What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (19 page)

1
Her books prior to this one are entitled
The Final Face of Eve
and
I
’
m Eve
.

J is for Jokes

Let’s Vote on It

Tompkins Square Park was the site of a tree-planting ceremony in honor of Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg lived on East Tenth Street, bordering the park, for 30 years before his death in 1997. I went, even though I was, and still am, ambivalent about him. Thirty people were there. One of the poets who organized the event took the mike. He started to talk about Ginsberg; the tree planted for him; Ginsberg’s name on a plaque; and the importance of Tompkins Square for the neighborhood. A woman standing on the sidelines screamed: “Allen would’ve hated this, he would’ve hated what’s happened to the park.” In 1989, the park was closed for more than a year, maybe two, after the City forcibly evicted squatters and homeless people from it. There was a terrible, violent confrontation, and, ever since it reopened, cleaned up and refurbished, the police surround the park every May Day, expecting trouble. The poet tried to continue, but the woman kept shouting, then demanded to speak at the mike. “Let her,” someone yelled. “Get her out of here,” someone else yelled. Quickly, the organizers decided we’d all vote on it: three minutes, yea or nay. She got them. I couldn’t stay and left thinking how democratic it all was, how right that a worthy ceremony turned into a fractious happening, an existential monument to Ginsberg. It was complicated and funny, too, like living inside a New York
joke: “A Jew, an Irishman, and a black man walk into a bar. The bartender says: Is this a joke?”

Try Again

I gave a fiction reading with the poet Matthea Harvey at New York University’s Lillian Vernon House, which lodges its creative writing program. At the end, we took questions. The last to me was: “What would you tell younger writers is the most important lesson you’ve learned so far in your writing life?” The next night I dined with a friend who’s an artist. He and I discussed how—and whether—to answer questions about our work: “I’ve said I believe in something, an idea or cause,” he said, “then someone in the audience says, ‘But I don’t see that in your work.’”

No one strong-arms you into becoming an artist or writer—most often you’re dissuaded—and volunteers who bemoan their chosen gig seem disingenuous. Visual artists are often called to account for their choices and asked to defend their positions. Few occupations other than finance, politics and crime entail this reckoning. Writers and artists may ask themselves why they make art or write, and many feel the pointlessness of their self-chosen jobs, but all rebuttals and answers to their existential questions rest on faith in Art or Literature. Faith itself will be tested.

Art and literary projects regularly fail, but the announcement of mistakes or failures is rare. There’s no written history of these failures, unless artists record them. In art, mistakes can be happy, revelatory surprises. Failures are also intriguingly resisted,
by people who keep on trying. My dermatologist has researched a cure for cancer for 40 years. At 82, he appears undaunted, but then he is one of many scientists engaged in cancer research. This commonality of purpose and group effort doesn’t pertain in the arts. The field primarily supports individual achievement at the cost of a general goal, like a cure for cancer. But pursuing a common goal for art would be misguided.

A comic gets rid of bad jokes, or is a bad comic, though failures might make it into the act, since they’re at the heart of funny. Comedy wouldn’t exist without failure, especially that of other people. Writers may publish idiocies and artists make dull objects, and some of this work may be celebrated as good writing or art. Some write more and more books, hoping to get it right, often digging a deeper hole to fall into. Success itself can be a rut, since, it’s said, it breeds success, so might condemn an artist to doing the same thing forever.

To the question about my best lesson for younger writers, I answered: “Don’t expect that being published will make you happy.” I didn’t mention the inevitability of rejection, luck, money, nepotism, etc. Before my first novel appeared, I’d naively believed that being published would compensate for every bad thing. In those pre-publication days, my writing was for me, I was its only reader, and I could believe it was without sin.

At dinner with my artist friend, I told him I didn’t know if artists owed anyone an answer or what a writer’s responsibility to readers was, if there was one. The ethics of these peculiar relationships remain conundrums. Notions of service to the field may not matter, if the proof isn’t in the pudding. Anyway, writers
and artists are not voted in or out by an electorate, though institutions—including collectors, gallerists, publishers, art magazines, critics—do vote but not in a transparent manner, not democratically. It’s insisted there is a public for art, but those who remark on it generally presume themselves separate from it.

Working with words and pictures engages artists and writers in a world they didn’t make, to which they may or may not contribute. I often think about Samuel Beckett and his agonistic relationship to writing and living. Beckett wrote novels, he wrote in two languages, he wrote plays. Beckett talked with actors, had intentions about how his plays should be performed, specified the props he wanted on stage, in service of communicating the incommunicable. A play is such an earnest art form, as it is written for, acted by and presented in front of living people. Its earnestness also resides in its ephemerality, the precariousness of every performance, tethering the genre to life’s temporariness. That Beckett wrote is a thrilling paradox. “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Societies find cunning solutions for communicating even the incommunicable. Which brings me to the time I lived in London. I didn’t understand the British use of “I don’t mind” to mean “yes,” “no,” “maybe.” The phrase seemed to allow for ineffable negotiations between people, though. “I don’t mind,” I saw, opened a conversational door through which either party could leave, without embarrassment. But it was hard for a foreigner to use, because it’s part of a British dance whose subtle moves are learned from childhood. The British also sometimes avoided answering direct questions. I loved that, it was so un-American, and now I sometimes
do it in New York, where people expect answers. I change the subject or pretend I haven’t heard the question, and watch surprise or chagrin appear on faces. It’s a liberation from others’ nosiness, a freedom I never expected. I recommend it, with reservations that will be different for each person, discerned only through trial and error.

K is for Kafka

The Litvaks Are Not Funny

The film shows at the Museum of Modern Art attract a strange audience. Very old people who come to all the shows tend to talk throughout the experimental work or leave. People drift in and out. The serious remain. Very big audiences become small ones. It’s a hard crowd to figure.

One night when I was there, before the start of the film, a young man leaped onto the stage and announced that he was an unemployed actor looking for a role in a movie. He pointed to his seat and urged anyone interested to contact him then and there. Smiling, he leaped from the stage and the audience applauded.

We became a more relaxed crowd and I remarked casually to the elderly women beside me, “New York is such a crazy place.”

Her answer was less casual. She replied: “Yes, that’s because of the Galiciani. The Litvaks are
not
funny.” She paused and continued: “The English
are
Jews. Gaelic is Hebrew but no one knew this until Pittman invented shorthand and then without the vowels it was clear that Gaelic and Hebrew were the same. The English
are
Jews.” Her hand waved in front of her and she said: “My daughter wrote the best art book ever written. It’s across the street at the Donnell Library. My husband invented radar. All the books are across the street.” I consider this and the lights dim.

L is for Lamentation

Of Its Time

What happened in 2012?

Otto Muehl, the Viennese Actionist, once kept a diary. A whole year was represented by this line: “Extreme Hatred for the Mayor of Vienna.” Stealing from Muehl, about 2012 I could note: “Impulse to Slap All Birthers.” Through our
annus horribilus
, or the US presidential campaign, some comfort came from thinking about history: people have always been stupid, wrong. Smart people, with generative ideas, occasionally prevail. This cheered me up.

I tend to believe that, before total annihilation, this clever/dumb species will design ingenious devices to ameliorate the poisonous effects of previous ones. I predict: The end is not near. Believing it, though, could be as reassuring to some as my recourse to history.

Future beings will laugh at us; each generation does about its predecessor. It’s an endless competition. The chunky, clumsy, slow things they devised—electrical wires, sockets. Coming soon—tiny memory implants, iWands.

But let’s not forget forgetfulness: A normal amnesia overwhelms most of any lived life. Recalling a year, last month? Stray scenes can return in startling dreams we usually forget; vague images surface, slip away.

In 2011, with millions, I watched Egypt’s revolution on television: “I’m watching history; history is being made.” But what does that mean, to watch an event that will be recorded, remembered, but not to have been in or of it? Anything could have happened in Tahrir Square. Normal disappeared. A few Americans told me they’d have liked to be part of their revolution. I thought, but didn’t say: A revolution doesn’t send out invitations. The Egyptians weren’t “having a revolution.” They were the revolution.

2012 rode in on the back of chaotic, thrilling, frightening political events: the clamoring will of people in the Middle East; the fragility of hope, and rebellion spreading; the instability of the euro and Greece’s desperation; the Occupy movement’s impact; now, street-by-street fighting in Syria, a government slaughtering its citizens, and no stopping yet.

In 2012, on May 1, I gave a reading at the KGB Bar in the East Village, with fellow writer Colm Tóibín. Afterward, a bunch of us had dinner. About 11 p.m., in a funky bar on Second Avenue, I heard a guy, who was peering into his iPhone, whisper: “Bin Laden’s been killed.” What? The bar turned dead quiet. He said, louder: “Bin Laden’s dead.” The bartender switched on the television. “Bin Laden’s been killed.” Colm and I walked outside, told passersby, or they told us: “Bin Laden’s dead.” I admit to shock, excitement, but more a rush of relief. “Admit” because I didn’t expect relief; I didn’t know that particular anxiety was lodged in me. What else didn’t “whoever I was” know that might inflect or form “my positions” and “my ideas”?

Unique characters, like Marshall McLuhan, envisioned the future, and speculated brilliantly. But no one knows exactly what’s
coming, or the consequences that will follow. No one knows what artists will do next, either, or why. Maybe perceptive, ludic, didactic, inspiring or dull art, film, writing. Contemporary work usually responds obliquely to its time, which necessarily includes the past, hidden or disguised. I didn’t expect relief at Bin Laden’s death, and artists may imagine and describe a surprising object from and of its time, with no obvious source.

In 2012, I saw an exhibition of work by Anna Molska at the gallery Broadway 1602 in New York. I remember her video,
The Mourners
(2010), in part because it caught me—thematically, formally, psychologically—and made present what I hadn’t expected. Molska asked seven Polish women to participate in a “social experiment.” The women were friends, who also had a folk-singing group, and sang songs at funerals. Molksa invited them to use a gallery, once a greenhouse, to do in it what they wanted. She provided neutral-colored parkas as costumes; and, in the windowed, spacious gallery, one wide bench and a white sheet, which became props.

In about 25 minutes, the women created a play: Enacting a funeral, singing to the dead and the living, they danced, rough-housed and laughed. They discussed God and the Devil, telling folk tales and their own stories about dying people. Very early in the improvised drama, one woman said, as if out of nowhere: “The Germans thought they were so smart; but they were stupid.” Suddenly the past joined the present and framed it.

Molska’s camera observes the group, usually in medium shots; close-ups study their happy, impassive, mournful faces. It watches them listening to each other or fashioning the white sheet
into a corpse, which they position on the bench. The women sing to it and, as they sing, an unnerving seriousness settles. Their eyes close. Their voices sound like the only music possible for lamentation. Later, World War II returns, when a woman mentions her father being sent to a camp, and her sympathy for orphans. Tears come to their eyes. The work includes much more than I can report.