Tag: Don DeLillo

Umarli na wzgórzu biją w stare, sterane dzwony, które obdzwaniają grzechy świata

Umarli przyszli zabrać żywych. Umarli całunami spowici, umarli jeźdźcy w szyku bojowym, szkielet grający na lirze korbowej.

Edgar stoi w przejściu między ławkami i próbuje dopasować sąsiednie stronice czasopisma, połówki reprodukcji. Ludzie przełażą przez ławki, krzycząc ochryple w stronę boiska. Edgar trzyma kartki tuż przy twarzy. Nawet nie wiedział, że ogląda tylko połowę obrazu, póki z góry nie spłynęła lewa strona, ta z rdzawobrunatnym polem i dwoma kościoludami ciągnącymi za sznury dzwonów. Musnęła ramię jakiejś kobiety i wirując, trafiła prosto w bogobojną pierś Edgara.

Thomson na środku boiska robi uniki przed kibicami, którzy nadciągają w podskokach i susach. Rzucają się na niego, chcą go przewrócić na ziemię i pokazać mu fotografie najbliższych.

Edgar czyta tekst w ramce na sąsiedniej stronie. Otóż jest to szesnastowieczny obraz flamandzkiego mistrza nazwiskiem Pieter Bruegel, zatytułowany Triumf śmierci.

Tytuł z tupetem, rzekłbym. Ale malowidło intryguje Edgara, i owszem – lewa strona jest chyba jeszcze lepsza od prawej.

Edgar uważnie przygląda się jaszczowi pełnemu czaszek. Patrzy na nagiego mężczyznę ściganego przez psy. Patrzy na wynędzniałego psa, który skubie zębami dziecko leżące w ramionach martwej kobiety. Psy na obrazie są smukłe, chude, wygłodniałe: to psy wojny, psy piekielne, psy z księżej obory dręczone plagą pasożytniczych roztoczy, psich tumorów, psich nowotworów.

Nasz miły, sterylny Edgar ma w domu specjalną instalację do filtrowania powietrza, dzięki której drobinki kurzu po prostu się ulatniają, ale fascynują go zgorzeliny, wszelkiego rodzaju zmiany chorobowe i rozkładające się zwłoki, pod warunkiem, że styka się z nimi wyłącznie za pośrednictwem obrazów.

W średnim planie znajduje drugiego trupa kobiety, na którym siedzi okrakiem szkielet. Ich wzajemne usytuowanie ma charakter niewątpliwie seksualny. Ale czy Edgar jest pewien, że szkielet okracza kobietę? A może jednak mężczyznę? Stoi w przejściu, wokół niego wszyscy wiwatują, a on tkwi nosem w kartkach czasopisma. Bezpośredniość obrazu Bruegla robi na nim wielki wrażenie. Owszem, umarli dopadają żywych. Ale Edgar stopniowo dostrzega, że ci żywi to grzesznicy. Karciarze, figlujący kochankowie, król w gronostajowym płaszczu przechowuje majątek w beczkach i cebrach. Umarli przybyli, aby opróżnić puchary wina, podać ucztującej szlachcie czaszkę na półmisku. Edgar widzi obżarstwo, żądzę i chciwość.

Jest zachwycony tymi wizjami. Edgar, Jedgar. Przyznaj się – jesteś nimi zachwycony. Z zachwytu jeżą mu się włoski na całym ciele. Szkielety z cieniutkimi chujkami. Umarli bębnią w kotły. Trup okryty pokutniczym workiem podrzyna pielgrzymowi gardło.

Mięsnokrwawe barwy, stłoczone ciała, pełen rejestr straszliwych sposobów umierania. Edgar patrzy na rozpłomienione niebo wypełniające najdalszy plan, aż za wzniesieniami po lewej stronie obrazu – Śmierć nietutejsza, Pożoga wszędobylska, Zgroza powszechna, wrony, kruki bezszelestnie szybujące, kruk przycupnięty na zadzie siwej szkapy, czerń z bielą raz na zawsze, a Edgar myśli o samotnej wieży na Poligonie Kazachskim, o wieży zbrojnej w bombę, i prawie słyszy wiatr wiejący nad stepami Azji Środkowej, tam gdzie żyją wrogowie odziani w długi chałaty i futrzane czapy, mówiący tym swoim starym, brzemiennym językiem, liturgicznym i poważnym. Jakąż spisują sekretną historię? Sekretem jest sama bomba, a istnieją też sekrety powstałe z jej natchnienia, sprawy i sprawki, jakich nie domyśla się nawet Dyrektor – człowiek, którego izolowane serce skrywa w sobie komplet ropiejących sekretów świata zachodniego – bo te spiski dopiero się zawiązują. Tyle akurat wie, że geniusz bomby to nie tylko fizyka, cząsteczki i promienie, lecz i sposobność tworzenia nowych sekretów, jaką stwarza bomba. Na każdy wybuch atmosferyczny, na każde dane nam przelotne mgnienie obnażonej siły przyrody, na każdy błysk tej obranej z powiek, przedziwnej gałki ocznej eksplodującej nad pustynią, otóż na każdy taki fenomen przypada zdaniem Edgara chyba ze sto spisków, które schodzą pod ziemię, żeby się mnożyć i motać.

A co łączy Nas z Nimi, ile splątanych ogniw znajdujemy w labiryncie nerwów? Nie wystarczy nienawidzić wroga. Trzeba też zrozumieć, w jaki sposób wzajemnie umożliwiające sobie dogłębne spełnienie.

Starzy umarli jebią nowych. Umarli wydobywają trumny z ziemi. Umarli na wzgórzu biją w stare, sterane dzwony, które obdzwaniają grzechy świata.

Edgar na chwilę odrywa wzrok od stronic czasopisma. Odsuwa je od twarzy – z bolesnym trudem – i spogląda na ludzi wypełniających boisko. Na tych, którzy są półprzytomni ze szczęścia. Którzy biegają wokół baz, głośno obwieszczając wynik. Którzy z podniecenia nie zasną tej nocy. Których drużyna przegrała. Którzy drwią z przegranych. Na ojców, którzy pospieszą do domów i opowiedzą synom, co widzieli. Na mężów, którzy sprawią żonom niespodziankę – kwiaty i wiśnie w czekoladzie. Na kibiców, których ciżba na schodkach wiodących do pawilonu śpiewnie wykrzykuje nazwiska zawodników. Na kibiców, którzy jadąc metrem do domu, będą się okładać pięściami. Na krzykaczy i na tych, co wpadli w amok. Na przyjaciół sprzed lat, którzy przypadkiem spotkają się przy drugiej bazie. Na tych, których euforia rozjaśni całe miasto.

Don DeLillo, Podziemie, tłum. Michał Kłobukowski.

I’d come to pay the briefest of visits and say an uncertain farewell

Everybody wants to own the end of the world.

This is what my father said, standing by the contoured windows in his New York office—private wealth management, dynasty trusts, emerging markets. We were sharing a rare point in time, contemplative, and the moment was made complete by his vintage sunglasses, bringing the night indoors. I studied the art in the room, variously abstract, and began to understand that the extended silence following his remark belonged to neither one of us. I thought of his wife, the second, the archaeologist, the one whose mind and failing body would soon begin to drift, on schedule, into the void.

• • •

That moment came back to me some months later and half a world away. I sat belted into the rear seat of an armored hatchback with smoked side windows, blind both ways. The driver, partitioned, wore a soccer jersey and sweatpants with a bulge at the hip indicating a sidearm. After an hour’s ride over rough roads he brought the car to a stop and said something into his lapel device. Then he eased his head forty-five degrees in the direction of the right rear passenger seat. I took this to mean that it was time for me to unstrap myself and get out.

The ride was the last stage in a marathon journey and I walked away from the vehicle and stood a while, stunned by the heat, holding my overnight bag and feeling my body unwind. I heard the engine start up and turned to watch. The car was headed back to the private airstrip and it was the only thing moving out there, soon to be enveloped in land or sinking light or sheer horizon.

I completed my turn, a long slow scan of salt flats and stone rubble, empty except for several low structures, possibly interconnected, barely separable from the bleached landscape. There was nothing else, nowhere else. I hadn’t known the precise nature of my destination, only its remoteness. It was not hard to imagine that my father at his office window had conjured his remark from this same stark terrain and the geometric slabs that blended into it.

He was here now, they both were, father and stepmother, and I’d come to pay the briefest of visits and say an uncertain farewell.

(…)

Artis was alone in the suite where she and Ross were staying. She sat in an armchair, wearing robe and slippers, and appeared to be asleep.

What do I say? How do I begin?

You look beautiful, I thought, and she did, sadly so, attenuated by illness, lean face and ash-blond hair, uncombed, pale hands folded in her lap. I used to think of her as the Second Wife and then as the Stepmother and then, again, as the Archaeologist. This last product label was not so reductive, mainly because I was finally getting to know her. I liked to imagine that she was the scientist as ascetic, living for periods in crude encampments, someone who might readily adapt to unsparing conditions of another kind.

Why did my father ask me to come here?

He wanted me to be with him when Artis died.

I sat on a cushioned bench, watching and waiting, and soon my thoughts fell away from the still figure in the chair and then there he was, there we were, Ross and I, in miniaturized mindspace.

He was a man shaped by money. He’d made an early reputation by analyzing the profit impact of natural disasters. He liked to talk to me about money. My mother said, What about sex, that’s what he needs to know. The language of money was complicated. He defined terms, drew diagrams, seemed to be living in a state of emergency, planted in the office most days for ten or twelve hours, or rushing to airports, or preparing for conferences. At home he stood before a full-length mirror reciting from memory speeches he was working on about risk appetites and offshore jurisdictions, refining his gestures and facial expressions. He had an affair with an office temp. He ran in the Boston Marathon.

What did I do? I mumbled, I shuffled, I shaved a strip of hair along the middle of my head, front to back—I was his personal antichrist.

He left when I was thirteen. I was doing my trigonometry homework when he told me. He sat across the small desk where my ever-sharpened pencils jutted from an old marmalade jar. I kept doing my homework while he spoke. I examined the formulas on the page and wrote in my notebook, over and over: sine cosine tangent.

Why did my father leave my mother?

Neither ever said.Years later I lived in a room-and-a-half rental in upper Manhattan. One evening there was my father on TV, an obscure channel, poor reception, Ross in Geneva, sort of double-imaged, speaking French. Did I know that my father spoke French? Was I sure that this man was my father? He made a reference, in subtitles, to the ecology of unemployment. I watched standing up.

And Artis now in this barely believable place, this desert apparition, soon to be preserved, a glacial body in a massive burial chamber. And after that a future beyond imagining. Consider the words alone. Time, fate, chance, immortality. And here is my simpleminded past, my dimpled history, the moments I can’t help summoning because they’re mine, impossible not to see and feel, crawling out of every wall around me.

Ash Wednesday, once, I went to church and stood in line. I looked around at the statues, plaques and pillars, the stained glass windows, and then I went to the altar rail and knelt. The priest approached and made his mark, a splotch of holy ash thumb-printed to my forehead. Dust thou art. I was not Catholic, my parents were not Catholic. I didn’t know what we were. We were Eat and Sleep. We were Take Daddy’s Suit to the Dry Cleaner.

When he left I decided to embrace the idea of being abandoned, or semi-abandoned. My mother and I understood and trusted each other. We went to live in Queens, in a garden apartment that had no garden. This suited us both. I let the hair grow back on my aboriginal shaved head. We went for walks together. Who does this, mother and teenage son, in the United States of America? She did not lecture me, or rarely did, on my swerves out of observable normality. We ate bland food and batted a tennis ball back and forth on a public court.

But the robed priest and the small grinding action of his thumb implanting the ash. And to dust thou shalt return. I walked the streets looking for people who might look at me. I stood in front of store windows studying my reflection. I didn’t know what this was. Was this some freakified gesture of reverence? Was I playing a trick on Holy Mother Church? Or was I simply attempting to thrust myself into meaningful sight? I wanted the stain to last for days and weeks. When I got home my mother leaned back away from me as if to gain perspective. It was the briefest of appraisals. I made it a point not to grin—I had a gravedigger’s grin. She said something about the boring state of Wednesdays throughout the world. A little ash, at minimum expense, and a Wednesday, here and there, she said, becomes something to remember.

Don DeLillo, Zero K, 2016.

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Jonathan Franzen on The Encyclopedia of New York, DeLillo:

It worries me a little, therefore, that the city [NYC] has now been paid the additional compliment of a million-and-a-half-word encyclopedia. There’s something decidedly valedictory about The Encyclopedia of New York City, edited by the same Kenneth Jackson who wrote Crab grass Frontier. The Encyclopedia has the heft and ambition of a monument. It’s a grand list for an age in love with lists. As soon as I got the book, I paged to the entry for “Sewers,” a topic of perennial fascination. I found a good historical overview of the subject but no hint of the daily drama of contemporary sewers. Indeed, a numbing sameness afflicts nearly all the longer articles in the Encyclopedia. Each entry begins with vaguely colorful arcana from the city’s earliest history (reading about “Intellectuals,” for example, we learn that “the leading intellectual circle of the late eighteenth century was the Friendly Club”), goes on to pursue the subject doggedly decade by decade, often achieving a full head of steam around 1930 (thus, under “Intellectuals,” The New Republic and Partisan Review are treated at some length), and finally peters out rather sadly in the present (“In the mid 1990s … major magazines of opinion continued to be published in the city but lacked the urgency and influence that they had enjoyed in earlier times”). It’s an odd thing to experience the present, which is, after all, so present, again and again as the dusty terminus of historical spurs. Reviewers of the Encyclopedia have dwelled on what’s missing from it, and their quibbles reinforce the notion of the city as a work completed, rather than a work in progress.

The chief pleasure of the Encyclopedia lies in a kind of Derridean lateral slide of association. I move from “Terrorism” to read about “Anarchism,” across the page to “Amphibians and Reptiles,” on to “Birds,” and (after a side trip to “Birdland” and a courtesy call on “Parker, Charlie”) to “Cockroaches,” which “are known to be attracted to toothpaste,” which brings me to “Colgate-Palmolive” and its founder “Colgate, William,” who fled England in 1795 “to escape public hostility toward his father, who had supported the French Revolution.” It’s like a game of Telephone: “Anarchism” connecting with the sansculottes not by way of history but, rather, via “Cockroaches.”

Yet there’s something empty about this pleasure. A city lives in the eye, ear, and nose of the solitary beholder. You turn to literature to find the interior point of intersection between subject and city, and as a living connection to New York’s history a few lines of Herman Melville or Don DeLillo outweigh whole pages of an encyclopedia. This is Ishmael downtown:

There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward.

This is DeLillo’s Bucky Wunderlick, walking the same streets more than a century later:

It was early afternoon and soon to rain, nondeliverance in the air, a chemical smell from the river. The bridges were cruelly beautiful in this weather, gray ladies nearly dead to all the poetry written in their names.

DeLillo, an essential New York artist, is unmentioned in the Encyclopedia, whose lengthy “Literature” article has little more to say about the post-Norman Mailer scene than this: “Many of the writers who had become well known in the 1960s left the city during the 1970s and 1980s.”

Jonathan Franzen, How To Be Alone