Bottomless Casket

 

Where I come from nobody knows, and where I’m going everything goes. Or, alternatively: Where I come from nobody knows, and where I’m going anything goes.

In 2019 I wrote book reviews. Other things happened in my life during 2019, but doubtlessly if you  look at the record you will easily surmise that all such business would have to have been determinedly secondary; none of it could possibly have taken up terribly much of my time. By that year’s end I had produced an outrageous amount of prose, some of it was read by people, one author of a book I had reviewed even privately communicating her esteem for my take on her latest, which was gratifying, certainly, though I did not concern myself with readership especially much. It was not really the point. And I’m not crazy about the word “reviews,” though this is what they are called on Goodreads. I gave the vast majority of the books five stars out of five.

It might be hard to take seriously a year given over almost entirely to reviews written for a social media site. I am not about to kvetch; precisely as it should be. I didn’t write those reviews for a social media site. I merely put them there. I am very grateful to Goodreads. I am happy it was there. I am happy it served me. If Goodreads was an arbitrary variable, it was also, precisely in that capacity, a trigger. You could in some sense liken Goodreads here to the recipient of the emails the totality of which amount to S. D. Chrostowska’s Permission, the impassive (implicitly permissive) silence of the correspondent the fundamental precondition for the serial sendings. I wrote my essay on Permission in July of 2019, halfway through the year. I think it was a landmark or a sort of apex. Things were getting deliriously involved, emphasis perhaps on delirious. In August, Goodreads cut back my character limit. Maybe they were scared for me.

I did not start writing Goodreads reviews in 2019. Though I guess I had written a few scattered reviews, which I shared on the site in 2012 and 2013, I really got involved in this commitment to sharing reviews of everything I read at the beginning of 2016. By the beginning of 2016 I mean just that: the very beginning of the year. You see, if Goodreads is an arbitrary variable of which I had come to make instrumental use, so too is the Gregorian calendar, my not being above making resolutions for the new year, even if the new year is a totally artificial construct, nakedly meaningless. It is the artificiality of a thing that very often makes it read harmless to me. Though you can harm someone with a plastic toy sandbox shovel—I should know!—I cannot escape thinking of it as harmless harm. I would like to believe in harmless fatalities, too, though I know that this concept can withstand little scrutiny. I think you will agree that we all believe in harmless fatalities from time to time, making this possible for ourselves by calculatedly eschewing scrutiny, by not looking too closely, knowing that we cannot actively mourn all the sad things. The best way to manage this stuff is probably by way of irony. I have had occasion to make the case for irony with some regularity. A New Year’s resolution is inherently ironic. It can also produce wondrous results. Such is the efficacy of instrumentality and, perhaps, the key to grace.

Though the 1948 film Portrait of Jennie was directed by the gifted William Dieterle, we would probably be wise to attribute as is more or less customary a considerable amount of its specific vision to the influence of its legendary producer, David O. Selznick, a man famous both for being a tyrant and, an anomaly amongst Hollywood tyrants, possessing some actual taste. Portrait of Jennie stars Jennifer Jones, the woman who had become Selznick’s foremost obsession and who he would marry the following year. It was not distributed by a major studio, but rather, to unsatisfactory returns, by Selznick’s own releasing company. Selznick, should you be unaware, had written his own ticket in 1939 as producer of Gone with the Wind.

Portrait of Jennie, a phantasmagoric or supernatural love story, begins in the winter of 1934. Joseph Cotten plays Eben Adams, a starving artist-type making the rounds in Great Depression New York City. Eben has been producing landscapes and still lives of little distinction. In an early scene, a pair of art patrons played by Ethel Barrymore and Cecil Kellaway buy a piece from Eben, the Barrymore character detecting in the artist something of worth not yet reflected in his portfolio. Shortly thereafter, Eben encounters an apparition-like waif, the young Jennie, in Central Park. Jennie (played, of course, by Jennifer Jones), decked out anachronistically in an old-fangled quasi-Puritan ensemble, explains that her parents are appearing as acrobats in a New York theatre Eben knows to have been torn down when he was himself still a boy, and she casually references the Kaiser, a man she believes to be the present ruler of Germany. Jennie disappears into synthetic myst, but she is to return betimes, a spectral though utterly corporeal inamorata, passenger of a parallel temporal regime or schematic, some kind of abstract line with which Eben’s more quotidian one repeatedly intersects. During their first interaction, Jennie performs a maudlin dirge-like song for Eben, a song containing the line “Where I come from nobody knows, and where I’m going everything goes.” Where is it that everything goes? It is not properly the case that everything dies. It is creatures that invariably die. Along the road to his inevitable discovery that Jennie died approximately two decades before she entered his life—the young woman, with whom he has made physical contact (and will again!), having become by this point the catalyst for his self-realization as artist—Eben will postpone the living out of the crisis the epiphany would appear to demand, though, after the direct re-insinuation of one decades-old Jennie-related tragedy, he will repeat those lyrics in solemn voice over, altering them ever so slightly. “Where I come from nobody knows, and where I’m going everyone goes.” When everything becomes everyone in this context, there can be no doubt whatever that it is death itself called into consideration. If things do not necessarily die in the manner of each and every one of us, they are likewise conditioned by finitude and impermanence. Consider just for a moment the title of a Neil Young & Crazy Horse live album: Rust Never Sleeps. Still, the poets among us will no doubt wish to suggest that this condition of finitude/impermanence is itself conditional. The figure of Jennie is herself a vehicle by way of which the question of the eternal comes to insinuate itself, this finding its culmination by way of the ecstasy and instantaneity of the creative act. Having sold his first sketch of Jennie to the aforementioned art patrons for a handsome $25, Eben basks in the accomplishment by presenting yet another variation on the song lyrics, this time diegetically to his scene partners. Jauntily: “Where I come from nobody knows, and where I’m going anything goes,” he pronounces, consecrating a new and open field of infinite possibility, his triumph at the level of métier already a triumph over imposed limit.

 

That Eben is a painter and Jennie the subject of the portrait that will kick-start his mature phase, consolidating his legacy, means that in Portrait of Jennie the muse is itself (or herself) very much the subject. Obviously this dimension becomes immediately twinned should we consider the meddlesome, autocratic David O. Selznick, whose only real desire here was to provide the ideal canvas for Jennifer Jones, the beloved he in life could not seem to help but torture, though she would remain his wife until his death in 1965. Jones would suffer multiple crises in her life. She barely survived a suicide attempt in 1966. Her daughter succeeded in taking her own life a decade later. Jones would become an ardent mental health advocate in later years. Portrait of Jennie was one of a series of gifts Selznick saw himself as giving to a woman who was herself, in his estimation, a gift he was giving to the world. The idea is that you are supposed to fall in love with Jennifer Jones, but a spectral or spectralized Jennifer Jones. You can’t have the real Jennifer Jones; she belongs to Selznick. In 1971, Jones married industrialist, art collector, and philanthropist Norton Simon, a man who is purported to have attempted years earlier to acquire the portrait of Jones that painter Robert Brackman provided for Portrait of Jennie, a portrait featured so memorably in the film’s final shot—its only shot in full Technicolor.

If Jennifer Jones died in 2009, Jennie is, of course, still circulating. She still belongs to a parallel regime or schematic, an abstract line. She will show up here and there. She may appear with the utmost felicity, she may portend doom, she may simply permit you to sob helplessly in her arms. It is strictly case-by-case. It has been noted that Selznick was a man of some taste. He prided himself on his culture and pedigree. Portrait of Jennie opens with omniscient voice over. A preamble. All subsequent voice over (deployed sparingly) will come to us care of Joe Cotten’s Eben Adams. The preamble is high-minded stuff of the kind Selznick often favoured. After a choice epigraph from Euripides, the narrator extemporizes at length. A little taste: “science tells us that nothing ever dies but only changes, that time itself does not pass but curves around us, and that the past and the future are together at our side … forever.” Our sagacious narrator wants us to know that the “truth” of Portrait of Jennie “lies not on our screen but in your heart.” Maybe you turn your nose up at this kind of stuff. I imagine it is part of what the avuncular Bosley Crowther was reacting against in his pithy contemporaneous review for the New York Times. I would caution you against raising the snoot. Disservice would be done to thine own self alone.

In January of 2016 I had just taken three years clean and sober. My natal birthday is on November 9th, my sober birthday the day following. On November 10th of 2019 I took six years clean and sober. My life for a good long while was primarily about recovery. At the level of its actual lived execution. Though the subject is frequently addressed head-on in my writing, my life is about recovery at the level of its execution because it is a way, like that of the Samurai. A method, in the sense that one 'practices' medicine. My work and my recovery assimilate the project of being and encountering among persons and things. Recovery thinks of itself as all good work by other, stingy means. The mandate: retain focus on connection, passion, the maintenance of keen expectancy, our universe almost entirely up to us, individually. Who am I? Is there any such thing (or one)? Yes and no. I hope to return to the matter shortly. I am a low bottom drunk, first and foremost, a very sick sick person. What does that mean? Well, I have had multiple kidney failures, woefully enlarged liver, esophageal varices, stomach bleeds, delirium tremens, all the hallmarks of cases traditionally determined hopeless. I have been in innumerable emergency rooms, had my electrolytes restored intravenously too many times to count. A blood transfusion or two. There have been some lengthy hospital stays. I am diagnosed with bipolar comorbidity, have demonstrated a proneness toward psychosis. I’ve stayed in numerous psych wards. I have shot down airplanes with my wristwatch, watched a large city trampled by giants. I have been found naked and mud-caked, totally mad and nearly dead, in the back yard of strangers. I always liked hospitals and psych wards. I was safe there, could get some rest, read. Between 2006 and 2014 I would be a resident of five different addiction-centric treatment facilities. Between 2016 and 2018 I would work at one of those treatment centres in the capacity of “Residential Support Worker.” Twelve-step recovery is the basis of who I am and what I do. Alcoholics and addicts tend to be resentful people, grandiose and prone to self-pity. Part of being a very sick sick person meant that when I was young, and for a long time thereafter, my resentment was God-sized. I used to joke that I resented only three things: myself, everyone else, and the World. I thought about suicide as much as I thought about sex starting around puberty. Very young, writing poems, I had already determined that suicide was an immediately accessible way to commit apocalypse, a good subject for a moribund youth dabbling in free verse. I nurtured this unexploited nuclear option. By the time I was in grad school, a young man difficult to be around, I was regularly boasting that my drinking was heroic self-immolation; I likened myself to the famous Indochinese monk Quảng Đức. I could not do suicide. I could not actually do the thing. Eventually I had a choice: I could die, and continue to endure unimaginable suffering until that sad little mercy was awarded, or I could make myself available for the miracle. In the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous they encourage you not to leave before the miracle happens. For a long time I believed this a lovely thing to tell the gullible. I mean, hell, I saw it working for them in the rooms, I just didn’t imagine it available to me. I was too sick, I saw the horror of human existence too clearly. I was a hopeless case. I am not sure I believed in the miracle until it was happening for me very suddenly in November of 2013. I see now that I was sort of as ifing it. I was making myself available for it without anything like actual belief, this too a triumph of some kind of irony. And it happened, the miracle a psychospiritual overhaul. Though much of 2011, all of 2012, and most of 2013 were very bad—at first spasmodically so, then just completely, totally—I had been sober for nearly two years beginning in 2009. Having done some time at a treatment centre in Palm Desert, California named for a certain first lady, I subsequently rented a room in Palm Springs and lived there until August of 2010. It was during this period that I met Paul Solomon, the most important friend I have ever had, a man in “the program” with whom I remained in constant contact of unprecedented intimacy until he died at the age of seventy-eight in the summer of 2019. He is an important character in this world's story. The year in Palm Springs was one of those lovely periods in which I didn’t really have to work. I was making a little money writing, living off some savings from an earlier contract job, and relying on some support from my parents. A Canadian citizen, I had the excuse of no visa. During this period I returned to the blog you are now reading, which I had started a few years earlier. It was a place where I was beholden to no house style and could just work out my craft and my ideas on my own terms. When I had started the blog, I had been a bit annoyed that the formatting made it such that you could not indent the beginnings of paragraphs, that you had to leave spaces between them. This, for no good reason, didn’t really suit me. My blog entries would often become long and sometimes quite complex in their transmissions of ratiocination, but I continued ever and always to present these posts in a single-paragraph deluge. I was very much aware of appropriating this fundamental mode from the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard, just as William Gaddis had consciously done for his final novel, Agapē Agape. This too began in a somewhat arbitrary fashion. The thing is, I continue to find the approach extremely enjoyable, it gives me pleasure. It carried over into the pieces I shared on Goodreads. The reviews I started sharing on Goodreads in 2016 as the result of my resolution to track everything, to always be writing and to not have to constantly fuss with gatekeepers, began as little at all, and I had continued to occasionally publish other stuff in more official outlets. Going back and looking at some of those earlier reviews makes it clear that there isn't much there. Much of it is slavering airhead praise-mongering, such things having next to no ability to return me to the heart and the heat of the original interaction with the texts. That changed over time. By 2018 I was starting to go quite deep. Some of those reviews are very useful for me to revisit. At a certain point in 2019 it became clear to me not only that this project upon which I had embarked was substantial, but that it was actually a genuine project. It was not until quite late in the year that the idea began to dawn on me that I could and maybe even ought to collect the year’s pieces together in a manuscript. It began to built and build, that spice of manageable delirium began to figure, detectable, I would imagine, to nearly any taste buds ready to assess. Again, the pieces started to become increasingly massive, perhaps unwieldy. I was going deeper with the books, investing more of myself (truly throwing everything I had at this stuff), producing more dizzying syntheses. We might reflect upon the philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s provocative suggestion, covered in my piece on David Lapoujade’s book on the philosopher for Semiotext(e), that his books on his favourite philosophers (Hume, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, et cetera) were written as an effort to produce freakish offspring by way of acts of buggery. In some sense I think I have myself perverted glorious mutants into existence. Over the course of the year, 2019, the work moves like a big sexual sea creature, it becomes. If the little essays from 2019 are lightyears beyond those of 2016, they likewise testify to a constant flux and general drift when cordoned off arbitrarily as their own standalone subgrouping. I indicated that I would return to the question of the operative-enunciative “I.” Who wrote this blog post? The author is first of all molecular, just like the field of operations. The author and the web interface the author encounters and the world or worlds in which these encounters occur are everywhere engaged in an incalculable profusion of unholy, simultaneous and/or successive, patently procreative couplings. This work is compulsive, to be sure, but ecstasy will do that to you. Ecstatic activities tend toward further activation.

Recall how the narrator in the preamble to Portrait of Jennie declares (in the name of science!) “that nothing ever dies but only changes.” Well, simply put, the author of this blog post is a set of epiphenomena germane to the phenomenon of mutation.

The image of the bottomless casket comes to us, as shall be made clear to committed readers of all the many miscellaneous things I've written (I've no illusion there's any such folk), from Jean-Pierre Richard’s reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold-Bug.” This author, the author of this blog post—a molecular multiplicity we shall call 'he'—has allowed himself to monkey ever so slightly with the original syntax. Richard (1922—March of 2019, our year in books) puts it thusly: “We shall never reach the bottom of the casket.” The author has monkeyed to ends he deems salutary, possessing as he does a special fondness for the poetic phrase that immediately strikes us as being available for two or more readings. The bottomless casket might be a casket of endless depth, the bottom of which cannot be reached. That’s what Richard’s phrase plainly indicates. The bottomless casket might also simply be a casket without a bottom, one from which a person can instantaneously escape should they happen to be consigned to it, a slick bit of prestidigitation pursued against the functionaries of internment. We might imagine the great ironist Groucho Marx making clownish use of such a casket, charming us with a performed evasion.

The film Portrait of Jennie, in which Jennifer Jones plays a revenant returning again and again from an alternative timeline (upon one such revisitation ministering to us with the soothing avowal, explicitly stated, that death isn’t real), is itself, as is I hope by now obvious, a bottomless casket. Jennie is the promise of the eternal and she needs to be painted. There is no movie without the portrait. The painting is about immortality but isn’t itself immortal. Rust never sleeps. This author, your current author, once, in a previous incarnation as arrangement of molecules, had occasion to write that the cosmic home movies of Jonas Mekas “feel like they are disappearing, but they are asserting immortality; not their own immortality—immortality itself.” This is the principal method by way of which one relieves the casket of its pesky bottom. What kind of solution is that, you ask? It is a spiritual solution.

What else does that wizened pedagogical preamble fella tell us at the start of Portrait of Jennie? I mean, besides that bit about how “nothing ever dies but only changes.” There are two more items on his earlier-quoted list: “that time itself does not pass but curves around us, and that the past and the future are together at our side … forever.” Have you studied the physics of time? It’s wild stuff! It is practically demanding—the author is about to employ the terminology of Paul West’s Dot Jaggers [she’s a character in the three Alley Jaggers books, which a bitch really ought read]—that you set out forthwith for to affect your own “unjailing.”

When he first meets her—we’re back in Central Park!—Eben Adams shows the revenant Jennie his not-especially-distinguished portfolio. She freezes on a painting of a seascape and promontory just off Cape Cod. It troubles her. Jennie is unsettled. She knows that there is supposed to be a lighthouse. Eben says she’s right and asks her how she knows. Jennie rejoins that she doesn’t know how she knows, she cannot remember. The lighthouse, she suddenly exclaims, it is called the Land’s End Light! “I thought you said you didn’t remember.” What can Jennie say? “I don’t, I just know.” Jennie intuits hazily the baggage she brings with her for her visit, more than merely that scarf wrapped in the 1910 news. The baggage is a future. That future is in the past. The past and the future are together at our side. This. This right here and right now. This is forever. Two timelines will fold, two fates will layer. Land’s End Light. There is more than a portrait in it for Eben. There is a notoriety that would have been available through no other means.

This author—this author who (or that) is primarily this thing that is happening as it is being entered—very cleverly set himself up to come back around to Gilles Deleuze when he claimed near the outset that Jennie occupies an “abstract line.” David Lapoujade analyses the “three syntheses of time” in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, the first two having to do with the quotidian (habit and memory), the third a “purely logical” time “beyond all duration,” an “abstract line.” The “abstract line” is the stuff of wild physics, it foregrounds “irreconcilable temporalities” (as in the novels of Henry James), and Deleuze will briefly equate it to Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return, though this is not a position in which this particular self-styled pervert, practitioner of aberrant movements, will remain stationary. The abstract line is Jennie’s domain. It is the field of Portrait of Jennie.

Let us take a moment to reflect upon the lesson of Nietzsche’s eternal return, something close to a thought experiment that would have us consider all that which happens to us slated to be repeated again and again ad infinitum. Nietzsche believes that the lesson of the eternal return is that the sapient creature ought learn to live with and maybe even love its fate. Never turn down the opportunity to take seriously the healthful ministrations of a revenant—they are the teachers of return! intimators of infinity!—such as those, for example, we will find in Jacques Rivette’s carnal cinematic ghost story Histoire de Marie et Julien (2003) or those, though they may appear of purely malevolent aspect, featured in the eschatological novels of László Krasznahorkai.

A True Bottomless Casket loves mean and stupid fate. It can't help it. Anything goes where everything goes. Revenants will return in their customary fashion, the book, any book, any fucking parchment, baby, desiring and energetically setting out to enact a dialogue with the eternal, such delicacies not available à la carte. The method only intuits a way. It takes as gospel that there is more than one time and that time is yours in which to do. This author's truth lies not on his screen, but in your heart.