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Further Adventures of My Nose [24 caprices]
John Surowiecki
Illustrated by Terry Rentzepis
Ugly Duckling Presse
My nose and I.
To my daughter, Vanessa, for her strength; my son, John Edward, for his talent; and my wife, Denise, for her love and support. Special thanks to Denise Abercrombie, Sandra Beasley, Greg Ford, Penelope Pelizzon, Dr. Tom Rockland, Bernie Sahlins and Steve Young.
Contents
1. Off on his own. 11 2. My feelings on the matter. 12 3. A nose of color. 13 4. Weltspiegel. 14 5. E-mail from my nose [Egypt]. 17 6. A world w/o odors. 18 7. Epigraph & epigram. 19 8. A violinist named Duranowski. 20 9. Daydream No. 1: The King of Spain. 21 10. E-mail from my nose [Dead Sea]. 22 11. Voice mail from Room 102. 25 12. Daydream No. 2: Speaking of oral sex. 26 13. Irena the czarina. 29 14. Chant from Room 104. 30 15. E-mail from my nose [Stratford-on-Avon]. 33 16. Exit Herr Timple. 34 17. Chemotherapy. 35 18. Daydream No. 3: Y_____ & the KofS. 36 19. E-mail from the Timples. 39 20. Grackles. 40 21. E-mail from my nose [under my bed]. 41 22. Mme. Curie & the Radium Girls. 42 23. Remission, return, reunion, rejoicing. 43 24. Follow up. 44 Notes.
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Plates
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
My nose and I. 3 My nose. 15 The King of Spain. 23 Herr Timple. 27 With Picasso’s noses. 31 Y____ and her cello. 37 My nose (studies). 45
At first I took him for a person. But luckily I had my glasses with me, and saw at once he was a nose. —N. Gogol
‘Tis a dead nose, replied the inn-keeper. ‘Tis a live nose, and if I am alive myself, said the inn-keeper’s wife, I will touch it. —L. Sterne, Tristram Shandy
1. Off on his own. He was once the raw red newel of my face, pitted, partly semi-precancerous, threatening to peel away & throw off foul-smelling bits. What did he care? He had, mutatis mutandis, begun to make a life for himself despite his bulbosity, rosacea & all those yrs of cocktails, crisping in the sun & sniffing out suffering in pleasant surroundings & after thumbing himself at me he up & left!
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2. My feelings on the matter. I fear for him — he’s me reduced to flesh & boneless — now that he’s unarmed in the world w/o a history of testing the waters, having been steadfastly neither this nor that & having all his life eluded life as life eludes words. Now, existence tantalizes & seduces & he wants to make of it a series of penetrations & injections, a blue-black permanence, a tattoo.
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3. A nose of color. He has become a nose of color; unfortunately, that color is purple, darkening to ruby unparagoned, color of the Crab, of shadows sliding along fresh morning snow, of a plum hastily stolen, flesh to flesh, stone to heart, skin to livid skin. Dr. S**p points out pustules, papules, rhinorrhea, , , & . Current has spilled somewhere, breeding ions & unpaired souls; the continents shudder w/ new weather & standing dangers to follow.
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4. Weltspiegel. The windows are sealed, the blinds binding. Lamps hang unswaying from steel threads in a single line across the universe. My nose walks the world while I’m only a mirror to it a glass stained w/ white rust & the atomized debris of tooth paste & mouthwash: l x w only, aware only of those few beings who walk past & then glance at themselves in passing.
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My nose.
5. E-mail from my nose [Egypt]. Sphinges have no noses no larynges, either. They remain silent on the subject of everyday life & refuse to covet the stir & wealth that lingers closest to the ground. Sphinges are 1/4 Pharaoh & 3/4 housecat. They behave like antimatter. A nose, on the other hand, connects the causeless world to another lacking consequences ABC. Always be cartilaginous.
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6. A world w/o odors. This is a darkness of another kind, a place of dead shapes & flat sounds where nothing rides on the air, where lilacs & the ocean are only sad movies of themselves.
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7. Epigraph & epigram.
But in order for this absolute exteriority to be given in the form of the “there is,” there must be a world; that is, the upsurge of a For-itself. The absolute exteriority of the In-itself in relation to the Initself is responsible for the fact that even the very nothingness which is the quasi-before of the apparition or the quasi-after of the abolition can find no place in the plenitude of being. It is only within the unity of a world & on the ground of a world that there can appear a this which was not or that there can be revealed that relation-of-absence-of-relation which is exteriority. —Sartre, Being & Nothingness Either everything exists except my nose or nothing exists except my nose which somehow amounts to the same thing.
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8. A violinist named Duranowski. All I hear these days from Room 101 is the music of departure: 1 good-bye after another. Life = love + labor + loss & I appear to be entering the loss phase. The violin is life’s last & death’s 1st voice. D. is playing something by A. von Webern. It sounds like an old man taking a leak in the middle of the night: drip, drop, plink plink plink plink, tinkle, surge, foam, hiss. [Coda: squirt squirt squirt.]
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9. Daydream No. 1: The King of Spain. Nurses say despair has a slippery vitaminE-like feel to it & a vaguely medicinal smell. They’ve plugged my nosehole w/ morphine pellets & soon my ex, the lovely Y , is petitioning the KofS in my nose’s behalf, even though Picasso’s noses are striped, ugly & poorly painted; El Greco’s are pinocchio-like; & Velásquez’s look like the last pick of a peasant’s potatoes* * * * * * * * * * * * What can one expect from Spain, a nation where noses are held in such low esteem?
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10. E-mail from my nose [Dead Sea]. Along with my new purple color, I have a new corporeal friend, a pimple that’s also a tumor. . . . . . . . . .a TIMPLE! It has brought me to this place where H2O is heavier than Fe or Pb, heavier, in fact, than anything on earth except a sinking feeling or a stone heart. .............................. Warmest regards, yr nose of Sharon.
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The King of Spain.
11. Voice mail from Room 102. “. . . I am reminded of the poet Trakl who died from a drug overdose while serving as pharmacist in the Austro-Hungarian army. To date, I am certain of 4 things: [1] we cast shadows, ergo we might be; [2] light & shadow are the world & its cartoon; [3] the night is a shadow & therefore ordinary; & [4] we are solid & so next to nothing in a hierarchy of lambencies. . . .�
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12. Daydream No. 2: Speaking of oral sex. Io/aka Y is engulfed in zeusfog: a trillion molecular mouths. Love is the heart’s music, the pedal point of daily life, but love is also geography, the snail trail of love’s progress: Sestus & Albydos, the mole isles, the navel sea, the ordinating feet, the fabulous India. But when it’s done, it’s done, & the nose&-tongue forays, the stamp-lick of territory gone.
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Herr Timple.
13. Irena the czarina.
Et s’introduit en roi, sans bruit et sans valets, Dans tous les hospitaux et dans tous les palais. —Baudelaire Like all empresses she’s a creature of milk. We’re stupider than she, so we exasperate her. We’re her lovely slugs & night spirits. She’s our graveyard-shift mother. She gives us lapis eggs, ivory eggs, bejeweled enamel eggs. She rules over every earthly creature & flower: roaches, centipedes, brown recluses, doublewinged dragonflies, , , , & endless fields of primroses, her yellow continent rising from the solemn olive of the sea.
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14. Chant from Room 104. O I’m in such pain, I’m in such terrible pain. O I’m in such pain, I’m in such terrible pain. O I’m in such pain, I’m in such terrible pain O I’m in such pain, I’m in such terrible pain. O I’m in such pain, I’m in such terrible pain O I’m in such pain, I’m in such terrible pain. O I’m in such pain, I’m in such terrible pain O O O O O O.
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With Picasso’s noses.
15. E-mail from my nose [Stratford-on-Avon]. Mon cher: The TIMPLE turns out to be awfully good at reciting speeches from the late Romance plays of WS, those reconciliatory dramas in which people get tired & weary & are more apt to make compromises than spill blood or actually die. In these plays everyone is both guilty & innocent: from a morning’s satires, an evening’s humble apologies. Miss you to pieces, yr Nosenkavalier.
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16. Exit Herr Timple. After surgery, my nose is less of a nose, topographically speaking, w/ a sizable hole where its tip once was: Herr Timple. He was unceremoniously dropped into a steel kidney-shaped cup & brought to the nearest theater where he can either end his refrain or emigrate to Canada & live a productive & harmless life. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...................................
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17. Chemotherapy. It ran through the veins & arteries like gasoline, cold but capable of fire. My nose thought he’d become a god! Then it was sleep & dreams of a halfazure, half-navy sea, of lava rivers, thickankled women & far-flung friends.
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18. Daydream No. 3: Y
& the KofS.
She appears with no new news of my nose, playing the cello on the Costa del Sol w/ legs apart & to royal applause, but as if for me, as if for me!!!!!!
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Y____ and her cello.
19. E-mail from the Timples. Just a quick note to inform you that I now have a wife & family & have abandoned yr nose forever. He has rid himself of a dreaded thing of darkness, which I acknowledge to be yrs truly, & has already regained some of his powers. So: Adieu, adieu, remember me. Yr every 3rd thought shall be my grave & how in this our pinching cave shall we discourse the freezing hours away? Well, we shan’t. xoxoxoxox oxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox Herr T.
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20. Grackles. Outside grackles arrive by the 1000s from no-one-knows-where & descend on vacant lots & parking lots & park lawns, pecking at sticks & bumping into each other. They seem to be saying Don’t celebrate just yet the Crab may only appear to be riddled & hammered. Then they leave in a slanting black cloud.
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21. E-mail from my nose [under my bed]. Tuberculosis or not tuberculosis: that is the question. Voices missing faces & voices that never had one to speak of say they speak for the living & the dead. Death lives in the cold room where bodies are replaced atom by atom with lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium, neodymium, promethium, amarium, europium, terbium, dysprosium, holmium, erbium, thulium, , , & uranium. Death offers * * * * * * * * * *delirium a turning away & a leaping thru time, insurance against the most terrible of truths. We are, you & I, each other’s rescuers.
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22. Mme. Curie & the Radium Girls. Her clothes, notebooks, even her hankies can’t be touched. She & the dial painters, the Radium Girls from Bristol CT, Clocktown USA, whose noses are black, scabbing & all but decomposed, are still hopeful that the luminous element, Ra At. Wt. 226 At. No. 88, the jewel aglow inside Mont Pitchblende, can be — dare I say it? — miraculous again. What has eaten at & disfigured them can be my nose’s salvation, ammo shot from gamma-guns, forming ropes of firefly light, ropes of hope. We hear Duranowski’s violin down the hall: the skip & frolic of the Spring Sonata.
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23. Remission, return, reunion, rejoicing. My nose has returned to its proper place & face & my senses number 5 once more: we’re together again in 103 under Irena’s dutiful care. Ra? Not even considered; everything got better sui generis. It happens sometimes. Herr Timple says hi from Stratford, Canada, where he & his wife, a local physical therapist, have 8 children. The men in 101, 102 & 104 have gone home. Y has remarried. They’re all right. She’s all right. The KofS is all right. Dr. S**p is all right. Mme. Curie is all right. The Radium Girls & grackles are all right. I’m all right. My nose is all right. Everything’s all right. In fact, everything can’t be anything else but all right.
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24. Follow up. Dread is a vague sensation of discomfort from a barely remembered dream. Joy has slipped away, H2O thru fingers. Sublime purple skies are pushed aside. Floods recede & droughts are quenched. You know, it really lasts only so long this new appreciation for life.
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My nose (studies).
Notes. 8. A violinist named Duranowski. Duranowski was a Polish violinist who apparently was the source of many stories — including those involving demonic activity — about Paganini, the virtuoso violinist and composer of The 24 Caprices. 9. Daydream No. 1: The King of Spain. The King of Spain also makes an appearance in Gogol’s Diary of a Madman. 17. Chemotherapy. The last words of the Roman emperor Vespasian were: “Methinks I’m turning into a god.”
Further Adventures of My Nose [24 Caprices] Words copyright 2005, John Surowiecki. Pictures copyright 2005, Terry Rentzepis. Second edition, November 2008. Made by Ugly Duckling Presse, Ltd., a 501(c)(3) organization, in an edition of 350 and at the UDP studio in Brooklyn. Design by GLF. Cover by Stuart Perry. Text set in Cochin and Copperplate. Interior illustrations printed by 4over4.com. Paper provided by Materials for the Arts.
Ugly Duckling Presse: The Old American Can Factory 232 Third Street, #E002, Brooklyn NY, 11215 http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/