Wittgenstein's Mistress (7 page)

Yesterday's sunset was a Vincent Van Gogh sunset, with a certain amount of anxiety in it.

Perhaps I am only thinking about streaks.

I have more than once wondered why the books in the basement are not upstairs with the others, actually.

There is space. Many of the shelves up here are half empty.

Although doubtless when I say they are half empty I should really be saying they are half filled, since presumably they were totally empty before somebody half filled them.

Then again it is not impossible that they were once filled completely, becoming half empty only when somebody removed half of the books to the basement.

I find this second possibility less likely than the first, although it is not utterly beyond consideration.

In either event the present state of the shelves is an explanation for why so many of the books in the house are tilted, or standing askew. And thus have become permanently misshapen.

Baseball When the Grass Was Real
is actually the name of one of those, I believe.

In that case one is at least made halfway curious about the meaning of the title, I must admit.

Less than inordinately curious, baseball remaining baseball, but at least halfway curious.

As a matter of fact perhaps I will mow my own grass, which is undeniably real, even if it is inordinately overgrown.

I cannot mow the grass. Not with the lawnmower being as badly rusted as the hand truck and the bicycles.

I have other bicycles, actually.

One is doubtless beside the pickup truck. Another may be at the gas station, in the town.

There was a bicycle in the cul-de-sac beneath the Acropolis, come to think about it.

Perhaps the books in the basement are duplicate books.

Like the two lives of Brahms, that would be. Even if both of those would appear to have been upstairs.

There is nobody at the window in the painting of the house, by the way.

I have now concluded that what I believed to be a person is a shadow.

If it is not a shadow, it is perhaps a curtain.

As a matter of fact it could actually be nothing more than an attempt to imply depths, within the room.

Although in a manner of speaking all that is really in the window is burnt sienna pigment. And some yellow ochre.

In fact there is no window either, in that same manner of speaking, but only shape.

So that any few speculations I may have made about the person at the window would therefore now appear to be rendered meaningless, obviously.

Unless of course I subsequently become convinced that there is somebody at the window all over again.

I have put that badly.

What I intended to say was that I may possibly become newly convinced that there is somebody at the window, hardly that somebody who had been at the window has gone away but might come back.

In either case it remains a fact that no altered perception of my own, such as this one, changes anything in the painting.

So that perhaps my earlier speculations remain valid after all.

I have very little idea what I mean by that.

One can scarcely speculate about a person when there is no person to speculate about.

Yet there is no way of denying that one did make such speculations.

Two days ago, when I was hearing Kathleen Ferrier, what exactly was I hearing?

Yesterday, when I was speculating about a person at the window in the painting, what exactly was I speculating about?

I have just put the painting back into the room with the atlas and the life of Brahms.

As a matter of fact I have now also had another night's sleep.

I mention that, this time, only because in a manner of speaking one could now say that it has this quickly become the day after tomorrow.

Certain questions would still continue to appear unanswerable, however.

Such as, for instance, if I have concluded that there is nothing in the painting except shapes, am I also concluding that there is nothing on these pages except letters of the alphabet?

If one understood only the Greek alphabet, what would be on these pages?

Doubtless, in Russia, I drove right past St. Petersburg without knowing it was St. Petersburg.

As a matter of fact Anna Karenina could have driven right past without knowing it was St. Petersburg either.

Seeing a sign indicating Stalingrad, how would Anna Karenina have been able to tell?

Especially since the sign would have more likely indicated Leningrad?

I have obviously now lost my train of thought altogether.

Once, Robert Rauschenberg erased most of a drawing by Willem de Kooning, and then named it
Erased de Kooning Drawing.

I am in no way certain what this is connected to either, but I suspect it is connected to more than I once believed it to be connected to.

Robert Rauschenberg came to my loft in SoHo one afternoon, actually. I do not remember that he erased anything.

The reason for one of my bicycles being at the gas station is that I sometimes decide to walk home, after having ridden somewhere.

Although what I really decided that day was to bring back kerosene, which was difficult to ride with.

I say was difficult, instead of is difficult, since I no longer carry kerosene, no longer making use of those lamps.

When I stopped making use of them was after I knocked over the one that set fire to the other house, although doubtless I have mentioned this.

One moment I was adjusting the wick, and a moment after
that the entire bedroom was ablaze.

These beach houses are all wood, of course. All I could do was sit at the dunes and watch it burn.

For most of the night the entire sky was Homeric.

It was on that same night that my rowboat disappeared, as it happened, although that is perhaps beside the point.

One hardly pays attention to a missing rowboat when one's house is burning to the ground.

Still, there it was, no longer on the beach.

Sometimes I like to believe that it has been carried all of the way across the ocean by now, to tell the truth.

As far as to the island of Lesbos, say. Or to Ithaca, even.

Frequently, certain objects wash up onto the shore here that could well have been carried just as far in the opposite direction, as a matter of fact.

Such as my stick, for instance, which I sometimes take with me when I walk.

Doubtless the stick served some other purpose than simply being taken along on walks, at one time. One can no longer guess at what other purpose, however, because of the way it has been worn smooth by waves.

Now and again I have also made use of the stick to write in the sand with, actually.

In fact I have even written in Greek.

Well, or in what looked like Greek, although I was actually only inventing that.

What I would write were messages, to tell the truth, like the ones I sometimes used to write in the street.

Somebody is living on this beach, the messages would say.

Obviously it did not matter by then that the messages were only in an invented writing that nobody could read.

Actually, nothing that I wrote was ever still there when I went back in any case, always being washed away.

Still, if I have concluded that there is nothing in the painting except shapes, am I also concluding that there was not even
invented writing in the sand, but only grooves from my stick?

Doubtless the stick was originally nothing more interesting than the handle of a carpet sweeper.

Once, when I had set it aside to drag a piece of driftwood along the beach, I worried that I might have lost it.

When I looked back it was standing upright, however, where I had had the foresight to place it without really paying attention.

Then again it is quite possible that the question of loss had not entered my mind until I was already in the process of looking back, which is to say that the stick was already not lost before I had worried that it might be.

I am not particularly happy over this new habit of saying things that I have very little idea what I mean by saying, to tell the truth.

It was somebody named Ralph Hodgson, who wrote the poem about the birds being sold in the shops for people to eat.

I do not remember that I ever read any other poem by Ralph Hodgson.

I do remember that Leonardo da Vinci used to buy such birds, however, in Florence, and then let them out of their cages.

And that Helen of Troy did have at least one daughter, named Hermione.

And that Leonardo also thought up a method to prevent the Arno from overflowing its banks, to which nobody obviously paid any attention.

For that matter Leonardo at least once put snow into one of his paintings too, even if I cannot remember whether Andrea del Sarto or Taddeo Gaddi ever did.

In addition to which, Rembrandt's pupils used to paint gold coins on the floor of his studio and make them look so real that Rembrandt would stoop to pick them up, although I am uncertain as to why this reminds me of Robert Rauschenberg again.

I have always harbored sincere doubts that Helen was the cause of that war, by the way.

A single Spartan girl, after all.

As a matter of fact the whole thing was undeniably a mercantile proposition. All ten years of it, just to see who would pay tariff to whom, so as to be able to make use of a channel of water.

A different poet, named Rupert Brooke, died in the Dardanelles during the first World War, even if I do not believe that I remembered this when I visited the Dardanelles, by which I mean the Hellespont.

Still, I find it extraordinary that young men died there in a war that long ago, and then died in the same place three thousand years after that.

And on second thought the gold coins that Rembrandt's pupils painted on the floor of his studio are exactly what I was talking about when I was talking about Robert Rauschenberg.

Or rather what I was talking about when I was talking about the person who is not at the window in the painting of this house.

The coins having only been coins until Rembrandt bent over.

Which did not deter me from rigging up a generator and floodlights in the Colosseum, however.

Or from being shrewd enough to call the cat Calpurnia, after having gotten no response with Nero and Caligula.

Still, if Rembrandt had had a cat, it would have strolled right past the coins without so much as a glance.

Which does not imply that Rembrandt's cat was more intelligent than Rembrandt.

Even if it so happens that Rembrandt kept on doing that, incidentally, no matter how many times they tricked him.

The world being full of stories about pupils playing tricks on their teachers, of course.

Leonardo once played a trick on Verrocchio by filling in part of a canvas so beautifully that Verrocchio decided to go into another line of work.

One finds it difficult to think of Aristotle playing tricks on Plato, on the other hand.

Or even to think of Aristotle doing lessons.

One can easily manage to visualize Helen doing them, however. One can even see her chewing on a pencil.

Assuming the Greeks had had pencils, that would be.

As a matter of fact even Archimedes sometimes did his geometry by writing in the sand. With a stick.

I accept the fact that it is doubtless not the same stick.

Even if it could well have drifted for years. Over and back any number of times, in fact.

Helen left Hermione at home when she deserted Menelaus and ran off with Paris, which is the one thing Helen did that one wishes she hadn't.

Though it is not impossible that the ancient writers are not to be fully trusted in regard to such topics, having been mostly men.

What one really wishes is that Sappho had written some plays.

Though in fact there are other versions anyhow.

Such as in the painting by Tiepolo, for instance, where Helen is shown being carried off by force.

The Rape of Helen,
in fact, being what Tiepolo called the painting.

Medea is a little harder to visualize chewing on a pencil.

Perhaps at seven or eight. After that she would have been Germaine Greer.

For the life of me I cannot remember when the last time I thought about Germaine Greer was. Possibly there are some books by her in this house, however.

Though I still cannot imagine what that other title might mean, about grass no longer being real.

Perhaps my stick was once a baseball bat.

Perhaps Rembrandt's pupils once played baseball.

Cassandra was raped too, of course, after Troy fell.

Doubtless there is no way of verifying that El Greco was descended from Hermione, however, after practically three thousand years.

Near the end of his life, Titian manipulated his pigments as much with his fingers as with a brush, which was surely not the way Giovanni Bellini taught him.

Naturally I had no way of knowing if the cat at the Colosseum had nibbled at anything behind my back, since most of the cans had seemed less than full to begin with.

Doubtless Brahms was once a pupil, also.

Even if, when he was only twelve, he was already playing the piano in a dance hall, which was more likely a house of prostitution.

In fact Brahms went to prostitutes for the rest of his life.

Nonetheless it is still not impossible to visualize Brahms doing scales.

Well, and perhaps the prostitutes when he was still only twelve were dancing girls after all.

Such as Jane Avril, for instance.

I have no idea if Brahms ever visited in Paris while Jane Avril was dancing there.

Still, for some reason it strikes me as agreeable to think of Brahms as having had an affair with Jane Avril.

Or at least with Cleopatre or Gazelle or Mlle. Eglantine, who were some of the other dancers in Paris at that time.

How one remembers certain things is beyond me.

Perhaps Guy de Maupassant was rowing, when Brahms visited in Paris.

Once, Bertrand Russell took his pupil Ludwig Wittgenstein to watch Alfred North Whitehead row, at Cambridge. Wittgenstein became very angry with Bertrand Russell for having wasted his day.