A Plea for Eros (24 page)

I slowly emerged from the headache and threw myself even more forcefully into my studies the following year. I became obsessed with Russian intellectual history—in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was so vivid, so crazed, so horribly sad in the end that I filled myself up with it. I continued to eat books like a starved person. I rejected Jung but was dreaming for Freud every night, making dreams the master would have liked: a twenty-year-old woman going through transference with a dead man. I wrote more poems, composing slowly and carefully—sonnets. I wrote a lot of sonnets.

It would happen again in 1982. A stupendous headache would arrive after I had fallen in love, after many months of ecstatic feeling had reached an aching zenith when I married the man I wanted. The attack began on our honeymoon in Paris with a seizure, one that to my utter astonishment threw me against a wall in the Galerie Maeght and then ended as quickly as it had begun. Half an hour later, I was walking in the street with my husband and my vision suddenly sharpened, as if every building, object, person, and color had been refocused through a powerful camera lens, and then I heard those words in my head,
I
have never been so happy in my life as I am now.
I was ill for a whole year. Near the end of that period, I landed in the neurology ward at Mount Sinai Hospital. A listless, prone body that had been ground to a halt by the drug Thorazine, I lay in bed plagued by guilt, busily interpreting my sickness. Had I just imagined I was happy? If I didn’t want to be married, why did it seem that I had wanted it so much? I was an enigma to myself, a burden on my new husband, and insane to boot. I have forgiven myself since then. I recognize that migraine can be triggered by any kind of high emotion, be it joy or fear or grief. I am resigned to myself as a jangling, spasmodic, fluttering body that must work to find calm, peace, and rest.

Sometime during my first week in New York City, the week I started graduate school at Columbia University in the fall of 1978, I was standing in the tiny student room I had rented, and I turned to look at myself in the small mirror over the sink. I knew the person I was looking at was myself, and yet there was an alien quality to my reflection, an otherness that brought with it feelings of exuberance and celebration. All at once, I was looking at a stranger. I had left my parents only days before, and when I said good-bye to them at the airport I had felt unexpected tears rise in the corners of my eyes. It seems to me now that in my mirror image I saw a confirmation of my sudden and radical autonomy, a recognition that a cut from home had been made, and I had survived it whole.

I embraced my solitude. I had left everyone I had known and knew nobody in the city. It wasn’t long before I cut all ties to the boyfriend I had left in Minnesota as well. I threw him off with the town and my childhood, and I did it abruptly. I still feel bad about it, not because it was a mistake but because in some frightened corner of myself I had known that I would never return to him or include him in my future and had hidden that truth from myself. Years later, I was at a dinner party in New York during which the host loudly declared his undying love for his wife. Two weeks later, he left her for another woman. I am as convinced that his declaration was sincere as I am that he was a cipher to himself.

That fall, I walked into another world. New York City struck me as more brilliant and more alive than anywhere else on earth. My body hummed with the city’s speed, verve, and humor. I acquired the urbanite’s sixth sense, the ability to detect the vague scent of danger in the streets and stiffen oneself against it. I wore out my shoes walking, and as I walked I rejoiced in the city’s massive ugliness, its mysterious ruined blocks, its gorgeous pockets of wealth, its markets, its crowds, its colors. Columbia is in and of the city, and I can’t separate one from the other during those years. Both the city and the school were part of a crazy new rhythm of things, a repetitive beat of excitement and discovery. The graduate department in English where I had come to study teemed with critical theory. Foucault, Derrida, Althuser, Lacan, Deleuze, Guattari, and Kristeva were authors I’d never heard of, much less read. By the time I arrived, structuralism had come and gone and the hipsters who populated the graduate schools in the humanities were deep into its postincarnation.

The ideas were our weather. We lived in them and they lived in us, and these hot, strong thoughts cast a subversive glare over Philosophy Hall and the Hungarian Pastry Shop, where students gathered to argue and explain and pick apart the French imports. When Jacques Derrida’s latest book was published in English, Salter’s, one of the Columbia neighborhood bookstores, posted a large handwritten sign in its window:
WE HAVE DERRIDA’S GRAMMATOLOGY!
Students stormed the shop to snatch a copy.

Ideas are always personal, too.

I
am sitting with K in the Hungarian Pastry Shop talking to him about Ferdinand de Saussure’s
Course in General Linguistics.
It’s a book K. knows well, and I am asking him about the relation between concept and sound image. He answers me by drawing a small picture of a tree on a napkin. It’s similar to an image in the book. I look down at the little drawing and what was abstract becomes real. I understand. A simple lasting revelation: We see through language. The word isolates, defines, creates the borders of the thing. Arbitrary and floating, language dissects the world.

F. is telling me about Kojéve’s reading of Hegel. He is a philosophy student, a good teacher, and a dear friend. He is patient, methodical, startlingly articulate. Systems take shape for me in his words. He is talking about the master/slave chapter in
The Phenomenology of Mind.
Hegel is too hard on the page, but now I am thinking about self consciousness, about two-ness, mirrors, about “I”s and “you”s, about entanglement.

The book is on the library table in front of me. To my left, the windows are letting in the last of the afternoon light that is the beginning of dusk. The book is Roman Jakobson’s
Two Aspects of Language.
I
am reading about aphasia. Jakobson writes that the aphasic patient loses first the words a child learns last
—
linguistic shifters, like pronouns. I exult in this discovery. I will use it in my dissertation, but more than that I recognize that human identity finds itself only in language as the subject and yet this “I” is fragile; it disappears with the “you.” The thought echoes inside me like the articulation of an old, old secret I’ve always known but never had the words with which to express it.

I will take some ideas and leave others. It’s all a question of resonance. Old thoughts from earlier reading will return in new forms, and I will fall in love with all the ideas that articulate what happens between us, with Martin Buber’s
Between Man and Man,
because he investigates the silences of touch and feeling, with Mikhail Bahktin’s
The Dialogic Imagination,
because it explicates the raucous plural dance of the novel, and even with parts of the intractable Jacques Lacan, so convoluted and maddening and yet, in some passages, a spark to revelation. In D.W. Winnicott I will find the story of the self and the other, the wounds and the blanks, and how the forgotten back-and-forth of early life becomes who we are. Years later, I will put the insight into the mouth of one of my characters, Violet, in
What I Loved.
“Descartes was wrong,” she says. “It’s not ‘I think, therefore I am.’ It’s ‘I am because you are.

I was poor in the city, and when I read, wrote poems, or just lay awake in my apartment I heard my neighbors through the thin walls. They rattled their pots and pans when they cooked, argued with one another, and made noisy love. Police sirens, rumbling garbage trucks, footsteps in the hallway made me jump and then kept me vigilant for the next sound. A young woman was raped in the elevator of my building. I heard stories of muggings, senseless attacks, and murders. One night on my way home, an ordinary-looking man stopped me on the street. I thought he wanted the time, but instead he lunged at me with a livid face and barked out an obscenity before I managed to duck and run. Men pursued me hard in those days, and there were times when I felt emotionally assaulted. They were too hungry, too eager, too full of lust I couldn’t return, and after an evening out I could feel depleted by their stubborn, never-ending pressure. Then it was a relief to be alone, a relief to see my books, my typewriter, my bed. And yet it was a time of dancing, too, of late nights and sporadic, short-lived passions I pursued on my own terms. My own aggression pleased me. But I wanted K., perhaps because he wanted me only fitfully, because he was elusive. I fell into and then got caught in the repetitive machinery of perverse desire—happiness and pain at regular, then predictable intervals, the cycles of an idiot in love—and finally, after many months of motion, the engine ground to a halt. I didn’t want it anymore.

February 23, 1981. I am leaving the reading with J., and we pause in the lobby of the 92nd Street Y to talk about the poems we have just heard. From where I am standing I notice a beautiful man in front of the door. He has a slender face, enormous eyes, and a small, delicate mouth. His hair is nearly black, and his skin is pale brown. He is smoking a little cigar, and he hunches over in his leather jacket and blue jeans as he brings the reed of tobacco to his lips. I notice that his feet are rather large, and I like these big feet, too. In seconds, I have taken in the whole of him and feel woozy with attraction. I can’t remember if J. sees me ogling and tells me that he knows the man or if I ask him if he has any idea who that person is. “That’s Paul Auster,” he says, “the poet.” We are introduced, and then the three of us head downtown in a taxi. In the backseat, Paul tells me about George Oppen, the poet he has just visited in California. I like his voice, and I like the warmth, the tenderness, I hear in it when he speaks of “George.” I didn’t think it then, but now I wonder if I wasn’t hearing something familiar. My father had that when he was alive. He was alive then. My father’s voice changed inflection when he spoke about someone he loved. In the taxi, I am already in love, crazed, enthralled, smitten, and am trying to hide it. The man beside me is not. I can see it in his shrouded, thoughtful eyes. I don’t let hint go. At the party, I talk only to him. We eat. We talk. We walk in the streets and talk. We sit in a bar and talk. The beautiful eyes are gaining focus. He is looking at me, listening to me. I can tell that he likes me.

It is early in the morning and we are standing on West Broadway together in the street. I am standing very close to him, looking into his face, but now, after hours and hours of talk, I have nothing to say. It is late. The evening is over, and I will go home and think about him. Then he kisses me, and it’s the best kiss in the world. A cab pulls up and we climb in together.

Not long after that, I read his poems, his essays, and finally the first half of
The Invention of Solitude,
“Portrait of an Invisible Man.” There were many books inside me by then, and yet these jolted me with their originality. I met the man before I read what he had written, but if I had not loved his work as I did or if he had not admired my writing, it would have changed things. Our work has been an intimate part of our love affair and marriage for twenty-three years, but what I read wasn’t then and isn’t now what I
know
when I’m with him. His work comes from the place in him I can’t know.

“When I get stuck,” Professor S. said to me, “I do automatic writing like the Surrealists. Try it.” S. was one of my professors at Columbia and a poet I admired. I was stuck. I had written many poems since I arrived in New York two years earlier but had rejected most of them as derivative or just weak. When I finally produced a poem I liked, I sent it out to
The Paris Review,
and to my astonishment, the poem was accepted and published. And yet, by the time I spoke to S., my work had begun to harden with self-consciousness, as though some inexorable pressure were bearing down on it. I hated my own words. That night I took S.’s advice and sat down at my blue typewriter in my apartment on 109th Street and wrote freely, and as I wrote I remembered what I had forgotten. I remembered the yellow paper my father gave his girls when he took us to the Historical Association, where he would work at his desk as we drew on the floor. Family stories came back to me—the bits and pieces of the life I had left. I noticed patterns, repetitions—a form emerged that I could never have invented beforehand. Something had broken in me, and I was writing like a person possessed. By the time I went to sleep, I had poured out thirty pages. For three months I edited and reedited those thirty pages into a prose poem. It was the best thing I had ever done.

After that, I never wrote anything in lines again. It would all be prose, and the best prose would always come in a flood. Where does the need to write come from? What is it? It is a need, not a choice. It’s a giving way and a giving up. I remember finding a reference to hypergraphia in a book on the nervous system. The obsessive need to write for hours and hours every day, the author said, was sometimes a symptom of epilepsy, linked to a pathological condition in the brain’s left temporal lobe. Auras. Fits. Writing. Dostoyevsky had it. Saint Theresa probably had it. My husband has often said, “Writing is a sickness.” But many people who aren’t epileptics have the need to write for hours and hours every day. Could my need to write be connected to my neurological sensitivity? Maybe, but not
what
I write. Content is what few neurologists discuss.

I am afraid of writing, too, because when I write I am always moving toward the unarticulated, the dangerous, the place where the walls don’t hold. I don’t know what’s there, but I’m pulled toward it. Is the wounded self the writing self? Is the writing self an answer to the wounded self? Perhaps that is more accurate. The wound is static, a given. The writing self is multiple and elastic, and it circles the wound. Over time, I have become more aware of the fact that I must try not to cover that speechless, hurt core, that 1 must fight my dread of the mess and violence that are also there. I have to write the fear. The writing self is restless and searching, and it listens for voices. Where do they come from, these chatterers who talk to me before I fall asleep? My characters. I am making them and not making them, like people in my dreams. They discuss, fight, laugh, yell, and weep. I was very young when I first heard the story of the exorcism Jesus performs on a possessed man. When Jesus talks to the demon inside the man and asks for his name, the words he cries out both scared and thrilled me. The demon says: “My name is Legion.” That is my name, too.