… (which I watched, at far too young an age, in a large dark silent room at my grandfather’s house in Port Deposit Maryland) was titled David and Eve. I remembered the title as David and Eve.
David and Lisa were brilliant, sensitive, lovers who met at a mental institution. Like Heathcliff and Cathy, only they understood each other; to the rest of the world they were bizarre enigmas.
It’s only with the recent deaths of my friend David Kosofsky, and his sister, the literary theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, that I see why I changed the title. Ten years after I saw that film, when I met the two of them, their brilliance and closeness and sensitivity – and strangeness – must have merged in my mind with the characters in the film.
Although I was David’s high school girlfriend (a fact that angered Eve and made her behave badly toward me), it was never, in my mind, David and Margaret. It was always David and Eve. Like David and Lisa, they shared a verbal and emotional world no one else could enter. Like Emily and the other Brontes, David and his sister had built a Gondal.
As a naive sixteen-year-old, I could sense the unsettling dependency, the charged intimacy, between brother and sister – and I could certainly sense Eve’s hostility toward me – but I couldn’t understand the nature of the relationship, or the hostility. I think it must have mainly registered – to an insecure kid – as intellectual snobbery, for both David and Eve were, at that age, arrogant.
In essays written toward the end of her life, Sedgwick elaborates on what I thought arrogance — elaborates, essentially, on the striking, motiveless cruelty toward me she displayed when I was a vulnerable and non-comprehending sixteen year old. She laments “the almost grotesquely unintelligent design of every human psyche,” and in particular the way attempts to overcome one’s tendency toward ressentiment (“which [Nietzsche] diagnoses as a self-propagating, near-universal psychology compounded of injury, rancor, envy, and self-righteous vindictiveness, fermented by a sense of disempowerment”) only seem to circle back to the same ressentiment. She argues that this vicious circle played out to some extent, for example, in her own field of queer theory, where aggressively projecting, say, envy-ridden, repressed homosexuality onto perceived enemies of gay liberation merely doubles back as an instance of one’s own paranoid hostilities.
In my case, as David’s first serious girlfriend, I suppose I activated (using Sedgwick’s Kleinian scheme) her anxiety at the loss of omnipotence in regard to her younger, adoring brother – an omnipotence he had until this point gladly granted her. This was Klein’s paranoid/schizoid mode – the direction of contempt toward perceived enemies — or, indeed, in the political rather than personal realm, real enemies. Sedgwick laments but understands the way queer theory, in the worst of the AIDS years, exhibited a “surplus” of “paranoid energies.” How could it not? But now (2007) Sedgwick wants “alternative forms of utterance and argument,” not so paranoid, not so self-defeatingly aggressive.
Sedgwick’s right that the human psyche is most unintelligently designed, for she needn’t have bothered activating her ressentiment shields against me. (The larger context of all of this – on which I stumbled decades later – was mental illness, as Sedgwick notes in a 2000 interview: “I was a mess at that point psychically, which made for a certain contempt for everything around me.”) As I said, it was always David and Eve, never David and Margaret. I believe she remained, long after David and I had evolved into kindly old friends, long after David had engaged in any number of intense relationships with other women, primary in his life. You could argue that he was her first, most powerful, and most powerfully influenced, student. Her cruelty against me certainly accomplished what must have seemed to her her goal – it made me steer clear of her – yet had she appreciated the extent of her power, she would have realized it was expressing itself in a way not merely wounding to me but totally unnecessary.
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Thus Eve’s death in 2009 shattered David; he wrote to me that although he thought he was prepared for it (she had had cancer for almost twenty years), in the event he wasn’t. His uncharacteristic outbursts of anger at me and others conveyed raw bitterness. His big sister, his model for all things affective and intellectual, had suffered for years and had died too soon.
David knew from infancy what all people in the field of literature now know – Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was powerfully charismatic. She pretty much single-handedly, through sheer force of personality and intellect, founded a cultural movement – queer theory. A phrase David often used with me was personal truths – the point, in life, was to discover, and then defend against all ridicule and incomprehension and disdain, the particular modes of being and understanding that you had evolved for yourself. David was learning this all his life with her; the world learned it from her celebrated writing.
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David died just two years after Eve, at the same age. She was fifty-eight, and his death, last July, came one day before his own fifty-eighth birthday. Although he had heart trouble, he was, he and everyone else thought, in reasonably good shape. On the day he died, he’d been kayaking.
I suspect that David had such trouble overcoming Eve’s death – he was so demoralized by it – that it weakened his already chancy hold on life.
Eve and David were both depressives (they used to scribble D or ND on the bottom of postcards to each other: DEPRESSED/NOT DEPRESSED). They wrote, privately and publicly, about their tenuous grasp on continued existence. “My lifelong depressiveness” wrote Sedgwick in the essay about Melanie Klein, has “endeared to me the idea of nonbeing.” David claimed never to understand my fear of death; he regarded extinction, he wrote to me once, as an opportunity to rest.
That Klein essay has as its main effort a revisionary take on the experience of depression, a condition almost comically common, as Sedgwick writes, among humanities types. (She quotes a colleague on an admissions committee calling depression “a prerequisite” for entry into their program.) Again following Klein, Sedgwick sees the remorse and passivity of depression as a kind of reaction to one’s frightening and inhumane paranoid/schizoid projections. If those aggressions were a slashing attempt to reconstitute something injuriously broken in the psyche (Sedgwick’s primacy, her omnipotence in regard to her brother, broken, as she perceived it, by me), then the subsequent shrinking into depression would be a despairing admission of that reconstitution’s impossibility, as well as shame for having acted badly.
Yet Sedgwick wants, in her Klein essay, to use depression, to conceive depression, in a different way – a way that might allow one to escape the paranoid/schizoid — depression circle. Depressed is at least better than paranoid/schizoid, since it removes a great amount of destructive aggression from your relations with the world and replaces it with painful but morally reflective degrees of withdrawal… If one could perceive paranoid/schizoid and depressive not as constantly reemergent distortions, but as steps in a narrative toward spiritual illumination, toward transcendence of both polarities, then perhaps something truly good and real could change in oneself and in the world.
Sedgwick imagines, at the very end of her essay, a position beyond the bad karma of paranoid/schizoid and the trying-to-be-good karma of depressive: “[T]he most liberating thing is to have no karma… [I]t’s the figure without karma, the bodhisattva, the ultimate teacher, who is able to perceive and be perceived clearly enough that the things he or she does are efficacious…”
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I suppose it’s inevitable, having spent many decades attempting to decode the complex language of David and (to a lesser extent) his sister – that their silence now has me circling the words they left. I circle, for instance, David’s frequent allusions to my own non-depressive disposition. He was amazed at my happiness, especially given all the depression in my family. Plus I’m a humanities professor!
But the reality is that my non-comprehension, as a sixteen-year-old, of Kosofsky-intensity toward the world – toward me – pretty much remains intact. If you say that this is due to the operations of repression, then I’ve spent my life under the darkest of repression-clouds. A more likely explanation, for this Henry Miller rather than Proust fan, involves the mysteries of sensibility – mysteries probably as much biochemical as experiential.
During the reception after yesterday’s memorial event for David, UD‘s ‘thesdan playmate, a woman in her seventies or maybe eighties came up to UD and took her hand. “In your speech you talked about meeting David in a Latin class at Walter Johnson High School. I was a substitute teacher there in the ‘sixties and ‘seventies, and I had David in one of my classes. It was awkward, because I already knew his mother, but I’d never met him. The last name told me it must be Rita’s son.”
“He must have been unpleasant to have as a student.”
“Yes. He was very smart, but condescending.”
“Yes.” UD recalled David’s imperious manner with their high school teachers.
“I once substituted for Virgina Baker’s Advanced Placement English class. Did you have her?”
“Did I ever! I remember that class very well… In my mind, Virginia Baker and Gertrude Stein are permanently merged, melded, enameled. They have become one and the same person.”
The woman laughed. “You’re right. Big intimidating demanding women …”
“I had a kind of a crush on her. I admired her rigorous no-nonsense thing. She’d seat herself at the front table, cross one leg over the other, lean back a bit, and not alter that position for the hour. She was a still point of burning intellect around which our mad young flames danced … I think she was the first really serious and learned, college-style teacher I’d ever had.”
“Both of my daughters had her. They used to speak with terror of having to write A Baker Paper.”
Baker was the polar opposite of today’s Frenetic Friend teacher, the Are You Being Served? mistress of ceremonies who scurries around classrooms asking comatose students staring at computer monitors if they need help with anything. Baker was a Buddha who sat immovable and inscrutable, a vast container of vast wisdom if we would only approach. Literature wasn’t valuable and fascinating because it made you feel things. Lots of things make you feel things. Literature’s primary value lay in its formal properties, about which even advanced students at a ‘thesdan school couldn’t be expected to know much.
I figured I wouldn’t find Virginia Baker on the internet, but I was wrong. Here’s a brief article she wrote in 1963 for The English Journal. It’s about the importance of making students aware of the variability of point of view in fiction – omniscient, limited omniscient, first person, etc. Although the piece is rather nuts and boltsy, I like her final sentence (I’ve made it this post’s title), in which she hopes that for some students she can create disciplines of writing which prompt Joycean epiphanies. I think she must have done this for me, though I don’t remember any particular epiphany. Maybe it’s more that she set going the gradual dazzlement Emily Dickinson describes as the way the truth works its way into us…
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“Tell the truth,” said David’s mother to me as we talked, at the reception, about the speeches his friends had just given. “But tell it slant. That’s best. That’s what you and the other speakers did.”
She was quoting the Dickinson.
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—
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Or think of Burnt Norton:
human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
And in fact even Dickinson’s poem, which seems a series of confident assertions about the truth, is actually artfully oblique and uncertain in regard to what truth is and how to tell it and how dangerous it is, etc. Dickinson, writes Gary Lee Stonum, “manifests a positive dislike for achieved stability.”
The hermeneutic zigzag of truth and error, blindness and enlightenment, or affirmation and insinuation may itself be a little dazzling. Indeed, the razzle-dazzle may be the point, and the zigzag is certainly the method. Dickinson’s double writing differs itself, always actively and often flagrantly, from any singularity it has itself signified. This poem accordingly works by both repeating and displacing the exhortation made in the first line, without ever arriving at a point where the divergent possibilities are gathered up into some more comprehensive or coherent view.
The poem itself is our safe, slantways approach to the truth: “We have art,” wrote Nietzsche, “in order not to perish of the truth.”
Virginia Baker’s successor in the responsive heart of UD was Erich Heller, all of whose comp lit courses at Northwestern she took; his essay, The Importance of Nietzsche, cites this famous statement.
Heller also, in that essay, characterizes modern secular minds as “plagued by a metaphysical hunger which it [is] now [with the disappearance of God] impossible to feed.” As with so many of Kafka’s characters, or Beckett’s, we are that absurd thing, a metaphysical animal without metaphysics. “The main condition of absurdity,” writes Thomas Nagel in a 1971 essay, The Absurd, “is the dragooning of an unconvinced transcendent consciousness into the service of an immanent, limited enterprise like a human life.”
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My friend David was, I think, a profound and wounded instance of this absurd condition. Plagued with a metaphysical hunger he could not feed, he spent his life in the hermeneutic zigzag. This was an honest and often rich place to be, no doubt; but there was no mistaking the sense of emptiness.
… the Garrett Park Bugle, UD‘s hometown newspaper, and her coverage of the latest Town Council meeting.
Yesterday, Les UDs hiked the towpath at the C & O Canal Park in Maryland. UD has visited these rocks and waterfalls all her life, first following the flat canal past mules pulling tourist boats, and then hanging over bridges above the rapids.
One winter Sunday in 1969, she walked the half-muddy, half-frozen towpath with her boyfriend, David Kosofsky. The day after that walk, she wrote a poem about it (the poem appeared in the Walter Johnson High School literary magazine, The Spectator). The first lines of the poem are this post’s title.
With David’s recent death in mind, UD yesterday recalled that day at the canal forty-two years ago. Her poem described David crashing a good-sized rock onto the canal’s surface, and the rock barely denting the ice. This seems to have struck wee UD as a metaphor for the way lovers try to break through the resistant enigma of each other … Maybe lovers even believe they have pierced the ice and gotten to the deep heart’s core , through the labyrinth of another’s being… More likely, love represents an unstoppable, every-day-briskly-setting-out, venture into the labyrinth… The thrown boulder, UD wrote in her teenage poem, barely nicks the surface. / Yet we never quite admit defeat. / Is this love?
Throughout our lives, David’s and mine, this idea of the mystery of other people expanded to embrace the mystery of one’s own self, and then the mystery of a larger world of humanity, nature, the divine. Here’s an excerpt from an October 2008 Gchat between UD and David. In it, he mentions his sister, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.
UD: i’ve always been able to – it feels like really enter into the personality of certain other people
i guess that’s often a novelist’s – or a deep reader’s – trait
leaving yourself
entering other people
or some plausible version of other people
like… norman bates becoming his mother!!
David: and manage to experience other people from the inside?
UD: that’s how it feels
obviously one can’t know to what extent one’s getting anything right
but that’s how it feels – really climbing into their skin
David: have you ever read Dilthey? His idea of `verstehen’? It’s about that… only as applied to history or sociology.
UD: yes – verstehen is in fact an interesting way of approaching what i’m trying to get at
understanding deeply
selflessly
only sometimes i think it’s a little crazy
David: Eve and I, when we were younger, used to talk about what you were just talking about… that kind of understanding of another person… whether it was possible… and if so whether desirable.. and if so whether (as Eve always insisted) FRIGHTENING.
But in Iris Murdoch’s unfrightening sense, this entering into the truths of another person was the basis of virtue:
[M]ost great writers have a sort of calm merciful vision because they can see how different people are and why they are different. Tolerance is connected with being able to imagine centers of reality which are remote from oneself. The great artist sees the vast interesting collection of what is other than himself and does not picture the world in his own image. I think this kind of merciful objectivity is virtue…
Key to mercy is this retained sense of the shadowiness of other human beings. Robert Penn Warren begins a poem to his child this way:
Here is the shadow of truth, for only the shadow is true.
He wants to speak to his child directly, unload his wisdom and his love… And yet nothing direct can be said. The poem is a series of beautiful indirections, failures to say anything forthrightly.
And when, by the hair, the headsman held up the head
Of Mary of Scots, the lips kept on moving,
But without sound. The lips,
They were trying to say something very important.
In that same chat, David put the matter in Buddhist terms.
David: within each person (I’m not stating this as an empirical fact or observation at all… it’s a `belief’ if you will) there is what I’ll call (since I guess I got…
… the idea from this tradition) a Buddha Nature. The trick of really understanding a person… in the sense of wanting to be compassionate… or of actually BEING compassionate towards them…
… is to find… to recognize their Buddha Nature.
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Was anything less shadowy now, avoiding stretches of towpath mud with my husband?
No. The clarity I’d gained was about the compassion drawn forth from obscurity.
Christopher Hitchens got a big laugh when, asked what the purpose of life without a belief in God would be, he answered “Gloating over the misfortunes of other people… Crowing over [their] miseries…” UD laughs whenever she watches him say this too…
Yet the astoundingly tanking fortunes of the outfit that last year sued UD has her thinking with some seriousness about schadenfreude. No doubt she’s got her share of it… But as one story after another of the financial desperation of the now universally ridiculed and reviled Righthaven pops up as a Google Alert in her email, she finds herself remarkably deficient in this response. The copyright troll whose threats and legal papers so frightened her two summers ago is this year a virtually bankrupt joke, taking outrageous beatings in every court it’s dragged into by people and organizations who – unlike UD – fought back.
Instead of anything emotional, UD seems to be experiencing that rather calmer it-is-meet-and-right thing that involves witnessing the reversal of wrongdoing.
A kid from Wisconsin comments on all the green pumpkins available this year. Les UDs bought only greens – dark green, gray green – last weekend. Butler’s Orchard had tons of them.
They look right, paired up and down the brick steps to our little brown house.
A few moments ago, fed up with a female downy woodpecker at work on my house just outside my office window, I got up, went to the window, and stared at it, inches away, as it drilled. Its terribly black eyes suddenly locked on to me; and, just as suddenly, it went flying.
Now, finally, it’s quiet around here.
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UD pecked about in vain for a good poem, image, whatever, to accompany this post.
James, a reader, found one.
UD is grateful.
Lots of fancy schmancy hospitals here in the DC region – Hopkins, GW – are unhappy with this result, but they’re taking it seriously.
UD, as it happens, had her recent surgery at Holy Cross Hospital.
The place was clean, quiet, and well-run — at least during the day. Genial doctors and nurses trundled in and out of her room checking meds and machines and all.
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But things got weird in the wee small hours of the morning. At that point a rather frightened, inept group of nurses took over.
They wouldn’t give me an extra pain pill, though I needed one.
One of them moved in very close to me and said: “Tell me about this mole on your arm. I want to know. Were you born with it? How did it become like this?” She gazed at it as if she thought it had magical powers.
I called the nurses when my IV suddenly beeped and said AIR IN LINE, and when one finally moseyed in she didn’t know how to stop that from happening. She called another nurse in, who muttered, in answer to my question, that yes, well, you don’t want to let that sort of thing go on too long because it can kill you.
When they told me I could finally have a full meal, they neglected to tell me that I had to call a certain number and order it. Eventually I called the number, and the kitchen said they had orders to give me nothing. It took a good deal of work to get the nurses’ desk to tell the kitchen that I could eat.
So evenings at Holy Cross with the night nurses were unpleasant. With daylight, it became an award-winning hospital again.
Mr UD’s father – on the far right –
behind Le Corbusier.
Paris. Around 1947.
A quiet Sunday. Time for some old photos.
Here’s UD‘s mother, Mitzi, taking part in
the 1966 Garrett Park July 4 parade.
She carries many signs.
Click on each picture for a bigger view.
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Little UD pretending to enjoy the fact that her
parents insisted the family always go camping. 1970.
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Also 1970. UD has deep roots in Maryland.
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Also 1970. Kitchen. Mother. UD. UD‘s ‘thesdan
playmate, David Kosofsky, lurks in the background.
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It’s a review of a show she curated at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.
… her grandfather, Joe Rapoport, ran Rapoport’s department store in Port Deposit, Maryland. This red brick building
was Rapoport’s. (Click on the photo for a bigger image.) UD remembers visiting there – the long dark store with clanging registers and rows of dusty shoes in the back, and the upstairs apartments (we slept in the rooms on the second level; the balcony overlooks train tracks and the Susquehanna River).
Port Deposit has been evacuated; the Susquehanna has overrun the place.
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I found the photograph here.
UD thanks her sister.
A bunch of UD‘s friends and neighbors are featured in this Fox report about the dire USPS situation.
I come to praise GW.
It’s been a long dark wet day, and I’m just about to walk to the Foggy Bottom metro and go home. But first I want to praise GW.
When I got out of the metro station this morning, anxious about how well I’d do in my second week of teaching, since I’m not quite recovered from my surgery, it was impossible to feel anything but good. Good and strong and happy.
Because here after all was the world – the world of people – and I hadn’t had much to do with that for three or so weeks, as I lay in bed reading, blogging, and taking pain pills. Here were… Wellies! Wellies of all kinds – spotted, mid-calf, plaid, psychedelic, thigh-high. Gazing especially at the stylish GW women splashing around me, their elegant suede-like Wellies setting off black leggings and soft brown jackets, I was… I dunno… enamored. It was a hyper-urban scene – people jogging, servers setting out tables in front of the row of new restaurants across from my office, a wrecking crew working its way through what used to be a campus parking lot – and I realized I’d missed this, faces and bodies whirling around me, chic new foodie places coming on to me with their starched tablecloths and big pink container plants. It was opening day for Whole Foods. It was morning in the city, and even in the rain people were crisp and excited and beautiful.
