The Word Exchange (4 page)

Friday, November 16

Has this happened to you? You’re taking a nap. Maybe you’re having a dream about someone you know, and maybe you don’t feel like revealing all the particulars right now, but let’s just say it’s a nice one, very vivid, that you’d like to go on dreaming for a while. You don’t get that chance, though, because just when you reach the nicest part (praying later you weren’t making any incriminating sounds), you’re wakened by what turns out to be a woman’s screaming. And what happens next, or roughly at the same time, is that you sort of forget where you were napping, which was underneath your desk, and when you try to rise up quickly, you clock yourself so hard in your (admittedly large) forehead that while you’re still half asleep, you nearly concuss, and the screaming seems still to be going on and on, like a siren song, until it reaches an apotheosis, and it isn’t until you’ve managed in a bruised approximation of panic to crawl out from below your desk (maybe with the vestige of an erection) that you realize the person standing there in the dark is the star of your once pleasant, now departed dream.

“What the fuck, Bart?” she says when she sees you, which seems a little unfair, considering.

You can’t help but notice what she’s wearing, because you always can’t help but notice. Tonight her sartorial choices are regrettably voluminous:
baggy red pants—pajama bottoms?—and an olive-green coat quilted in figure-swallowing chevrons. Her hair looks unwashed, though you can’t really call the kettle black on that one, and she seems to have on two different shoes. This change in mien is pretty recent; in fact, you think you can date it to the day Max moved out of their Lilliputian apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. (A lamentably apt neighborhood for Max, less so for this variegated seraph.)

Not that your heart doesn’t still do an ovation each time she walks by your open office door. And in fact, on those rare occasions when you might shut said door to concentrate, just the buttery clop of her clogs on the carpet outside is enough to carbonate your blood. Her congenital restlessness, thank God, tempts her from her desk a couple times an hour—to check on Doug (and, on the way back, chat with someone, usually Svetlana or Frank), to visit the kitchen for endless cups of tea (and subsequently the ladies’), and, more often than really seems possible, to take covert trips to the cafeteria for candy.

In the month since Max left, though, her restlessness has changed. These days you sometimes see her slowly come to a bewildered halt halfway down the hall. She’ll shake her head as if lost, then turn around and go back—sometimes only to stumble by again a few moments later, muttering something unkind to herself, face beset with disappointment.

And what a face. A face that (if it weren’t so chauvinistic to think it) you might find yourself believing should be exempt from mortal disappointments. The kind of face that one could easily make the mistake of describing, e.g., as a “radiant, pre-Raphaelite cynosure” (as you may have done on one of this journal’s earlier pages). It does conform to a paint-by-numbers kind of cardinal “beauty.” You could imagine it atomized by the teen blogs you’re sometimes forced to consult for neologisms, with its [
sic
] “perfect heart shape,” “rich, golden complexion,” and high “crabapple cheeks,” its huge “sea-green” eyes, straight, slender nose, and pointy chin, lips so ridiculously full they could be in an ad for tire gauges, and the long, blondish hair that “halos” the whole thing, nearly condemning it to simple, plasticine convention. But it’s saved, naturally, by its defects. I.e., her slightly crooked front teeth; her unusually dark brows, which help perpetuate confusion about her hair’s natural color (you’ve seen it in shades of brown, black, platinum, red, and, once, blue); her oddly cramped smile, the tightness of which is somehow accentuated by a peculiarly pleatlike and asymmetrical dimple; and
especially the small, brownish pink, strawberry-shaped mark on her left cheek. It’s always the scuffs in the marble that make its inner light seem to glow more brightly.

(Twice you’ve heard her described as “plain”: once by Ana herself, which was a little grating, but once also by Svetlana, which you found far more mystifying.)

So, no. It’s not the neat collection of ideal features that makes your guts do a little leap. It’s the way her upper lip tends to dew with sweat, especially when she’s nervous, e.g., during a book launch, or when she has to give a Dictionary tour to someone kind of famous. It’s how Doug’s Dougish little jokes and pranks can get her to bray with bona fide mirth, and the ambrosial if tuneless songs you sometimes catch her humming in the hall. In other words, it’s the way your insides feel when she sees you and smiles.

(Okay, enough. I’m now officially embarrassed by much of the above, but especially of writing in the second person. Somehow it seemed so much more evocative and—ugh—literary a few months ago, when I finally succumbed to Doug’s aggressive encouragements and started keeping this journal. But let’s face it, I’m no Camus or Faulkner or Calvino. And anyway, my use of “you” derived not from an interesting effort to “subvert narrative expectations”—i.e., call attention to the consentient artifice implied by the act of reading—but probably just from a misguided attempt to short-circuit my own neurotic self-censoring tendencies by sort of pretending I’m someone else. But now I’m stopping, officially.)

Hence: “Ana,” I say, rubbing the lump rising on my forehead.

“What were you doing?” she asks, in what I can only describe as a suspicious tone. I notice she’s holding something crumpled in her purple mitten.

“Well …” I begin. But it’s at about this point that I realize how not only small and unwashed but how truly
harrowed
Ana is looking, and it doesn’t seem worth explaining about the train up to Washington Heights taking 30 minutes, times two to come back, and having at least another few hours of work for tomorrow, rendering the cost-benefit analysis of napping in the relative comfort of my sagging, squeaky full mattress at home versus (as I generally do) on the floor beneath my desk to lead me most often on weekends to the latter course. (I occasionally sleep in the
guest bed of Dr. D’s apartment, in Ana’s old room, but I’m not sure she knows.)

It goes without saying, of course, that Ana isn’t merely pretty. Both in the sense that she supersedes mere prettiness (see above) and in that she’s not
merely
pretty. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to call her, as Dr. D once did, “a boldly sapient creature of divine enchantment.” Form, I think, is dialectically related to content. And in fact it’s perhaps her not-mere-prettiness, her intellect and sense of style and kindness and competency and good joke timing and infectious joy for life, etc., that have, to my mind (and, believe me, many others’), elevated her from the more crowded and clamorous ranks of the pretty to the rarified stratum of the beautiful. Something about her suggests the endless unfolding of possibilities. Ana qua Ana is, basically, flawlessness qua flawlessness, sui generis.

Maybe, before launching into an accounting of tonight’s events, I should start by explaining how my acquaintanceship with Ana began. Maybe. But as Hegel teaches us, beginnings are necessarily problematic. (As are endings.)

How can I describe my first encounter with Ana fairly, when my understanding of her essence has passed through infinite iterations over the past four and a half years? My early impressions, if I could even accurately access them, would come across now as vulgar. Not in the sense of lewdness, of course, but I’m ashamed to admit that some of her subtler and more refined charms—maybe, e.g., her brains—were a little lost on me when Dr. D introduced us in the hall outside his office, Ana wearing just a yellow slip of sundress.

Unfortunately, in one of the more disappointing turns of my early adulthood, Ana met Max soon after. (His appearance, like Ana’s, tends not to elicit a neutral response. He has sort of woundedly Rimbaudian eyes, oddly paired with a warm, impish, slightly gap-toothed smile. That, and he’s tall and blond. Honestly, he and Ana don’t look altogether unrelated. A fact I’ll diplomatically refrain from remarking on further.)

He turned up at the Dictionary unannounced—to visit me, funnily enough. I think it would be fair to say that Max was also less attuned at the time to the sapient-creature side of Ana’s nature. Unlike me, though, he didn’t really outgrow his first impressions. In part because he didn’t have to: within a week, as he’d crassly wagered several friends, he and
Ana were “together.” Also, though, Max is incapable of anything more probing than first impressions. He claims his powers of perspicacity are such that he “gets” everything—women, philosophical precepts, etc.—from the most superficial of initial perceptions. Any deliberations one might undertake beyond the seminal “gut reaction” should be dismissed, he says, as perseveration.

(On the afternoon Max and Ana met, when it was already clear where things were headed, Max cornered me outside the office men’s room. “Going in for a grunter?” he said, very loudly, which made me blush. The men’s room is near Neologisms, and several women work in Neologisms. I don’t like calling attention to these visits, especially given how often they occur. Once he’d embarrassed me, Max gripped my shoulder in a way I found menacing, and oddly intimate. “Don’t tell her about me,” he said quietly. “I don’t want to fuck this one up. So don’t
you
fuck it up for me.” I promised him, of course, that I wouldn’t say anything, which I wouldn’t have anyway, because of the sheer unpleasantry of divulging an unattractive truth to an attractive person.)

Let me begin instead, then—yes, appreciating the irony—with Hegel. First, it bears acknowledging that G. W. F. H., born in Stuttgart at the end of August 1770, has enjoyed only fleeting upticks in popularity. Depending on whom you ask, his work is part of the canon or it isn’t. He’s been hijacked by the left or the right. Some claim he’s an apologist for the abuse of state power, even totalitarianism. At the moment of his death, he’s supposed to have said, “And he didn’t understand me.”

GWF is often remembered only for the reductive thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad, when that phraseology wasn’t even his but Kant’s. Carl Jung (of all people) called him crazy. And more philistines than one could count have accused his writing of being inelegant or difficult—or incomprehensible. As every serious scholar knows, to read Hegel in anything other than the original German is an amateurish offense. There really is just no appropriate translation for
Begriff, Urteil
, or even
Geist
, let alone
Aufhebung
.

According to my reading of Hegel, language is our servant, submissive to the master of reason. Max, among others, likes to remind me that this judgment is considered conservative; it apparently fails to account for historical context. And I guess it
could
seem contradictory to argue that Hegel is only Hegelian in the gusty vigor of his native German. It might be more rational to make a concession here to at least the weak
version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. (I feel a certain kinship with this version, frankly, if weakness is its defining feature. The day Max bench-pressed me was a humbling day indeed.)

So, okay: I give in. Language can
influence
the content of communication. But really I was defending Hegel against charges of inelegance, not difficulty. What’s
Aufhebung
in English? Only “to raise up.” In German it connotes (i) raising higher, literally and figuratively; (ii) taking away, i.e., canceling or annuling; and (iii) (thanks to Hegel) sublation. Viz., this one small, soothing word and its multifarious meanings are in some ways the kernel from which Hegel’s whole philosophical enterprise springs. Its aleph, if you will.
Aufhebung
. Aleph. They even sound like simulacra. (I don’t mean, of course, the electronic device. Although I’m sure that’s why the word is on my mind—from the strange conversation Ana and I had a couple hours ago.)

I guess all I’m trying to say is that language may be large, unwieldy, and in a perpetual state of transformation—in other words, language is like love—but, unlike Dr. D, I don’t think it’s greater than we are. I think it’s our duty, in fact, to corral it into coherence; to suppress its more unruly tendencies; to verify its meaning and, more importantly, its efficacy; to test its subjectivity-bridging potential. (Again, we should treat it very much like love.)

And on this point maybe Max and I aren’t so far apart. We both think love (and language) are interesting but taffylike diversions: soft, simple, perhaps a little salty. If either one takes over your life, you’re an ass.

I met Hermes Maximilian King and Hegel at roughly the same time, in Professor Lockhart’s terms four and five seminar on the mythologization of the philosopher, in which Lockhart argued that Hegel was one of the most important—and misread—thinkers of the past 200 years. (Max remained skeptical. His attachment was to Sartre. Who, by the way, was also influenced by Hegel.)

You might think the thin coincidence of two people sharing a syllabus wouldn’t automatically occasion some kind of lasting friendship. But to understand my relationship with Max, it’s important to know that, apart from us and David Lockhart, there were only two other people in that class. And 24 other students on campus—total. No girls at the time. No distractions. No chances for escape, or much escapism. An actual
policy
promoting isolation. Such was the nature of our college, way over yonder in that lonesome California valley.

I didn’t really know how lucky we were to be at Deep Springs. Even then, a decade ago, professors at other schools were slowly being replaced by computers and machines. Now, with the Meme, kids just download everything. For us there were nights we stayed up until four in the morning reading. And you could
feel
the work we did: an afternoon of hefting alfalfa bales will leave you sorer than a beating. That’s why it’s hard for me to understand Max’s plans to take over the world. (Kidding. Kind of.) But I guess it fits on the logical continuum. Let’s just say he can claim an inimitable and, to many, intoxicating admixture of volubility, rigor, pathological charisma, and dismissiveness. He was—is—worshipped. Then, by Professor Lockhart, by probably 22 of the 26 pupils at our school, by
all
their moms and sisters and girlfriends, and yes, debasing as it is to admit, by me, even if my hero worship was shot through with a note of very serious doubt. The first thing Max ever said to me? “You look like my great-uncle Gustav, man. I think he has those same suspenders.”