An Unstable Buffet

© Edward Moore 2015

It is unhappily your disposition to consider what you have as worthless -- what you have lost as invaluable.

~ Lady Byron to Lord Byron

Pardon, at the outset, the titular pun, and self-conscious allusion to Hemingway's A Moveable Feast -- unless, of course, you find these sufficiently charming or amusing to motivate your reading of this little piece. And the quote from one of Lady Byron's letters to her unstable and destabilizing husband, while not especially profound, is, I think, a gentle and valuable reminder to attend to what is on one's plate or -- to use a phrase from Burroughs -- to see what is on the end of one's fork. The present is, however, the worst place to remain. Brief attention to the moment is necessary for the success of any project, such as writing or sex, for without an unimpeded view of the words or the body in front of you, nonfelicitous accidents revise the past and splinter the future into innumerable and unmanageable possibilities. Which is why I feel that everyone aspiring to be a writer or a lover, or both, should see to it that he acquires an addiction (preferably booze) and spends at least a little bit of time in prison. Allow me to explain.

When one is pleasantly buzzed -- not dead drunk -- re-interpretation of the past becomes a duty, to one's emotional and intellectual health, as well as a pleasant and nearly effortless act of private creativity. When one is sailing gently the wine-dark sea, every port of call is a return to a place that is instantly recognizable yet bustling in the midst of a rejuvenation project. One is then as young as one's memories and, despite the haze of noontide and the shifting outlines of the "external" world, as clear-thinking and capable an agent as one could possibly hope to be. To change metaphors, when one is sufficiently enspirited, with the deftness of a virtuoso pianist improvising a cadenza, one trusts in the foundation of the composed piece to lend stability to the unpredictably emerging variations, and in one's own inspiration (courtesy of true down-to-earth spirits) to weave any false notes subtly into the musical texture, to produce a drama of unintended consequences which, when the last note is struck, will strike the listener as wholly intentional. (This last cumbersome sentence is an example of a cadenza-like approach to writing that is not, perhaps, pleasing to the reader, but certainly fun for the hung-over writer.) In other words, then, the past can be a source of personal myth-making, a sort of ur-text of one's life that can be endlessly glossed, allegorized, emended, deconstructed, or expanded into seemingly endless tema con variazioni. For the person who experiences, in the face of his past, a profound and complex depression born of missed or squandered opportunities, self-sabotaged loves, public and private humiliations, et cetera, the ability to re-craft and re-interpret -- like an Alexandrian commentator on Aristotle -- these dark damning lines into epic or romantic monuments of a life that is, in any case, inescapable, becomes a bulwark against the buffetings brought on by that charred imp of the pit known as Conscience.

So much for the past. Like a good buzz, one cannot remain with it forever. Eventually, a brief oblivion ensues, followed by a re-emergence into a blighted dawn where one is welcomed by the precise, predictable, and implacable torturer known as delirium tremens. Every time I fall victim to DT, I wonder if it will be my last; for with every alcohol-fueled, revisionary sojourn into my past, I re-enter the present aged if not wholly sobered, exhausted with the effort of demiurgic struggle with nearly chaotic mental matter, and fated to watch my effortlessly reinvented past and self assume once again their true form. In an essay on "Late Works," John Updike wrote that "The past in one sense recedes but in another gains in interest as the writer ages and the stage of the present empties of decisive action." This is true if the writer -- or indeed anyone -- is permitted to recollect the past in tranquility, and is not subjected to continual buffetings produced by, and productive of, actions both decisive and indecisive. But how many of us are ever afforded that luxury which Wordsworth considered the source of the finest poetry? In this era of ceaseless and inescapable talk, text, and web -- and now of wrist watches that literally zap us to attention -- tranquility and its attendant daydreams seems to be no longer in demand. The past -- as a nice place to visit for a few, a source of pain and regret for many, and a mine of material for the exquisitely rare type of person known as creative -- is consequently failing to receive its proper share of attention. Few seem to notice that insalubrious dwelling in the present is akin to the DTs. When I am suffering from that dreadful extreme of withdrawal, all of my senses are sharpened -- painfully so. My nerves are taut and I am ready to spring at the least possible stimulus. Time virtually stands still as I await a maddening cycle of waiting for the possibility of waiting for something that is nothing but a Blanchot-esque waiting for the wait itself. The physical sickness goes virtually unnoticed as the gentle seductive fingers of insanity begin to stroke me into a morbid, hallucinatory "little death" during which I lose both past and future in an ecstatically static present. But postmodern stylistics aside, and to put it in plain prose, people who live in the present are very often nervous wrecks, for they have no point of reference, no ability to "ground" themselves with the aid of temporal place markers. I knew a certain woman, for example, who simply could not handle a wasted day. If she and I happened to spend a morning and a greater part of the afternoon in love's embrace, you could be assured that the evening and a good part of the night would be burned away in a frantic effort to "catch up." She would fire up the computer, send off hurried and harried emails, blaze through the house on a cleaning spree like Durtal's housekeeper in Là-Bas, and finally collapse exhausted, the pleasant afterglow of lovemaking a distant memory. Living with the conviction that every waking moment must be crammed tight with purposeful activity is almost a guarantee of an early death -- it is most definitely a guarantee that people will find you insufferable, impossible ... unloveable.

Now in prison one is forced to accept wasted days -- many of them. But there is a saying: "Do the time, don't let the time do you." Anyone who has spent even a small amount of time in the pokey knows exactly what that means. A person who is already used to self-reflection will fare rather well in an environment of pointless activities (cards, chess, dominoes, television re-runs, circumambulation during yard time, et cetera), for the real activity for the introspective person will always be the quest for personal meaning. Prison acts as a buffer against the onslaught of the outside world, and provides one -- whether one wants it or not -- with the essential solitude for a sojourn into one's past. The person who has a rich and varied past -- equal parts (almost) joy and suffering, love and hate, sickness and health, and so on -- will emerge from the big house with a determination to "arise, or be for ever fallen." I am writing here of myself. Remembrance of past happiness -- triumphs, loves, discoveries -- kept me sane in prison, and motivated me, upon my release, to venture into unknown territory for the purpose of adding new material to my future past. Poignantly, I sought to distance myself from certain memories that I shared -- and share -- with a woman for whom I will always feel the deepest love by creating new memories of a vastly different type. This involved, initially, a restorative return to earlier, youthful passions that were not shared with my beloved, and in the pursuit of which she had no part and, therefore, no tainting effect upon those memories. Building upon memories of a time before my beloved had entered my life, I was able to re-enter the "free" world rejuvenated and prepared -- so I thought -- for brand new experiences that I would work into the ongoing narrative of my life without any painful references or flashbacks to the one who abandoned me. So my past, purged of pain, became entangled intimately with my present. The bafflingly wide diastêma or caesura created by the selective Lethe-draught, the attempt to exorcise the mnemonic phantom of my beloved, became a scene of playful experiments with alterity.

A good friend asked me one afternoon, as we strolled down a quiet residential street in Philadelphia (bad memories, brownstones, brittle stuff everywhere), why I like Hemingway. Not the novels so much, I explained, but some of the short stories, and especially the flowing, jubilant, and non-condemnatory reminiscence entitled A Moveable Feast. In the tiny preface, Ernest wrote: "If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact." No characters emerge as "real people" in this reminiscence (I won't call it an autobiography), rather they are depicted as agents of certain actions and carriers of atmosphere. Ezra Pound (one of my faovrite poets) is written up in absolute terms. "Ezra was the most generous writer I have ever known and the most disinterested." Knowing what I know of Pound, "disinterested" is a strange adjective. Perhaps Ernest meant that Pound's devotion to an American literary renaissance, a rejuvenation of the bristling hot-wired spirit of conquest that motivated Poe, Emily Brontë, Lovecraft and some select others, led him to separate his emotional life from his escriturial life. Tripartite Pound -- the lover (he loved deeply two women: his wife, Dorothy, and his life-long mistress, Olga Rudge), the linguistic virtuoso, and the thinker of things ideal (the fascist) -- outdid Hemingway in the arena of moving, shaking, and getting arrested. Hemingway was easily frightened, as the memoir makes clear. Pound was as sure of himself as a child is of getting dinner (to use Emerson's cutesy analogy). Ernest bragged and killed animals, got a hard-on watching a bull fight, never really satisifed a woman (I know this because he who boasts is he who cannot make the lady moan) and wrote prose so bad it is good. Pound made the ladies swoon, tasted the gift that only a woman can offer, never did any real violence to anyone. Sure, he was a bit of a loon, but he captured his own mind in the epic Cantos. He takes his place on the eternal shelf. Hemingway, old Ernest (with his kitties and shotgun), wrote with a sense of duty, a job getting done, no tossed-off phrases for the sake of a good line. Describing Wyndham Lewis, Ernest simply stated that Lewis's eyes are those of "an unsuccesful rapist." I don't want to write like Hemingway, but I wish I could if I wanted to.

Philadelphia is a place for loose-limbed artists. If you get hit, you let the punch roll off of you, your body swings and flops from side to side during the buffeting, usually because you are drunk. Walnut Street where we kissed passionately on a blazing July afternoon ... the Reading Market, where I placed my hand below and brought it up scenting of promise and a long night ... the Museum, explaining to the heroined she-devil that a triptych is part of an altar, et cetera -- hard and wild the whole time. What have I written? Works about Church Fathers, some petty panache stilted stuff about Heidegger to please my ex-wife (who hates me with a pitchfork type torture brutality hatred), some poems, and more than a few essays to pack off the day and let sleep roll over me without regret. Prison and alcoholism. On my table stands a large bottle of gin. Some cigars. To drink and smoke and hope that this rambling prose work will be read by someone capable of granting a dinky wish: tweet it. Why? The absurdity of existence is expressed well here. I am kind of crazy about a certain lady I've recently met. She has dark hair and dark eyes, a smile that emits centuries of femininity in a flashing moment. A laugh that invites, hands that throw warmth to the center of my body, ears peeking out from luscious black hair, demanding gentle nibbling.

Will I ask her to go to the Whitney with me? Or maybe just for a lunchtime bite? Of course not. I will continue to tap words onto this screen. And regret everything, from the embrace, the farewell kick, the razzle-dazzle shedding of self that is HOPE (such a sadistic lascerating rusty knife wielder) only to see her again on Monday. Smile. Recite a line from Tennyson. Hell, snort a line. It's only 11:41.