prose
Gerard MALANGA
That Was Then, This Is Now
photo by Gerard MALANGA
"The mythological hero aspires to the
absolute,
but cannot realize this absolute in a woman's love. James Dean would have had an unhappy
life with Pier Angeli, who married Vic Damone: legend or reality? In any case, the
legend
is anchored in reality. In front of the church which Pier Angeli left as a bride, James Dean
gunned his motorcycle: the noise of the motor drowned out the sound of the bells.Then
he
dragged violently and drove all the way to Fairmount [Indiana], the cradle of his
childhood."
The Stars, Edgar Morin
. . . and from a letter:
Both Sunday & Monday nights
I have awoken three times
to see if you were there . . .
from MEMORY IN PROGRESS
THAT WAS THEN, THIS IS NOW.
"You must see Venice when it snows . . . Venezia bellissima," Elsa (Morante) said to me over lunch (Ristorante Bolgnese, Piazza del Popolo, Rome) where she'd be squinting every now and then at the fine print of L'Unita, folded half lengthwise, not more than 5 inches from her nose. (I would later learn her eyesight was deteriorating from advanced diabetes.) "Yes,' I said smiling, "I will go there . . . some day perhaps. It's the place to be with your soul mate, right?" She laughed . . .and agreed.
We never did wake up a morning in Venice when it snows. We never did take that trip to Paris. Visit the Rimbaud home on Quai de la Madeleine, Charleville. The Musee des Beaux Arts, Bordeaux. The experience of sharing a Chateau Nenin, Pomerol 1982, the last glass.
There would never be the opportunity to pose so I'd get the perfect exposure of you naked or clothed—the photos you so wanted—the headshots where I'd come in tight on the shoulder and breastbone.
Mohonk Mountain house fades in the blue morning mist. The leaves already turned. We would not occupy its small rooms, November sunlight filtering through the window curtain, you backlit, almost in silhouette . . . the tree branches behind you also. Or turning now your head birdlike to the side, catching the light, share a moment of repose in eyes meeting eyes.
Nor was there ever the opportunity to do something for her art.
"This technique in the art of living," Freud remarks in his
writings somewhere, and he knows.
*
Tina Modotti naked on the azotea, ca. 1923, made by Edward Weston, her lover.
Harry Crosby/Kay Boyle being geniuses together at Coupole, or at Ermenonville, south France—someone's grainy snapshot.
Lillian Hellman/Dashiell Hammett on open sun deck in early colorchrome looking out over mountains I can only imagine, or of Stieglitz/ O'Keefe in the Saratoga twilight . . . or the black & white photomat-strip of how you might've looked one year ago in New York.
These photos, imaginary and real, project a future looking back at themselves in the same amount of time, though the circle of time gets smaller and smaller. It would seem now "History is the memory of time," just like Charles Olson first pictured it. This is the world of synchronicity gone out of sync. The future irretrievable in the past.
No formula in which to express these feelings rightly until I've learned something by examining the out-of-sync process, until I get my power back. This is Stieglitz speaking. This is Dante speaking. This is the voice of an absent person in the dream upon waking. This is the heart. This is a recording . . . At the sound of the beep please leave your name . . .
*
It was the clouds passing over or the way the sun cut through the clouds—Sunday, May 3rd—that you'd be driving me back to Barrington. It was an occasional glance in your direction behind the wheel and the way you looked back reaching across for my hand, for the reassurance of what had occurred those few hours past now. It was the way the mountains changed color with every new angle, with every few turns of the road: the Catskills, Taconics, then finally the Berkshires. The trip, more or less 70 miles, was about to come to an end. It was what we said or did not say that was in itself reassuring. No promises. Just hanging loose—We'll see each other when we want to, and left it at that—getting off to a good start, cultivating rapport, like they say.
Roland Barthes speaks of "the adventure of desire." Perception is the process by which desire projects an image to hold fast to. A woman, thirty-eight, mature, attractive, a pervasive intelligence. "Intelligence invents beauty." A man looks at her while standing in the doorway to the kitchen. They come close. They embrace, slowly at first. Their clothes let loose, fall from shoulder and waist. The knees clean of all reference. The y-ligament of the backward moving leg pushing the front of the pelvis downward, fully physical and the image of the woman rising from the genital, kissing the pudendum. Later, getting up to make for the toilet downstairs she shows herself and endowed with qualities which have still to be discovered, but not these things are the factors, not your so-called chance meeting and beauty is not just skin deep in this instance, but in the very essence the aura she projects out from herself is not a lie, though blind to what inner sight she might possess. Such gestures, motion of hand, turn of the head, the neck curving gracefully into collarbone, hint a profound significance, but she needn't know that. She needn't know that the soul is felt through the eyes . . . that the eyes are what the soul sees through. She has only to trust what she feels and she'll know.
The specific circumstances of a given moment prevails in which reflects unconsciously in myself the entirety of what I had witnessed on those two brief occasions we'd been together, so that in reaching across distance and time, all time suspended in us. "Psychic images in the present" (Jung). The daydreams state. The situation infinitely tender and intense. The mons veneris exposed, or the way the light keylights the curve of the back with, how T.S. Eliot first saw it, " . . . that lovely curve up from the bottom."
I have committed the indiscretion of honoring what the eye sees—you, in this instance—the face of love and the smile coming toward me from whatever the fact of her existence from all possible Conjunctions even now dates in reverse, from the instants which are not lived, so that the slow loss of a small piece of time is only Change, or that none of it ever occurred. Sunday now, 6:30 a.m., May 17. Morning after full moon. You are asleep beside me and this is no dream.
Monday now. I'm here by myself, awake at an ungodly hour—turning with your scent in the sheets, the scent still on me. I didn't take a shower, didn't want to—thinking time lost as possibility, thinking wind in the trees across Anderson Street seen from attic bedroom window. And the light coming in that window—the light before sunrise—a dark blue. Empty-echoing rooms below, cats scurrying, all one world. Two nights, two separate occasions for encounter, entwined, that's all. A night driving through rain. A sunny day after. Bare legs and breasts. Nothing to look at, speak of, past now or ahead, but the faces unchanged in memory now. She grows reflective. Closes her eyes now.
If for once I didn't have to think it all through, or having not met, would you still exist? Aleister Crowley, mad magician, was correct in assuming "A line can only be aware of another line at the point of contact . . . and a soul of another soul." It is so. It is important that she stay fresh in the mind.
Seeing you in mind's eye reawakens those feelings in me I thought somehow dead: that moment when there's no difference between you and whatever it is you're looking at. A singular recognition. I could just as soon be living a lie where everything is made up, including your name, personal history, biographical data, where you live, etc., your license plate number. I could say the picture I made of you a Sunday afternoon May 3rd looking into the mirror at me was of someone else. I could say the picture you in turn made of me is that of someone else's life existing without him.
I could say none of this happened.
*
. . . and now the road is receding. The sky fills with a dark blanket of clouds. The Catskills reawaken in the sound of thunder off in the distance. I can hear the birds scatter. I can see the spruce out back undulate in a cool wind. Now the rain comes—soft tapping sounds on the window and roof. The house and the barn appear farther away than I had remembered. Butter, your cat, asleep in my lap.
4:vi:92
Great Barrington, MA