Oblivio

Scene

While shaving just now, I remembered that I hadn't sent this email yet, although I wrote most of it last night (everything up to the paragraph about snow). I felt bad because you'll think I'm not thinking of you when really I am. So I put down the razor and turned off the water.

On the way to my desk I imagined myself standing across the street with a bunch of strangers, watching our building burn to the ground. Every now and then a new person would arrive, and I would see it slowly dawn on this person that I must live in the burning building because half my face isn't shaven.

Outside

Recently I've been having these experiences. I walk out of the apartment and stand at the top of the stairs waiting for K as she locks the door. While standing there I realize I can't remember walking out of the apartment. I remember being about to leave, but I can't remember leaving. Nonetheless I must have left because here I am at the top of the stairs.

From An Abandoned Homage To Thomas Bernhard

I've never liked the word cunt. Not that pussy is any better. Cunt seems demeaning, while pussy seems—what?—silly. I can never decide which to use in my diary. I try cunt for a time, then switch to pussy, then return to cunt, sometimes in a single sentence.

In desperation I resort, now and then, to vagina. But vagina is so medical-sounding that I invariably cross it out. My diary is littered with sentences in which I've drawn a line through vagina and written cunt or pussy in the space above it.

A few times I've considered using the word sex (meaning vagina), but sex is far too poetical. No one uses sex (meaning vagina) in everyday speech for fear of sounding lofty or prudish, or both at once.

Baudelaire, if I'm not mistaken, used the word sex. Or rather his translators did—lord knows what word Baudelaire used.

Bernhard, by contrast, never mentioned this part of the female anatomy. Of course I'm referring to that portion of Bernhard's work which has been translated into English. Because for all I know, Bernhard used the German equivalent of cunt or pussy in one of his lesser plays or novels, or perhaps in one of his poems (not one of which has yet made it into English!)

Still, I'm dubious, because nowhere in Bernhard's translated work—twelve novels, three plays, and a three-volume memoir—does he refer, direct or otherwise, to sex (meaning sex). The only possible exception is the scene in Bernhard's final novel, Extinction, in which the naked protagonist encounters his spinster sister in the hall on the morning of their parents' funeral and sneers, Haven't you seen a naked man before?

In a sense this is Bernhard's only sex scene—his only scene, really: a repulsive man taunts his sister with his nakedness.

My Gym: The Regulars

My gym's just a block and half away, at the corner of Union and 7th, in a basement. They tried to make it nice—and I suppose they succeeded—but it's still in a basement. There are no windows. This bothered me at first, but now I don't think about it so much. My gym is my gym.

I go nearly every morning. Most days my trip to the gym is the only time I leave the apartment, and the people I see there are the only people I see all day, aside from K and the occasional delivery person.

I rarely talk to anyone at the gym, but I notice everyone. I notice them and think about them and often make up little stories about them. I do this anyway, wherever I go, but the gym is ideal because I see the same people over time, the regulars. I like the regulars. I'm a regular myself.

Sometimes I'll spot a regular on the street, and if I'm with K, I'll turn and say something like, "That woman in the blue dress belongs to my gym. I told you about her. She wears sweatpants that say YALE across her butt." But K rarely remembers any of these people.

I tell her about them in the morning as we're eating our oatmeal. I call these my gym stories. I have a new one every day. I think K finds it both funny and disturbing that so much of my social life, such as it is, takes place at the gym, and that so little of it consists of any actual interaction with anyone.

Dreams

Middle of the night K is making whimpering sounds. I'm lying on my side and she's behind me, spooning me. I don't know how long she's been doing this, but what finally wakes me is the way she's shaking. I turn to hold her.

"You had a bad dream," I say. "It's okay."

"No, it's not okay."

"It was a dream, sweetheart, and now it's over."

"It was real."

She's sobbing now. I ask her to tell me the dream. She says her father came to visit and we were sitting in the living room, talking and having a nice time, when suddenly he said he had to go. "You mean back home," she asked, and he said, "No, dear, I have to back underground."

"He's never coming back," she says now. "He's underground and he's gone forever."

"No, he's here in your heart." It's the only thing I can think to say.

This prompts more crying and I hold her. In time she turns for a tissue, saying, "I'm getting better at this," meaning getting better at blowing her nose when she cries, which she didn't used to do. Nose blowing is my influence.

Later she gets up to pee. When she returns, she says she feels better and can go to sleep now.

I ask her to tell me more about her father. "He's always welcome at our table," I say.

In the morning I mistakenly believe I dreamed it all, but K sets me straight.

"I blew my nose," she says. "I've never done that in dreams."

Circle

My sister Andrea and I visited the circle yesterday. The circle is where we grew up; it's a cul-de-sac. We were driving to Target to return her vacuum cleaner when Andrea suggested a quick side trip.

We parked in front of Bruce Goldberg's house. Bruce doesn't live there anymore, none of the Goldbergs do, but I still think it as Bruce Goldberg's house.

One time when we were kids, Bruce's sister Rhonda, who was fat, sat on Andrea, who was tiny, and Rhonda refused to budge. I can't remember why Rhonda did this, but someone told me about it while it was happening and I came running. Andrea and Rhonda were on the lawn in front of Bruce Goldberg's house (which naturally I thought of Bruce Goldberg's lawn), surrounded by a crowd of kids, many of whom who were yelling and pointing.

I would like to report that I made Rhonda get off my sister, but instead I simply stood there laughing. It was Bruce who pulled her off.

Also, Bruce's father is the person who told me my first dirty joke. It happened in Bruce's kitchen as Bruce and I sat at the kitchen table, eating something. Bruce's father stood by the counter, drinking a beer, and simply started telling us a joke which from the beginning was not like any joke I'd ever heard before. Actually I'm not certain about the beer; that may be a detail I added later. But I remember the joke exactly as Bruce's father told it to me. The punch line included the word tits, which was an amazing word for an adult to say, in a joke or otherwise.

I believe Bruce became a doctor, but I have no clue what happened to Rhonda. Their mother died recently, of cancer. I don't remember her at all, which strikes me as almost shameful. How many times did I see her walk in or out of Bruce Goldberg's house? A thousand? Five thousand? I can't even remember the color of her hair.

Andrea and I made a circuit of the street, reminiscing about the inhabitants of each house. (By inhabitants, I of course mean former inhabitants.) It's always so strange to return to that street again. Everything is so much smaller than I remember. Naturally I tell myself to expect it to be smaller, and yet each time I'm surprised by how small it is. For some reason I can't reduce my expectations enough to match an ever-diminishing reality. Also, the houses keep moving closer together. In memory there's enough room between each house to fit in an additional house, but those spaces are nearly gone now. It's as though the circle is continually contracting, houses and all.

And the people are gone as well. That's what strangest of all—the fact that the circle is inhabited by usurpers who don't even realize they're usurpers. As we headed back to the car, Andrea and I watched a bald man stroll into Bruce Goldberg's house. Naturally I realize that Bruce and his family left that house over twenty-five years ago, and yet it still confused me to watch this stranger act as though he owned not only Bruce Goldberg's house but everything inside the house, including, for all I know, the kitchen table where I sat listening to Bruce Goldberg's father tell me my first dirty joke.

Oh, the lawn. The bald man believed—you could tell this—that he owned Bruce Goldberg's lawn.

Story

I know a woman who can only come from words—or rather, from stories. These stories are always about people coming. She reads them and comes. Naturally she touches herself as she reads, but the stories are primary: they make her want to touch herself.

Music

The opening is there but he cannot go through, so instead he goes part way through, which only makes him want to go farther, which he cannot do, and so, like a person in a line that is not moving and will not move, he takes a tiny step forward, moving that tiny step closer to the person in front of him, who in turn moves a tiny step closer to the person in front of her, that person being him, for there are only two people in line.

It's like a game of musical chairs. They walk in slow circles around a single chair, waiting for the music only they can hear, for it is in their heads, to stop. They do not want this music to stop, nor do they want to stand in line any longer, for they know it leads nowhere, and yet this is how this particular game is played. When the music stops, as stop it must, neither wins anything.

Window

Everything we experience is recorded and stored in our brains. I believe I read this many years ago in a science magazine. You might be sitting in a chair, looking out the window, and all the while your brain is silently registering and recording what it feels like to sit in that chair, the feeling of the chair on your butt and the backs of your legs, the pressure of it, as well as everything you see and hear while sitting, things you don't necessarily even notice, consciously. Actually I saw this on TV. There was a man on an operating table with a sawed-open head. The sawed-opened part had been flipped over and was resting on top of his head. The hinge of this flap (flap is probably the best word for it) was made of skin. A surgeon touched the man's exposed brain with a pointer that was connected to what looked like a giant car battery. Each time the surgeon did this, he asked the man to say whatever entered his mind. (Yes, the man was conscious during this procedure—in fact, he had to be conscious, or there would be no point in sawing his head open.) Each time the man's brain was stimulated, he would remember some random, inconsequential experience, like, say, sitting in a chair and looking out the window. I honestly don't believe I dreamed this. What amazed me was the unconscious part: that the man would remember things he wasn't aware of when they happened, that everything had been recorded and could be replayed, assuming one could find the play button.

Thinking about this now, I don't know what the point of all this remembering is. It seems that when everything is remembered, memory is reduced to a mishmash of minutia. Ideally we should only remember what matters to remember, and only forget what matters to forget. It's impossible of course, because what matters changes, and anyway who's to say what matters, but still this seems the ideal. Although maybe we already do this, in our fashion, without knowing. This being the work of the unconscious: to choose what matters to remember and to forget (with remember and forget in quotes, of course) and to do so in the background, silently, as we sit in our chairs and look out the window.

Cooperation

An awkward scene in the co-op. The cashier is someone I had a date with two years ago, just before meeting K. We had soup at a Japanese restaurant and she complained about being chilly—she hadn't worn socks—so I lent her the thick wool sock I use to store my digital camera. Every five minutes or so she would switch the sock from one foot to the other. It was a scene out of a romantic comedy, and I liked her plenty besides—she was smart, beautiful, and unpretentious—but then we got to talking about the co-op, of which we were both members, and I made the mistake of making up the plot of a film, set in the co-op, in which a character based on her gets a crush on a character based on me. I forget the details, but I believe her character switches her shift to be on same shift as my character, only their hippy fascist squad leader keeps sending her to other parts of the store to do jobs she doesn't know how to do. Each time she complains about this, the squad leader says, "Co-op means cooperation." I thought this would make her laugh but instead it made her uncomfortable. The problem, I think now, was that her character gets a crush on my character, and not vice versa, which I believe she found too flirtatious or presumptuous or god knows what. If I had it to do over, I would reverse the roles.

The next day I wrote to say what I nice time I'd had. I didn't mention the film. She responded, simply and coldly, with the question of why I would write and not call, since I now had her number. If I had this to do over, I would call and not write, but really, if mistakes like these are what matter, there's no point in trying. I knew this at the time, but just to be certain, I called. She never responded, and then a few weeks later I met K.

Today she was my cashier. Thankfully I remembered her name.

"Hi, Virginia. I'm Michael."

"I know who you are."

Her tone was the same as her email. She meant to indicate I'd made another mistake.

I ignored this—what difference does it make now?—and asked if she was cooperating.

Sauce

I had lunch with a friend at my favorite Japanese restaurant, Yamato, on Seventh Avenue. I ordered what I always order: the teriyaki salmon lunch box. It comes with miso soup, salad with carrot dressing, two deep-fried dumplings, rice, a California roll, and a little medley of pan-fried vegetables. Everything is first-rate. I particularly like the carrot dressing, although the dumpling sauce is yummy too, as is the teriyaki sauce. Even the rice is a cut above, fluffier and less sticky than elsewhere.

Also (and this is the point, really), I had nothing to say. I've had nothing to say for some time.

Related: I recently began a piece that begins:

All writing is positive. Even Beckett (perhaps Beckett most of all) is positive. His characters are compelled to speak, if only to speak of the pointlessness of it.

I wanted to connect this to Camus's idea of suicide as the only serious philosophical question, but I ran out of steam.

About Yamato, I often have lunch there on Fridays. It's a reward, a little treat, for a hard week of work. I bring the New York Times and sit at one of the tables near the big window that looks out on Seventh Avenue.

The waiter there knows me: he asks if I'd like the usual and I say yes. It feels nice to be known.

Guitar

I played a guitar today for the first time in many years. K's nephew, a musician, is visiting from Chicago, and he left two guitars in the hall. This morning, after he'd left for the day, I decided to try one. It was a better guitar than I've ever played, one worth several thousand dollars—not that I could tell the difference.

To my surprise, I found I've forgotten all the songs I ever wrote. Parts of some came back, a smattering of verses and choruses, but I couldn't play a single song from start to finish. I'm also down to just four chords: Am, Em, G, and C.

I've never counted, but I believe I written at least 25 songs on the guitar, some of which were good. I say were because they're gone now—or most are, the only exceptions being the handful I recorded. A few get played by friends (or once were), so these can probably be recovered, but the rest are lost, likely forever.

What's interesting in this is how little it matters to me. I used to hold on more, I used to try to preserve things—letters, photos, mementos. However, during my last apartment move, I trashed several boxes of such items, recognizing that I hadn't opened them, or even thought of opening them, in over a decade.

I've come to think of this as a storage problem. The older I get, the more past there is to try to save... while my capacity for storage—both physical and emotional capacity—diminishes, in seemingly equal measure.

Holding on is a losing strategy. Not that there's any winning strategy, of course.

Ball

A few nights back I saw a play written by a friend. I'd seen the play years ago, in a different production, and had read it before that and had loved it. It's a beautiful play. Poetry, of a kind.

This time it was lousy, mostly, because the lead actor was lousy. There are only two actors in the play, and only the lead speaks, so if the lead is lousy, the play is lousy. Although maybe the lead wasn't that lousy, really; maybe he was so-so or mediocre or some word or phrase meaning less than good but not that terrible. I don't know. I just know I felt for him because he was trying so hard to make it good, but for one reason or another it wasn't very good and he had to know this.

The problem was, he entered too agitated, leaving little room for increased agitation later in the play. So all his agitation was at the same high level throughout, with little dynamic variation. It's an easy mistake to make. Afterwards I wondered if I should mention this to him, but of course I didn't—I didn't even speak to him—and instead got out of there as quick as I could without making it seem like I was hurrying out.

During the play, I kept thinking about a poem I heard long ago at a poetry reading in the West Village. The poem was by a man named Chris Brown who is probably dead now, because he was already quite ill at the time and because it was so long ago. It was a simple poem. Chris and a woman, evidently his girlfriend, are walking through the park when they stop to watch a Little League baseball game. A ball is hit to the boy playing second base, and the boy fails to catch it.

The ball rolls through his legs, read Chris. What pain.

Happy

I'm going to a show tomorrow. I mention this in part because I don't go to many shows these days. In fact I can't think of the last show I went to.

Okay, I just remembered: it was Letter Purloined.

As much as I enjoyed Letter Purloined, the seats were uncomfortable, or I was uncomfortable sitting, and this more than anything is what I remember about it: being uncomfortable.

Actually, no, this isn't true: I remember how the actress who played the queen/psychiatrist would say uh-huh, and the way the king would recite his poetry, his hand cupped over the crown of his head, and many other things as well—enough to choke a horse, if a horse could swallow memories—but my point is that I rarely go to shows and yet I am going to one tomorrow.

Nearly everything about this show makes me happy. It is one of those things you know you will love and cannot wait to have happen, except that, in another sense, you don't really want it happen, because then it will be over and you will no longer have it to look forward to.

Anyway, if you're around tomorrow (around meaning: in New York City and otherwise unoccupied), you should join me. The show has a highfalutin title—Inquiry Towards the Practice of Secular Magic—but don't let that fool you. Here's all you need to know:

Wednesday, October 11, 7pm
Pioneer Theater
East 3rd Street (between Avenues A and B)
More info

Please note: The show includes the three-minute film, Michael Barrish Screen Test, which, despite my previous vow to the contrary, I have decided to see.

Villain

David said that Oblivio sounds like a comic book hero whose superpower is making people forget. I laughed, imagining a gang of bad guys thwarted by absentmindedness—they hold weapons in their hands but cannot remember how to use them.

Or should it be the other way around—Oblivio as a villain whose weapon is forgetfulness?

I like this better, for evil, like love, proceeds from memory. In the absence of memory, there is no evil. Tsunamis aren't evil, nor are piranha. You need a person for evil, someone capable of connecting the present to the past and future.