A FEW THINGS THAT ARRIVED IN A CLIME THAT COULD HAVE BEEN A HANGOVER OR A MIGRAINE
Enrique Vila-Matas concludes Montano's Malady with a description of Robert Musil on a mountain. As the coat, the hat, and the expression on Musil's face emerge from words, I recognize them immediately from the photo Vila-Matas used to write this. A photograph taken of Musil on a mountain. When I inform my dog that book ends with a photograph of Musil rather than the ghost invoked by the author to meditate, briefly, on the city of Prague, he barks three times.
The author doesn't acknowledge the photograph at any point in the text. In this, Vila-Matas resembles Samuel Beckett, who rarely ever names the paintings by the Old Dutch Masters that figure prominently in his descriptions of landscapes and interiors.
Alone in his cottage, Beckett stared at those paintings, described what he saw, and then placed the images in the frame we call fiction. Perhaps he was trying to exorcise them from his imagination. Obsessive relationships are tiresome. There are times when the only way out requires us to reproduce the thing we can't stop remembering. Reproduction can be read as a rite of exorcism. My dog barks again, this time for no reason. One bark seems more like a question than a response. The paintings in question feature dark backgrounds altered by shafts of light that invoke the metaphysical, a word Beckett avoided using since being kicked out of his mother's womb.
In the past year, I've watched over 118 videos of pilots debriefing the circumstances of various airplane crashes across the world. But only at night. Only when the house is sleeping do I return to my obsession and loop its possibilities.
The plane crashes are familiar to me. The shape of the horror engorged by the instant of realization that death is inevitable: this is already present when I begin watching the videos. Thus, each viewing offers a sense of recognition wherein the speaker reveals how the thing I imagined did actually happen, as confirmed by the evidence. The videos involving crashes relax me. They affirm my own experiences. They help me let go of the worrisome world and drift off to sleep like most imbeciles.
Only during those secret moments near midnight when my family sleeps and my dog snores am I permitted to live in the real world of airplanes. Unlike the world inhabited by most upright 21th century humans, the airplane world of minor writers and single barks knows that numbers exist to keep us from thinking about what numbers exist to avoid saying. The odds are not comets but the horizon is saturated with them.
I rarely leave home without a set of dice pilfered from a board game belonging to my kids tucked inside my backpack. Whenever an unexpected bird enters the frame, I remove the dice from the inner pocket and roll them. But what are the odds? I wonder. How much would the odds matter if we didn't secretly believe literature is a map that seeks to obscure its repetitions?
Bloody Mary only appears if you say her name three times while looking in a mirror. Dorothy has to click her heels three times to move between two mutually-denying worlds. There is the world with a house on a prairie and a family, but that world feels less real than the one run by the tiny magician.
Families in houses are not very realistic. Insomnia, on the other hand, is very realistic.
Montano's Malady situates itself firmly in the field of literature without laying claim to a literary genre. It is a story about a story that cannot be told, just as literary criticism is an imaginary world inspired by its relationship to finding language for the co-imagining of worlds created by others.
Knock knock, says the book I am currently writing when not writing.
An ex-lover appeared on the patio as I watered the flowers planted by my children. “Not you again,” I said wistfully. The former was wearing equipment. He was involved in a sort of dressage. He was dressed for a marathon and totally drunk. “You're a liar,” he said to me, in that dolorous tone which appears on the coattails of an unsustainable andante moderato. At some point, you just need an explosion. Like any violin, I wanted at that moment to kiss him, an urge I resisted by nourishing the white and pink flowers, and pretending to be a gentle drizzle located directly above the flowerbed, leaking down from a stationary, spot-specific cloud. So many plane crashes occur because pilots underestimate a cloud, I thought, and what literary critics ignore is how autocriticism isn't a nouveau cumulus dominated by women with pedicures and broken hearts but rather a cloud that has continued reforming itself for centuries across the globe. No cloud can be called an American, yet critics continue to write as if the only language of clouds is contemporary, or some variant of English with an American passport.
“If you think I'm a liar, you should walk down a street with Enrique Vila-Matas,” I said to my ex, fondly. In the years between our last meeting, my ex had developed significant calf muscles. I wouldn't have recognized him if ordered to pick him out from a series of calf-profiles in a police station; there would be no way to say with certainty yes officer, this is in fact my ex without being permitted to smell his breath, a situation that would inflame my fondness and make it harder to resist kissing him. I have been practicing the art of resistance for decades. The autobiographical self is frequently buried inside a nest of abstraction that elides the drunkenness of the author (who might be Marguerite Duras or any significant other) while weaving a mysterious aura around the character who is wobbling on the patio, guising the slur of their intonation with images of the ocean and intensified sand dunes. Every time I read about an octopus, I remember throwing up in the ocean and then trying to swim away from it, like many literary critics swim away from their presence on the page in order to demonstrate to those on the shore that the rigor with which they swim away makes them reliable and certainly more trustworthy than the drunk ghost of a former lover on the patio. Or his author.
“Did you bang him?” my ex demanded, possibly alluding to Vila-Matas or Duras or whatever author I was reading at that moment. Once again, I remembered how viciously we had fought about Proust, and how all my ghosts existed in relation to their particular misinterpretation of Proust, as well as the various timbres of passive-aggressiveness with which they voiced those self-serving bastardizations (usually when soused) so that, even though their calves and nostrils disappeared from my memory, I could still tell the police how each one of them read Proust. I could identify each one as the X who promulgated that particular bastard variant with Jaegermeister on his breath. “Of course not!” I said to the ex, raising my shoulders indignantly, as if to italicize my refusal to countenance his way of thinking about books. I would never harm a book, no, even if I hated a book, I would not harm it physically in any way. No bang. No boink.
“A seagull went by and I'm not going to follow it,” my ex said ominously. In a fit of insecurity, he had stolen my use of italics in order to draw attention to his own emotional needs and ornithologies. In truth, he had always been the liar and his pants were on fire and his lechery was notorious in certain circles. Even when he was not drunk, I wanted to kiss him and bang things together the way children bang the naked plastic bodies of Barbies together to indicate Love/Sex/Reproduction /Recreation has occurred. I found the Barbies in those positions on a bookshelf in the basement. I felt a migraine inching into the margins of my promiscuous parenting, a regimen defined by my failure to adopt a singular mommy-book method (although I had flirted with attachment-detached paraphernalia in the early days). So I said to my ex that it was good to see him. Truly, it was good to see his calves glistening in the patio sunlight, and to watch all that light shattering over his equipment, shattering and recombining into what could only be described as a shimmery worm looking for attention and italics. “You're a liar,” he said wistfully. “It's a pity that you over-watered those flowers by letting that cloud get out of hand and now all the flowers are dying. They are drowning,” my ex said. “What sort of mother holds Proust against her ex while massacring innocent plants that rely on her for sustenance?”
Knock, knock, said the book. Meet me on the patio.