Authors: William H Gass
Life Sentences (7 page)
I carry this refrain on into
The Tunnel
, a novel finished thirty years later, where it turns out that men were made by their alleged creator to murder one another, and to invent the bulldozer in order to dig mass graves.
Along with hundreds of others, I was once asked by a French newspaper to state, in a word, why I wrote. I replied in a sentence suitable for a courtroom. I write to indict mankind. I suppose I could have said: I write to convict mankind, but man has already done that without my help, and, besides, I wanted the use of the pun.
So—on to number five: evidence for a theory. This is my account, the bald facts taken from Holocaust documents, of the death pit at Dubno, and my narrator of
The Tunnel’
s characteristic double-edged use of it.
We read, and therefore see before us a great mound of earth which bulldozers have gouged from the ground.… In front of the mound: a mile of naked strangers. In groups of twenty, like smokes, they are directed to the other side by a man with a truncheon and a whip. It will not help to ink in his face. Several men with barrows collect clothes. There are young women still with attractive breasts. There are family groups, many small children crying quietly, tears oozing from their eyes like sweat. In whispers people comfort one another. Soon, they say. Soon. No one wails and no one begs. Arms mingle with other arms like fallen limbs, lie like shawls across bony shoulders. A loose
gray calm descends. It will be soon … soon. A grandmother coos at the infant she cuddles, her gray hair hiding all but the feet. The baby giggles when it’s chucked. A father speaks earnestly to his son and points at the heavens where surely there is an explanation; it is doubtless their true destination. The color of the sky cannot be colored in. So the son is lied to right up to the last. Father does not cup his boy’s wet cheeks in his hands and say, You shall die, my son, and never be remembered. The little salamander you were frightened of at first, and grew to love and buried in the garden, the long walk to school your legs learned, what shape our daily life, our short love, gave you, the meaning of your noisy harmless games, every small sensation that went to make your eager and persistent gazing will be gone; not simply the butterflies you fancied, or the bodies you yearned to see uncovered—look, there they are: the inner thighs, the nipples, pubes—or what we all might have finally gained from the toys you treasured, the dreams you peopled, but especially your scarcely budded eyes, and that rich and gentle quality of consciousness which I hoped one day would have been uniquely yours like the most subtle of flavors—the skin, the juice, the sweet pulp of a fine fruit—well, son, your possibilities, as unrealized as the erections of your penis—in a moment—soon—will be ground out like a burnt wet butt beneath a callous boot and disappear in the dirt. Only our numbers will be remembered—not that you or I died, but that there were so many of us. And that we were
…—orderly, quiet, dignified, brave. On the other side of the mound, where two young women and the grandmother are going now, the dead have placed themselves in neat rows across an acre-square grave. The next victims clamber awkwardly to the top of the pile where they’ll be shot by a young man with a submachine gun and a cigarette. Some of the dead have not yet died. They tremble their heads and elevate their arms, and their pardons are begged as they’re stepped on; however, the
wounded worry only that the earth will cover their open eyes; they want to be shot again; but the bullets bring down only those above them, and for a few the weight is eventually so great it crushes their chests …
Sometimes a foot slips on the blood-wet bodies, and a fat woman slides face forward down the stack when she is hit. Climbing up, there are quiet words to the wounded, and an occasional caress. From the gunman’s end, of course, the mound looks like a field full of false hair. Millions die eventually, in all ways. Millions. What songs, what paintings, poems, arts of playing, were also buried with them, and in what number? who knows what inventions, notions, new discoveries, were interred, burned, drowned? what pleasures for us all bled to death on the ice of a Finnish lake? what fine loaves both baked and eaten, acres of cake; what rich emotions we might later share; how many hours of love were lost, like sand down a glass, through even the tiniest shrapnel puncture?
Of course one must count the loss of a lot of mean and silly carking too. Thousands of thieves, murderers, shylocks, con men, homos, hoboes, wastrels, peevish clerks, loan sharks, drunkards, hopheads, Don Juans, pipsqueaks, debtors, premature ejaculators, epileptics, fibbers, fanatics, friggers, bullies, cripples, fancy ladies, got their just deserts, and were hacked apart or poisoned, driven mad or raped and even sabered, or simply stood in a field and starved like wheat without water; and we shall never know how many callow effusions we were spared by a cut throat; how many slanderous tongues were severed; what sentimental love songs were choked off as though in mid-note by the rope; the number of the statues of Jesus, Mary, or the pope, whose making was prevented by an opportune blindness or the breaking of the right bones; what canvases depicting mill wheels in moonlight, cattle at dawn, children and dogs, lay unexecuted on their easels because of the gas, talent thrown out as if it were the random pissing of paint into
a bedpan; so that, over all, and on sober balance, there could have been a decided gain; yet there is always the troublesome, the cowardly, midnight thought that a Milton might have been rendered mute and inglorious by an errant bullet through the womb; that some infant, who, as a precocious young man, might conceive a Sistine ceiling for the world, and humble us all with his genius, as he made us proud of our common humanity … well, there is always the fear that this not-yet youth has been halved like a peach; that Vermeer, Calderón, or Baudelaire, Frege or Fourier … could conceivably, oh yes, just might possibly … have … been … gently carried to his death between a pair of gray-haired arms, which, otherwise, were no longer even strong enough to disturb a clear soup.
I wrote
The Tunnel
out of the conviction that no race or nation is better than any other, and that no nation or race is worse; that the evil men do every day far outweighs the good—the goods being great art and profound knowledge scientifically obtained.
The poet who has been my unwitting companion in this enterprise, Rainer Maria Rilke, similarly wondered, as his own career grew to a close, whether mankind had justified its reign of terror with some offsetting achievements. He thought about the grandeur of cathedrals. But, really, was it enough? I quote from my translation of the Seventh Elegy:
Wasn’t it miraculous? O marvel, Angel, that we
did
it,
we, O great one, extol our achievements,
my breath is too short for such praise.
Because, after all, we haven’t failed to make use
of our sphere
—ours
—these generous spaces.
(How frightfully vast they must be,
not to have overflowed with our feelings
even after these thousands of years.)
But one tower was great, wasn’t it? O Angel, it was—
even compared to you? Chartres was great—
and music rose even higher, flew far beyond us.
Even a woman in love, alone at night by her window …
didn’t she reach your knee?
That
but
—“but one tower was great, wasn’t it?”—that plaintive, despairing
but
—as if anything played or painted or built or composed or inscribed—or a little love, honest for a change, and felt by another—could weigh as much as a sigh in the balance against Dubno’s pit and its high pile of corpses, or any massacre, even if it is that of fish in a poisoned lake.
I have taught philosophy, in one or other of its many modes, for fifty years—Plato my honey in every one of them—yet many of those years had to pass before I began to realize that evil actually
was
ignorance—ignorance chosen and cultivated—as he and Socrates had so passionately taught; that most beliefs were bunkum, and that the removal of bad belief was as important to a mind as a cancer’s excision was to the body it imperiled. To have a head full of nonsense is far worse than having a nose full of flu, and when I see the joggers at their numbing runs I wonder if they ever exercise their heads or understand what the diet of their mind does to their consciousness, their character, to the body they pray to, the salvation they seek.
Yet I had to admit, wondrous as he often was, that D. H. Lawrence was a fascist chowderhead, Eliot an antisemitic snob, Yeats fatuous, Blake mad, Frost a pious fake, Rilke—yes, even he—wrong more often than not, and that even Henry James … well … might have made a misstep once alighting from a carriage. But—there it was again, that
but
, that
yet
—yet Henry was great, surely, if anyone was. How did the artist escape the presumably crippling effects of his intellectual idiocies? Here I had activity number five to help me. It was theorizing. Not about truth. About error. Skepticism was my rod, my staff, my exercise, and from fixes, my escape.
What is critical to the artist is not the fact that he has many motives (let us hope so), or that their presence should never be felt in his canvases, or found in the narrative nature of his
novels, or heard amid the tumult of his dissonances. In the first place, our other aims won’t lend their assistance without reward, and they will want, as we say, a piece of the action. No; the question is which of our intentions will be allowed to rule and regulate and direct the others: that is what is critical. It is a matter of the politics of desire, or, as Plato put it when he asked this question of the moral agent: what faculty of the soul is in control of the will?
I believe [I use this word here with the greatest irony] … I believe that the artist’s fundamental loyalty must be to form, and his energy employed in the activity of making. Every other diddly desire can find expression; every crackpot idea or local obsession, every bias and graciousness and mark of malice, may have an hour; but it must never be allowed to carry the day. If, of course, one wants to be a publicist for something; if you believe you are a philosopher first and Nietzsche second; if you think the gift of prophesy has been given you; then, by all means, write your bad poems, your insufferable fictions, enjoy the fame that easy ideas often offer, ride the flatulent winds of change, fly like the latest fad to the nearest dead tree; but do not try to count the seasons of your oblivion. (
Finding a Form
, 1996)
Life may be a grim and grisly business, but the poet’s task and challenge remains unchanged. Rilke wrote:
Tell us, poet, what do you do?
—I praise.
But the dreadful, the monstrous, and their ways,
how do you stand them, suffer it all?
—I praise.
But anonymous, featureless days,
how, poet, can you ask them to call?
—I praise.
What chance have you, in so many forms,
under each mask, to speak a true phrase?
—I praise.
And that the calm as well as the crazed
know you like star and storm?
—because I praise.
[“
Oh sage, Dichter, was du tust?
”]
Celebrating is the sixth preoccupation then. Because to write well about anything, and it might be mayhem, is to love at least the language that you are attaching to it, and therefore to give it glory. This result can be disconcerting, and there are readers, writers, critics, who feel that such attention as the artist often gives to the awful is itself awful. Even those anonymous, featureless days should be left where they lie, like idle waste, idly discarded—unphrased.
I am sometimes accused of retreating into language, of being a good writer—on paper. It is certainly where I often send my characters—villains or whores, most of them—into a world of words. Is there happiness, fulfillment, to be had from the canvas, the stone, in the score, on the page? Nope, I wrote:
So even if you hope to find some lasting security inside language, and believe that your powers are at their peak there, if nowhere else, despair and disappointment will dog you still; for neither you nor your weaknesses, nor the world and its villains, will have been vanquished just because now it is in syllables and sentences where they hide; since, oddly enough, while you can confront and denounce a colleague or a spouse, run from an angry dog, or jump bail and flee your country, you can’t argue with an image; in as much as a badly made sentence is a judgment pronounced upon its perpetrator, and even one poor paragraph indelibly stains the soul. The unpleasant consequence of every such botch is that your life, as you register your writing, looks back at you as from a dirty mirror, and there you perceive a record of ineptitude, compromise, and failure. (
Finding a Form
)
Translating (number seven) allowed me to get close to poetry in a way my own feeble efforts would never permit, and—yes—when I had finished a poem of Rilke’s I would sometimes imagine I had written it, and that his sounds were mine (as, in English, they had to be), that he was once more alive in me, in all of us who could hear him—say him—be him. I concluded my book
Reading Rilke
(1999) with this paragraph and one poem, as I shall conclude this reading and these remarks.
The poem is thus a paradox. It is made of air. It vanishes as the things it speaks about vanish. It is made of music, like us, “the most fleeting of all” yet it is also made of meaning that’s as immortal as immortal gets on our mortal earth; because the poem will return, will begin again, as spring returns: it can be said again, sung again, is our only answered prayer; the poem can be carried about more easily than a purse, and I don’t have to wait, when I want it, for a violinist to get in key, it can come immediately to mind—to my mind because it is my poem as much as it is yours—because, like a song, it can be sung in many places at once—and danced as well, because the poem becomes a condition of the body, it enlivens our bones, and they dance the orange, they dance the Hardy, the Hopkins, the Valéry, the Yeats; because the poem is a state of the soul, too (the soul we once had), and these states change as all else does, and these states mingle and conflict and grow weak or strong, and even if these verbalized moments of consciousness suggest things which are unjust or untrue when mistaken for statements, when rightly written they are real; they themselves
are
as absolutely as we achieve the Real in this unrealized life—
are
—are with a vengeance; because, oddly enough, though what has been celebrated is over, and one’s own life, the life of the celebrant, may be over, the celebration is not over. The celebration goes on.
