Beloved one–

I miss you a great deal. The last time we spoke we were at the Brothel of the Mind. Oh, but I wish they’d just show the art, dispense the pelvic massages, and shut up. I’ve always despised it when people who know nothing won’t stop talking. I know you feel the same way—thank god you speak your mind, otherwise I expect I might shit myself from pure boredom. You’ve always had such a way with words, and “glossy but stupid” is a perfect way to describe the entire Brothel of the Mind. They mock me for the way I paint—they say it’s unfinished, unvarnished, rough-hewn. You told them to critique by creating, and swept away, back to America, back into the thicket of divide. I know you. You’ll cut off your hair and hide your frame and find a way to fight. I fear that when that happens I will never see you again.

But you know all this, and when I write I aim to distract you. Should I talk about how none of them knew that Easter takes its name from Eostre of the dawn? I know how furious that would make you. But you are an angry woman, and I love you for it.

Oh, but they’re suffocated by mindless good taste, my darling, and they don’t even realize it! To walk among them is to be smothered by the silk and stultified decadence. It is to marvel at how they find the de-sexualization of live, mute, sculpted bodies—posed as if for a photo shoot and moving as if according to an instruction manual—arousing. Voltaire would have four lifetime’s worth of material from four hours’ worth of listening to the perfectly coiffed Marquis D’Pretentious Bastard and Mademoiselle Va te faire foutre et mourir describe themselves as “erotic politicians,” or talk about how they were oh so different from everyone else and so oh rebellious and their difference and their rebelliousness made them oh so unloved and oh so angsty.

But I digress. You don’t want to hear about them. As fun as it may be to mock them, I am no better than them sometimes, and that’s when you get to smack me back down to size.

I went to a tavern to people-watch, and I saw a woman shivering in the corner.

She was old, and quiet, and I knew that speaking to her would only drive her away. She had been crying recently, and winced away periodically, as if someone was striking her repeatedly. There was a sort of resignation to her. No anger, no rage, only the endless army of defeat.

I refused to look at her as I got up and walked over. I leaned against the wall next to her and sank down, curling up around my mug of hideous alcoholic beverage, and shivered.

I have told you about my struggles with the voices, darling, how sometimes when I read I have to shout mentally to drown out their click-scuttling-snarling, how when they worsen I sometimes whack my head into the sink all morning to make them stop.

I know the signs, and her demons were all around her, had been all around her her entire life.

I moved a hand towards her, and though I wasn’t  looking I could feel her shock backwards—a sun-moment of clarity.

“I hear them too,” I said. I was afraid. I did not look at her. What could I say? I too live in the center of an unseen, howling void? You don’t stand alone?—Worst—and most pretentious of all—I know what you’re going through?

She looked at me with the revulsion and fascination normally reserved for five minute old babies and ran her gnarled fingers through my hair over and over, as if I were a cat.

“Are you real?” she asked, her voice spider-crawling over my skin. Her grip tightened. “Are you?”

I knew  from experience that whatever I said would be the wrong answer. I looked up at her and smiled, showing all my teeth.

“Find out.”

Long story short, that is how I got the scars. I think it was interesting for her to be on the other side of pain.

I have a feeling you would have told that story better. You’ve always had such a way with words. When you spoke to me last you spoke about your dreams, and I remember what you wrote, just so:

“Mother says she thinks of me as a singer painter poet. Isn’t that a lovely dream? Wake up and say to your hands, what would we like to do today? And do that! Oh, I am so excited now. Excitement is so funny to me. I am afraid of it. But here I am, and it’s late, and nobody but you can see me happy dreaming, so what the hell, it’s safe, and I am going to read and stitch and draw and wander wild down all the paths until my feet are worn and I am tall and brown and living.”

I don’t create. You create. I just quote and quote and honestly sometimes I think I haven’t had an original thought since I made the Library of the Forgotten.

Remember when Smirky Smirky tried to ask me about music? He asked whether or not I thought Mozart was better than Beethoven. I told him Mozart was more mathematical while Beethoven was more passionate. Direct quote from my sister. He seemed so impressed that I was infinitesimally versed in music, and I played the wide-eyed ingénue while he lectured me ad nauseam about how he’d grown jaded with their music, saying that for now Lizst wasn’t boring him, but he had Wagner planned for when Lizst inevitably bored him. I then proceeded to describe in excruciating detail the things I would do to Franz Liszt and the things I would let Franz Liszt do to me until his smirky smirky jaw hit the floor in shock.

While I’m on the subject of Beethoven—he reminds me of Stesichorus, the most forgotten of the lyric poets. Stesichorus lived among a refugee population hungry for language. He knew the way words can bleed under and through each other. Beethoven let his music do as it wanted to do and as it had to do. Stesichorus did the same with words. Stesichorus freed up adjectives, those “latches of being”—oh there goes the quoting again. Beethoven went deaf; Stesichorus was famously blinded by Helen of Troy. Beethoven took the old forms and defenestrated them. Stesichorus opened the old forms and let the new worlds within blossom before him.

Oh, I remember the first time I listened to the Ninth and the Seventh, and his 8th sonata. I wanted to throw up from it. I wanted the brilliance rising up in my chest to retch its way out and go and do something bigger and better with its life. And I remember the first time I read a fragment of Stesichorus, whose true name was Tisias:

IX: Geryon’s War Record

Geryon lay on the ground covering his ears The sound

Of the horses like roses being burned alive

 

XVI: Geryon’s End

The red world And corresponding red breezes

Went on Geryon did not

 

I shook for a long while after that. You’ve always preferred things that have the bones of Greek Mythology. I understand why. Those bones never ossified.

Under the seams run the pain, you said to me, tracing my scars with your fingertips one night.

I know you complain about overanalysis, that meaning is assigned to art after the fact. You don’t understand—when it’s my work I want overanalysis—I want them to feel something because I am a writer, and my ego is matched only by my general self-loathing. I want my work—an extension of myself in some way—to be picked over, because I labor in the dark. I have always labored in the dark. If anyone even reads or looks at what I’ve created, that’s a great day.

I wouldn’t even mind the mindless noise I despise so dearly—at least my work might make them feel that they ought to feel something. Also, when it comes it interpreting my work, usually they’re so far off what I meant by any of it that the voices and I find it hilarious.

That’s a lie, those two paragraphs. Only you can make them laugh or be silent. It’s a sign of how far gone I am, that I’m allowing myself to write any of that. I’m unsteady right now, but I don’t think you’ve ever minded that. It bores you from time to time, I know, but it’s the one thing you’ve never held against me.

Oh, but there are things that have been lost as well—remember my darling Talia? You recall her–seventeen, redhead, quiet, pointy-nosed, foulmouthed, with a mind that could shred the minds at the Brothel into wet little pieces of meat—she composed a symphony recently, and the New York Philharmonic itself wanted to perform it, and would have, but she left the damn thing in the back of a hansom cab. I’ve never seen her so angry. I painted her furious face in a blue cave, which of course was dismissed as rough-hewn and unfinished and sketchlike, but with great potential! they said oh so encouragingly, oh so patronizingly–I wanted to throw things at their heads until they were too busy bleeding on the floor to encourage anyone else.

Monsieur Monet appreciated my work. He has the same style, I believe. But he impressions Nature. He wants to found an Academy of his own. Perhaps I’ll join him.

Recently I’ve been listening to Franz Liszt, with a picture of him by my bed—never mind why. His music is raw and beautiful and structureless. You’d hate it.

I must end this letter, darling, for I have run out of ideas and won’t at all be interesting when next we meet.

In the words of our dear Mallarmé—“Fortunately, I am quite dead now.”

By the nine names, nine runes, and twice-nine charms, learned by the All-Father in his agony, free them and return to me.

Forever yours,

Occam’s Stubble