The Way of the Dog (11 page)

Day after day, no trace of bitterness.

All the while I was jotting things down. I would say, “Hold on,” interrupting a conversation to jot something down in the little notebook I carried always. I was
ostentatiously
jotting things down. The little notebooks came first. After a while I abandoned them for index cards. The cards were an affectation, I knew even then that I had taken them up for show: pulling from a pocket my little stack of cards, removing the rubber band, sorting through to find the right card, and jotting something down. For years I was constantly interrupting to scribble on an index card. I imagine that a person looking to
sum me up
at that epoch for someone who has forgotten might say, “You remember Nivenson, the inveterate card scribbler.”

It became a habit and then a necessity. It is a necessity now. Not for any literary reason, but because it is a habit.

Everything I write on my cards, or on my slips of torn paper, is the working out of a physiological impulse (a habit) and has no literary significance.

The habit of jotting everything down, sitting in coffee shops and bars, or stopping in the middle of a crowded sidewalk to jot something down, made me look demented.

“He was,” they will say, “a flash in the pan. He had genius, probably, but it was in fits and starts.”

In fits, in spasms. I had regular throes of creativity—
piercings
I called them at the time—when I scribbled furiously.
Now, now
, I would say to myself, it has come, it is here at last. But it hadn’t, it wasn’t. A line or two, half a page, sometimes only two or three words. It is a beginning, I would console myself, but it wasn’t that either, wasn’t even that. It was nothing.

It was not nothing. It was a
little
something. A fragment, a scrap.

The deep
metaphysical
appeal of jigsaw puzzles: by connecting the pieces one forms a whole. One
discovers
a whole that was there all along.

At the end of everything—the flailing about, the bafflement, the completely crazy suffering—would stand an impossible artwork. It would show itself as the justification, the point, the actual covert
destination
of the divagations and evasions of my life. Under the influence of the final
impossible
artwork the twists and turns would appear in their true shape as the normal meanders of an artistic life path. Once I had enough cards, once I had enough of the
right
cards, I thought, I had only to assemble it.

The idea that the index cards, which were actually pieces of my life, would ever fit together was completely crazy.

Imagine an expanse of ruins. A vast field on which are scattered thousands of bits and pieces of wood, glass, and masonry. As if a large building had been demolished there, broken into pieces so small and shattered they cannot be identified as window, door, plank, as if the building had disintegrated, though in fact they are not the remains of any building that has ever stood in the field. The debris was dumped there. Hundreds of tons of debris were brought in and dumped for use as building material. But no one has built anything, though the material has lain there for decades, and the people no longer think of the field of rubble as a building site. To them it is just a dumpsite in a barren field.

One day an elderly man comes to the field. He carries a megaphone. He stands in the middle of the field and shouts through the megaphone. The people living in the houses that surround the field come out and stand in the rubble to listen to him. He talks a long time. He tells the people there will not be a building there. He apologizes for not having constructed the building and for having covered a lovely meadow in trash. He ought to stop there. The people have accepted his apology and he ought to stop. But he doesn’t stop. He wants to justify himself by describing the impossible building he wanted to put there. He strives to make them see its incredible, heartbreaking beauty. He talks a long time, he is
carrying on
about it. In his enthusiasm for the imaginary building he fails to notice that the people are becoming bored and restless. They are not interested in imaginary buildings and are beginning to wander off. He continues to talk, but the crowd has drifted away and he is alone in the field.

Attempting to pick a pencil up from the floor I make it roll under the bed.

Diamond has written eleven novels, in addition to teaching. Eleven long novels, eleven multigenerational
sagas
, and a volume of literary criticism. The newspaper calls her a literary
powerhouse.
She is a literary
industrial-scale
waste producer. Obviously she is using some kind of
trick
, you can’t write that many novels unless you have a trick. For example, the same novel is being written over and over. That is what most of them do. They find a scheme, a trick really, and then use it over and over.

People like Diamond, the so-called literary powerhouses, are the number one
preventers.
Their example, and the malice and envy it stirs up, has been the biggest prevention and barrier of them all, absolutely destroying the aloofness and aesthetic calm I struggled to attain, essentially and repeatedly wiping out the equanimous mental state in which I might have worked with complete indifference. Instead I was forced to abandon that Apollonian indifference, was forced constantly to peer around me, to keep track of what people were saying about me, or what I thought they were saying, to figure out what they were thinking. I constantly had to prick up my ears in order to eavesdrop on what they were saying, and be consumed by rancor on discovering they had not even noticed.

A state of Apollonian indifference—that is the exact opposite of the one in which Meininger worked at the end. Meininger at the end had turned his creative impulse into an exact response mechanism to the vulgar tastes of his affluent public. He didn’t have to peer around to discover what they were thinking, because he was thinking the same thing.

“The barrel of a pistol is for me at the moment a source of relatively agreeable thoughts,” Nietzsche wrote in a letter.

Roy was part schnauzer and had a moustache like Nietzsche’s.

I once put the barrel in my mouth to see what it felt like.

Hemingway also.

When I have the pistol in my hand, I just wave it around.

There was once a story as big as the world. It had a beginning, middle, and end. Everyone recognized himself as a character in that story, knew his place in the plot. It gave meaning to life, though no one thought of it in that way, as having that role, because no one could get outside of the story and look at it. They couldn’t know that it was just a story.

“The total character of the world is for all eternity chaos,” Nietzsche also said. A consequence of the
failure
of that enormous story.

The world today is everything that is the case. It is the sum of all facts. A story is a
counter
fact.

There are no stories in the world.

The goal, Moll says, is inner peace.

Some things are becoming clear. It is becoming clear that I have to make a stand, for one. Or take a stand, or both. It is becoming clear that I must make a statement, for two. Lacking a statement, it is impossible to take (or make) a stand. Without a statement people have no idea what you are doing. Your statement is designed to clarify that, shed fresh light on it, situate it in relation to its origins, to what you hope to accomplish by it, and so forth. Without a statement your stand will appear arbitrary and stupid. On the other hand, statements minus stands are the sure marks of a blowhard. For me now to make a statement and then fail to take a stand is out of the question.

It was easy when all one had to do when making a statement was offend against good taste, when just making a statement
provoked
a stand. That was possible when there was still good taste, a code of aristocratic honor and after that a code of bourgeois correctness that could be violated. Now they are all louts from the outset. Especially the so-called educated classes, including the local middle class, are complete louts incapable of being offended. They cannot be offended even by good taste. At best they are puzzled, at worst they are amused.

There was once a young woman painter. A young
struggling
painter, impoverished, rejected by galleries, ridiculed by other painters, exploited by men. She kept a diary in which she described the minutiae of her daily life, and it was practically a
book of suffering.
She had made up her mind to kill herself. This was, as she phrased it in the diary, an
irrevocable decision.
There was no imaginable circumstance that would cause her to change her mind. She had even decided on the method: she planned to throw herself from the roof of her ten-story building. The only element of the decision that she left open was the exact moment at which she would do this, that alone had still to be decided. Meanwhile she went on painting, in fact she noticed that she was painting with a new vigor and radicalness. Her paintings, which had been rather conventional and dull, became exciting, even daring. She did only self-portraits now. People who came to view these portraits found them frightening and appalling. They looked at the painter with fresh eyes. Some people thought the suffering faces in the paintings looked doomed. They looked in the artist’s face and thought they
recognized
the doomed faces in her paintings. Her complete indifference to public opinion impressed a few people whose judgment was respected, and gradually her reputation grew. She sold paintings to important private collectors. Finally a huge show was planned, where she would exhibit nearly a hundred paintings and drawings she had done during the many years in which she suffered in obscurity. Facing the prospect of this important show, she realized that it was a bridge and that if she crossed it she would inevitably return to being the dull, conventional painter she had been before. She saw that she had to choose between her talent and her life. The night before the opening of the show she jumped from the roof of her building. The show opened on schedule and was a great success. All ninety-six paintings and drawings were sold.

I make a statement, and then I stop. An artistic statement that will make everything clear. As clear as the essential obscurity of the matter permits. A statement about the forest, the denseness of the forest and the impenetrable undergrowth, the absence of paths, the presence of deceptive paths that just stop or circle back on themselves. A statement about wandering off and becoming lost, about thickets. By describing the absolute obscurity, it will make all that comprehensible. An entertaining statement in black and white that will send the audience into paroxysms of tears and laughter and bring down the curtain on the farce.

I never came close to true art.

I was on the sidewalk near my house and preparing to cross the street, when the man backed his car out of the drive and onto the roadway in front of me, blocking my path. He stopped the car, rolled down the window and looked at me with raised eyebrows. I was not sure of the expression, if it was questioning or mocking. The sons had stopped banging their basketball. They sauntered over to the car. One of them seemed to be working his way around behind me. They are behaving like this because they know that I consider his wife, their mother, to be completely insane, I thought. “I am going to my house,” I said. The father and the boys exchanged glances. The father said, “Sure, go ahead.” I was walking around the front of the car, to get across the street, when he leaned from the window and said, “Do you
need
something?” but I kept on walking. I have never spoken to any of them, not two words, but they can tell by the way I look at their wife and mother that I think she is insane.

Writing up the circumstances preceding my demise, as I have begun to do, though of course not the circumstances of the demise itself, which I must leave to others, I have discovered to my surprise that I am enjoying myself. At the end of a row of gloomy sentences, which I expect will actually
depress
my readers, I notice that I am smiling.

Moll: if you were a dog you’d be always barking.

She has been to the beauty parlor. She has had her hair curled. Her straight, rather
stringy
hair is now a mass of short
frizzy
curls, like an African’s. She is wearing pink lipstick.

I turn around, and there is Diamond on the sidewalk behind me, on her way home from the market, I suppose, and walking faster than I am. She will overtake me before reaching her house, I anticipate from her footsteps, from the quick, determined clicking of her shoes growing steadily louder behind me. She is within a yard or two of passing, when I notice the footfalls growing softer. I look back, and she is crossing the street, intending to overtake me on the opposite sidewalk, even though that will mean crossing again when she comes level with her own house, all so as not to have to brush past me on the narrow walkway.

Had I met Diamond at one of the parties I went to in those days, twenty-five, or even thirty years ago, we would have argued. I am certain we would have begun arguing the moment I stepped through the door. The first casual remark, a remark about anything, would have set me off, and once set off I would have demolished her. I would have done my best to completely crush her. I was the sort of vicious party debater who knew how to use every trick in the book, every piece of gossip to crush and humiliate my opponent in front of everyone. I made myself the focus of attention in those days, pushing my cleverness to such a pitch, leaping into every conversation with something cutting or witty, that I must have seemed almost hysterical, I think now. But when Meininger came I found myself stepping back, willingly stepping aside, I thought then. In fact I was being pushed into the background, I see now,
relegated
to the role of Meininger’s faithful friend. When I was around Meininger, I felt lumbering. We were often at parties together, and I would come out with some remark that in normal circumstances, I see now, would strike anyone as shrewd or cleverly zany, but with Meininger around it would shrivel the instant it left my mouth, I felt at the time. I would not have finished speaking, and I would see that what I had said was actually flat and completely obvious. And Meininger’s presence had the effect that everyone else saw it as well.