The Hermetic Impulse Ethan Osterman

The Hermetic Impulse

Ethan Osterman

99

What a relief to come into the light, even if it’s a shadowy half light, what a relief to come where it’s clear Roberto Bolaño, the Savage Detectives

My first encounter with Morrell was immemorable, either in a library or a café somewhere—not that it makes much of a difference to you, or even to me. The inclusion of insubstantial details, he tells me at some point, is a nervous habit of all liars, and also of all truthful men. How do you tell the difference, I ask, already aware of the answer, already ashamed of my stupidity. But that’s beside the point, too. It’s a dreary afternoon; I’m reading (or really, rereading) Borges while the rain runs down the glass in little rivulets, forking and coming back together again, sometimes beading up, sometimes suspended in the dead air like vagabond constellations, before retreating again to the window sill or the damp earth. Really, I guess I’m mostly watching the rain. It’s a shame, or a dishonor, that he never won the Nobel, he says to me. His voice is soft, and the lines of his face are like the ridges of an antique globe. His English has the unmistakable affectation of a Spaniard. It takes me a moment to realize that we’re having a conversation about Borges—it takes a moment to realize that we’re having a conversation at all. But I eventually respond; I’m far out of my depth. Later on I tell him: I can’t even find a

100

translation of Macedonio—as if to show that I am not completely clueless, as if to blame my ignorance on someone else. He laughs and says something, I don’t recall what. The sound of the coffee press (I remember now: we’re at a second rate café on Capitol Hill, where I used to sit and read Bolaño and imagine I was an avant-garde poet from out of Tenochtitlan) is overwhelming. At some point, we exchange names. He orders a drink, I forget what kind, and not long after our conversation ends. I go back to watching the rain, thinking all the while about labyrinths of glass.

That night I see my friends, but I don’t feel like smoking. I’ve grown out of it, I tell them. What I don’t say is: I wish I hadn’t.

Morrell and I cross paths from time to time in the café— and maybe once or twice in the library, although it’s a ways away. I admit to him, but only after he asks, that I’m studying philosophy. I once had a friend who studied Wittgenstein, he tells me. I confess that, aside from the last lines of the Tractatus (whereof one cannot speak, etc.), I couldn’t tell you a damn thing about what he thought. Morrell laughs (an old man’s laugh, somewhat tired, almost sad) and agrees. He was a true German: logically rigorous and utterly inscrutable all at once. But that’s the point, isn’t it? Outside the window and beyond its film of rain (so melodramatic, so 90’s) he gestures to a victorian house painted jade, with wide windows looking out over Lake Union. I used to live there, he says. With my aunt. His father, an American, had taken part in the Spanish Civil War—on the side of the Republicans, thank God—and settled down in Barcelona with an anarchist woman; Morrell himself was born in the aftermath, when the dust had settled and Franco had taken power and everyone had returned to work and to tedium. I gather that he takes this to be a personal tragedy, or at least an inconvenience—

101

although whether it’s the one or the other or neither at all— perhaps the contrivances of fate have treated him, on the aggregate, well enough—he never says. He asks me if I’ve ever read Hemingway. Only the Sun Also Rises. But my grandfather,—who, for what it’s worth, I never knew—helped to treat him at the Mayo Clinic. Morrell retorts: it may be that your grandfather helped to kill him, depending on who you ask. On that line of thought, we circle back to his parents; for their affiliation with that dissolute menagerie of political dissidents, they are arrested; thus Morrell ends up on the other side of the world, living with his aunt in an otherwise empty house which to him must have at first seemed infinite, or labyrinthian. He describes at length the ancestral (in this corner of the world, this amounts to two or three generations) heirlooms, his grandfather’s antique swords, the modest library, the mirror at the end of the hall which so frightened him as a child…

One day, Morrell asks to see some of my writing. I wrote a little prose poem not long ago in a bout of insomnia, I tell him. (Although there was no need to do so, I have included it here out of a dumb sort of vanity, as if I could absolve myself of it): And we were grabbing at the curtains, looking for a tear to let the light in, for a sort of revelation, for a purifying glare to kill our confusion and to leave it writhing in the inimical light; and we were begging to be sold a dream, arms outstretched like paupers and laden with the creeds and the dogmatisms of the truth, minds cluttered by patterns, by structures, by an order writ by dread divinities; and we were dumb and we were blind and we could speak and we could see, and that was enough for us. He tells me it’s very good, that it’s interesting, and out of sheer embarrassment I avoid the café for a month.

102

The last time we meet, he seems agitated, or at least disturbed. He asks if I remember his friend—the one who studied Wittgenstein. I remember, vaguely. The corners of his eyes wrinkle a bit: all of our memories are the images of images; vagueness is the name of the game. Having said this, he begins his story; a long, rambling thing which, to my recollection, went something like this: He was a real iconoclast; a brilliant, dispassionate sort of guy, does that make sense? Always working on some project or another, staying up too late, forgetting to eat… always forgetting to eat, it seemed, although he wasn’t too thin, either. It took some real effort on my part to get him to eat, you know? Just one of those guys who didn’t really care about food; a real ascetic; a real iconoclast… my favorite project of his—although he never quite wrapped it up—was a poem, only one word long, said with such pathos, such intensity (it would be enough, he thought, if it could be murmured in the ear of a drunk or dying man—it would be enough, even if no one else understood, if no one else could ever understand) that it’s sheer brevity would become it’s sole virtue. There’s something almost Eleatic to the thought, no? Something Parmenidean, something universal in its simplicity, something simply universal about it. But to be honest, he failed; he told me once that if he were German, or if he were a Skald, it would’ve been easy—but to compose like that in English was a joke, it was an impossibility. He settled for this phrase, which he wrote in the margins of Augustine’s Confessions: oh life, oh elegy… it’s an interesting thought, no? A circumlocution, a mote of meaning reaching out beyond itself, saying things it has not said. After all, what of life, of the elegy which is life? That is left unsaid; the true address is left drifting in obscurity, in the imperceptible, like a dominant chord waiting perennially for the tonic to absolve it of itself. In his honor (how strange, these rituals!) I once composed a song with only one note… but I don’t want to talk about me. He

103

was a naturalist, in a way; a sort of misanthrope, a primitivist; a critic of the world, of the iron laws of civilization, like a cage rapidly shrinking, like a horizon melting into oblivion with the setting of the sun, like an incremental and unconscious suicide; you know the type. Obsessed with “rewilding,” with the return to nature and all of that… the whole thing was always a bit unclear to me. But it was important to him. And so he started taking these trips, these hikes, out into the mountains, trying to live off the land for a while—and one time, a snow storm rolled in while he was out there and he never came back. An author—his name escapes me at this veritable twilight, like so much else—once asked why we don’t lock our doors and force ourselves up to die alone, with lucidity and with terror. Lucidity and terror, those were the words he chose. There is something terrible about death, no? But something vital, too. Whether he liked it or not, my old friend would have done just that, lost up there in the mountains, trying to start a fire and freezing to death to the tune of the wind’s dirge, the flame not taking, the charcoals staining his fingers black. Otherwise, it would be frostbite darkening the skin. In any case, doom prevails. A search party was eventually sent out, but by then it was too late; the storm had come and gone. All they ever found of him was a frostbitten ring finger, cut off and hidden in a fire pit. There was some talk, later, about whether it was a suicide, or if it had been an accident, or if he even survived and emerged on the far side of the mountains; I for one maintain no illusions as to what happened. He wanted to disappear completely, to erase his name from time; he wanted to be forgotten, unjudged, unjudgeable—but I remember him, I can never be rid of him, though, to all appearance, he has died and is dead...

He gives me a long baleful look, his shoulders sagging and robbing him of height, as if to say it really doesn’t matter, anyways. I want to disagree, but I sense that he is lost in thought

104

and begin to fear that I might intrude on a secret congregation of his dreams, that I might barge in to that solemn, wordless exchange, that I might tear the curtains from the interior, bringing with me a light which is blind and purifying and anathema to his solitude, and so I say nothing, but look back at him sadly, with a look of misunderstanding on my face. What a dull dream, he finally mutters, thanking me for my time, turning to walk out into the street, and as he reaches for the door I notice for the first time the missing finger on his left hand. I haven’t gone back to the café—and somehow I know that he won’t, either.