Good Trouble. Joseph O’Neill
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Название: Good Trouble
Автор: Joseph O’Neill
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
isbn: 9780008284015
isbn:
The status of poet is not to be worn like one of those fine ceremonial gowns sported by recipients of honorary degrees for a single, sunny, glorious afternoon. Not even by Bob Dylan. If there is such a thing as a poet’s mantle, it is a $4.99 plastic poncho: useless for fashion but good in the rain and the cold. And in an emergency.
His third thought about Merrill’s e-mail was that his name had never appeared in the Times and that if he signed the poetition it would.
His apartment was on the third floor of a Victorian only minimally maintained by its owner. There was a bedroom and a kitchen–living room equipped with an armchair, a desk, a desk lamp, a small sofa, and bookcases that entirely covered two walls. No television. The kitchen-living room had two windows. When Mark wanted to pace about the apartment, his one option was to walk to and from these windows. This he now did.
It was a journey that he’d made thousands of times, and thousands of times he had viewed the shingled rooftops of the houses across the street, and beyond them, in the town’s small business district, two brown glassy towers. At night, you couldn’t see much beyond the glare of the streetlight directly in front of the window. And yet evidently there was an inextinguishable need to approach an opening built into a wall for air and light, and to look through it.
Somebody down there was walking a dog. That was a poem, right there: the master, the leash, the joyful dog, etc. But the territory had been covered. There was that Nemerov poem, just for starters; and the one by Heather McHugh with that all-time-great dog line—doctor of crotches. A poem by Mark McCain would be water poured into a vessel that was already full: superfluous.
He kept looking, which was another poem—a poem about the peculiar percipience of the one who gazes out a window. The poem would do for the window what theorists had done for the threshold: it would offer the idea of the fenestral as a consort to the idea of the liminal. He wouldn’t write it. The automatic metaphoric associativity of “the window” was just too much. He could always play with the associations, of course. But surely there had to be better things to do than play with the associations of “the window.”
He returned to his chair and wrote, in less than half an hour, a poem that deviated from his previous work. The poem masqueraded as notes for a possible poem. It was titled “Meditation on What It Means to Write?” It read:
Problem: “meditation on” is a cliché. “What it means to” is a cliché.
The very notion of a problem, colon, is a cliché.
“The very notion of” is a cliché.
“Cliché” strikes one as a cliché.
As does “strikes one.”
And “As does.”
Ditto inverted commas.
Ditto “ditto.”
He did not write Merrill back. He did not put his name to the poetition.
As soon as he had not done these things, he rose up from his chair. He went not to the window but to the area between the chair and sofa. He stood there with hands balled into shaking fists. Silently and exultantly he roared, Never give in. Never not resist.
For almost a decade, Chris and I have received an annual visit from one of my former students, Jack Bail. This year is different. When, as usual, he e-mails to invite himself over, I reply that “our traditional dinner” can “alas” no longer take place: six months ago, Christine and I moved to Nova Scotia.
Jack Bail writes back:
Nova Scotia? Canada’s Ocean Playground? I’m there, Doc. Just say when and where.
“Oh no,” Chris says. “I’m so sorry, love.”
It’s I who should say sorry to Chris. Not only will she have to cook for Jack Bail but she will also have to handle Jack Bail, because, even though I’m supposedly the one who’s Jack Bail’s friend, it’s Chris who retains the details of Jack Bail’s life story and the details of what transpired in the course of our meals with him, and who is able to follow what Jack Bail is saying or feeling. For some reason, almost anything that has to do with Jack Bail is beyond my grasp. I can’t even remember having taught anybody named Jack Bail.
“And I guess Chris will be coming,” Chris says, confusingly. “His wife,” Chris says.
Of course—Jack Bail’s wife, like my Chris, is a Chris by way of Christine. Which is irritating.
I say, “You never know. Maybe he won’t be able to make it.”
Chris laughs, as well she might. Jack Bail always turns up. Without fail he marks the end of the tax season by eating at our table. It is always a strangely fictional few hours. Only after Jack Bail has left does our life again feel factual.
Chris’s long-standing opinion on the Jack Bail situation is that I should effectively communicate to him that I don’t wish to see him. It’s not her suggestion that I socially fire him in writing—as she acknowledges, “That’s pretty much psychologically impossible”—but that I make use of the well-understood convention of e-mail silence.
I’ve tried it. E-mail silence only prompts Jack Bail to switch to pushy text messages. For example:
Hi about this dinner thing. Just let me know details as soon as you have them, no rush.
This obdurate memorandum and others like it—
Dinner this month? Next month? All good:)
—weigh on me so heavily that in the end it’s just easier to spend an evening with the guy. The truth isn’t so much that Jack Bail is a terrible or unbearable fellow but that Jack Bail falls squarely into the category of people whom Chris and I really don’t want to see anymore as we hit our mid-sixties and apprehend the finitude and irreversibility of human time as an all-too-vivid personal actuality and not as a literary theme to be discussed in high school classes devoted to The Count of Monte Cristo or The Old Man and the Sea. A central purpose of moving to this Canadian coastal hilltop has been to shed our skins as New Yorkers and finally rid ourselves of the purely dutiful associations that, it seemed to me especially, overcrowded our day-to-day existences, which, even discounting work, apparently amounted to one interaction after another with individuals who demanded that we transfer our time to them, often for no better reason than that our paths had once crossed or, would you believe it, that their very demand for our time constituted such a crossing of paths.
(Illustration: A, who claims to be a friend of a friend, informs me by e-mail that he’s thinking of applying for a job at the school where Chris and I teach. Could he pick my brains over coffee? Further illustration: B writes to Chris to say that her child once attended the school. Could Chris help B get an overseas research fellowship? Exercising what is, I believe, a universally accepted right to reasonable personal autonomy, we choose not to answer these approaches; whereupon, we find out, both A and B tell people that we’re rude, selfish, full of ourselves, etc. СКАЧАТЬ