in Pamplona, after drinking all day with his companions, after watching the unloading of the bulls at the corral, before the corrida, so that when he gets back to his room, and begins to undress for bed, the walls seem to be spinning, and he thinks to himself how, in the morning, though he is enjoying the Turgenev now, and admiring the way the Russian seems to have constructed the countryside, so that one feels as though one might walk right into it, or as if one was in it already, instead of wherever one happens to be, he will not remember what of it he has read, though somewhere in his consciousness he will have absorbed it.
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Among the travelers near a gate at the airport from which my flight was soon departing was a woman who’d fallen asleep reading a paperback that at first was resting on her knee, where she’d placed it face down, with the covers showing, as if she’d hoped to keep her page and start reading again whenever she woke and picked it up, but that at some point slipped to the carpet near her feet, where it landed on its front, so that the pages fluttered shut, and where it remained until a toddler hurried past and happened to nudge it or kick it with its foot, though the toddler didn’t realize, but instead kept going, so that the book slid beneath the woman’s seat, and I saw that she might not understand where it had gone when she woke and began to look for it, although, as it turned out, the man who was traveling with her, and who’d wandered off to some other part of the concourse, to pass the time or get something to eat, noticed it as he came back, and knelt down and reached for it and brought it up and placed it on her lap, and then stood and sat down beside her, so that when she did wake, a few minutes later, and the two of them started talking, she saw the book, where she figured it must have been, and took it up, and found her page, and didn’t know that anything had happened to it, which, in a way, nothing had.
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The driver of a car I’d hailed from my phone this morning told me, when I asked him how his holidays were going, after he’d asked me how mine had been, and I’d responded, that his were likewise going well, but that he missed the country he was from, and that he wished he could’ve been there, though when I asked him what that country was, and he told me, and I tried to remember what I knew about it, from the details I associated with its name, so that I might make a remark about it, or ask him something to keep the conversation going, so that we wouldn’t lapse into silence, and lose the camaraderie that existed between us, he began to speak of his own accord, and to tell me things without my prompting, so that I discovered I needn’t say anything, but could merely pay attention and smile, and by the time we’d arrived at the airport at which he was going to drop me, and from which I was going to fly, he was singing a song for me in the language that must have been his first, or most beloved.
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And so I get up again, in a different city, but a city all the same, and stand at a window, and look out at the snow, which has fallen during the night, and still is falling now, and will be falling later, when I pull on my clothes and leave my room and go downstairs and drink some coffee and venture outside to walk with my sisters and my brother toward the lake.
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Ah, but no matter…who minds what this diary is? Or what purpose it serves. Or why I’ve undertaken it, or wherefore it might end. I could go on and on, asking these things of myself, and nothing I’d say would explain the entries I’ve included so far, nor shape those that are yet to come, unless it’s true, as I’ve heard said, that consequences pertain to even the slightest movement of the soul, so that everything I say and do and think and feel precipitates, to some degree, that which I’ll later produce.
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On the other hand, perhaps this diary has more in common with a performance than it has with literary art, for while I’m interested in what I have to say, and in fact discover what I want to say by saying it, so that language becomes, if I’m using it well, a living medium, as opposed to a series of phrases a reader has heard before, and whose trajectory can be guessed at, or anticipated, and thus experienced as boring…yes, what I’m most aware of, in my approach to this diary, in spite of my interest in what I have to say, is not what I do say, but only that I want to say something, as if the act of showing up each day, or being here, wherever that here might be, is more important to me than what I produce when I am here, though what I produce does matter to me too.
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And yet part of me wants to repudiate my earlier work, or to establish between myself and it a line of demarcation, the purpose of which would be to express the ambivalence I feel toward it, when I think of it, not so much for whether it constitutes art, or a project that has been realized, but for what seems to me, in its narrative, the pervasiveness of violence, the bleakness of landscape, and a darkness of prophecy that isn’t in keeping with my conception of reality.
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And of course, as well, this diary isn’t so separate from my previous work, but is an extension of it, whereby the themes with which I have been occupied, in poetry and fiction, and that I once made manifest with characters and verse, I now articulate with more immediacy, or, anyway, with less dramatization, for all works act upon a consciousness with immediacy, whether they are dramatized or not, though no work will have the effect an artist hopes it will have unless it is ordered in such a way that the audience upon whose consciousness it is directed is transported, and experiences that which the critic Longinus called the sublime.
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And of course I’m speaking to myself in this diary, but not to myself alone, for it isn’t a diary in the strict sense of the word, but only in its appearance, and in the conventions that belong to it as a genre, so that whatever I write here is not as uncontrived as one might expect, but has an artifice that isn’t to be found in my everyday speech, and thus is intended less as a private expression than as an expression made in private, for public comprehension.
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But when I ask myself if what I’m doing in this diary is art, I also have to ask myself if I’m able to answer that question objectively, or whether I would be biased, in which case the question should be put to someone else, someone who has no investment in my feelings, who understands aesthetics in a disinterested way, and who, by training or by native talent, can distinguish between works that obtain to the level of art and works that do not.
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The other night, on our way to the bar, my friend and I passed a house that had out front, as part of its Christmas decorations, one of those nativity scenes where the figures and the animals are made of a plastic mold that is lit from within by a bulb you cannot see, but that you know must be there, for the way it enlivens the colors on the surface, and draws your attention in the dark, though we didn’t stop, but kept on going, intent as we were on convincing each other of the opinions we held in a debate we were having, about one subject or another, though a few hours later, once we’d finished drinking, and happened to pass through that neighborhood again, on our way to an entrance to the subway, we stopped for a minute and looked at the scene, which was pleasant to stand beside, and regard without hurry, though we couldn’t think of anything to say, for we’d spent ourselves in conversation, though my friend made me laugh when he reached out and touched the donkey’s face.
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I woke early this morning, when it was dark, and I couldn’t fall back asleep, so I got up and pulled on my clothes and left my apartment and went down the stairwell of the building and out through the vestibule to the sidewalk outside, where I could hear, once I was heading in the direction of the bridge I wanted to cross, so I could reach the other side, and wander that part of the city that is busy during the day, but at this hour would be deserted, the wailing of sirens that seemed to reach me from a long way off, and that produced in me a mournful feeling, so that I began to wonder for whom they had been summoned, and for what reason, though after I was on the bridge, where the wind was up, so that I’d lowered my head and had buried my face in my jacket, and was out over the water, I could no longer hear them, and my mind became occupied with other things.
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Sometimes, when I go to the museum with my friend, she gets bored before I do, though she doesn’t tell me right away, but continues to wander with me from room to room, though no longer in an orbit that’s distinctly her own, but rather in a lethargic, almost dissociative way, so that I’m always aware of her presence, and she’s always beside me, not unlike a child, where if I stop and turn to her and say her name and smile, I can see her eyes come back into focus, from wherever they’ve been, as if, in order to maintain her demeanor, in this place where people are looking at art, to which she no longer has the wherewithal to attend, though generally she likes it, and for a time will find it absorbing, she has yielded completely to daydream.
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One of my friends told me to make sure and include a Christmas tree in my diary, so here it is, I love Christmas, it’s true.