Authors: John Ashbery
“My sister
Hecat,
who sometimes accompanies me on midnight rides to nameless and indescribable places, warned me of this dell, seemingly laid out for the Sunday strolls of civil servants, but in reality the haunt of drifters and retarded children.
You
,” she cried, shaking her wand at the corps de ballet of hobos, who stumbled and fell over each other in their frantic attempt to get away from her, “you who oppress even my dreams, where a perverse order should reign but where I find instead traces of the lunacy that besets my waking hours, are accomplices in all this, comical and ineffectual though you pretend to be. As for that creature” (here she gestured toward the sleeping Alice), “she knows only too well the implications of her presence here with that changeling, and how these constitute a reflection on my inward character as illustrated in my outward appearance, such as this spangled gown and these tangled tresses, meant to epitomize the confusion which is the one source of my living being, but which in these ambiguous surroundings, neither true fantasy nor clean-cut reality, keeps me at bay until I can no longer see the woman I once was. I shall not rest until I have erased all of this from my thoughts, or (which is more likely) incorporated it into the confusing scheme I have erected around me for my support and glorification.”
At this there was some whispering and apprehensive regrouping among the hobos; meanwhile Alice and the pig slept on oblivious, the latter’s snores having become more relaxed and peaceful than before. Mania continued to stride back and forth, impetuously stabbing her wand into the ground. Suddenly a black horse with a rider swathed in a dark cloak and with a dark sombrero pulled down over his face approached quickly along a path leading through the trees from the right of the stage. Without dismounting or revealing his face the stranger accosted the lady:
STRANGER
: Why do you pace back and forth like this, ignoring the critical reality of this scene, or pretending that it is a monstrosity of reason sent by some envious commonsensical deity to confound and humiliate you? You might have been considered beautiful, and an ornament even to such a curious setting as this, had you not persisted in spoiling the clear and surprising outline of your character, and leading around this hideous misshapen beast as though to scare off any who might have approached you so as to admire you.
MANIA
: I am as I am, and in that I am happy, and care nothing for the opinion of others. The very idea of the idea others might entertain of me is as a poison to me, pushing me to flee farther into wastes even less hospitable and more treacherously combined of irregular elements than this one. As for my pet hyena, beauty is in the eye of the beholder; at least, I find him beautiful, and, unlike other beasts, he has the ability to laugh and sneer at the spectacle around us.
STRANGER
: Come with me, and I will take you into the presence of one at whose court beauty and irrationality reign alternately, and never tread on each other’s toes as do your unsightly followers [more whispering and gesturing among the hobos], where your own pronounced contours may flourish and be judged for what they are worth, while the anomalies of the room you happen to be in or the disturbing letters and phone calls that hamper your free unorthodox development will melt away like crystal rivulets leaving a glacier, and you may dwell in the accident of your character forever.
MANIA
: You speak well, and if all there is as you say, I am convinced and will accompany you gladly. But before doing so I must ask you two questions. First, what is the name of her to whose palace you purpose to lead me; and second, may I bring my hyena along?
STRANGER
: As to the first question, that I may not answer now, but you’ll find out soon enough. As to the second, the answer is yes, providing it behaves itself.
The lady mounted the stranger’s steed with his help, and sat sideways, with the hyena on its chain trotting along behind them. As they rode back into the woods the forest faded away and the scene became an immense metallic sky in which a huge lead-colored sphere or disc—impossible to determine which—seemed to float midway between the proscenium and the floor of the stage. At right and left behind the footlights some of the hobos, reduced almost to midget size, rushed back and forth gesticulating at the strange orb that hung above them; with them mingled a few nursery-rhyme characters such as the Knave of Hearts and the Pie Man, who seemed to be looking around uneasily for Simon. All were puzzled or terrified by the strange new apparition, which seemed to grow darker and denser while the sky surrounding it stayed the same white-metal color.
Alice, awakening from her slumber, stood up and joined the group at the front of the stage, leaving the pig in its baby clothes to scamper off into the wings. Wiping away some strands of hair that had fallen across her forehead and seeming to become aware of the changed landscape around her, she turned to the others and asked, “What happens now?”
In reply, Jack Horner, who had been gazing at the camera in his hand with an expression of ironic detachment, like Hamlet contemplating the skull of Yorick, jerked his head upward toward the banner, whose scarlet motto still blazed brightly though the trees that supported it were fast fading in the glare from the sky. Alice too looked up, noticing it for the first time.
“I see,” she said at length. “A process of duration has been set in motion around us, though there is no indication I can see that any of us is involved in it. If that is the case, what conclusion are we to draw? Why are we here, if even such a nebulous concept as ‘here’ is to be allowed us? What are we to do?”
At this the Knave of Hearts stepped forward and cast his eyes modestly toward the ground. “I see separate, soft pain, lady,” he said. “The likes of these”—he indicated with a sweep of his arm the group of hobos and others who had subsided into worried reclining poses in the background—“who know not what they are, or what they mean, I isolate from the serious business of creatures such as we, both more ordinary and more distinguished than the common herd of anesthetized earthlings. It is so that we may question more acutely the sphere into which we have been thrust, that threatens to smother us at every second and above which we rise triumphant with each breath we draw. At least, that is the way I see it.”
“Then you are a fool as well as a knave,” Jack answered angrily, “since you don’t seem to realize that the sphere is escaping us, rather than the reverse, and that in a moment it will have become one less thing to carry.”
As he spoke the stage grew very dark, so that the circle in the sky finally seemed light by contrast, while a soft wail arose from the instruments in the orchestra pit.
“I suspect the mischief of Mercury in all this,” muttered Jack, keeping a weather eye on the heavens. “For though some believe Hermes’ lineage to be celestial, others maintain that he is of infernal origin, and emerges on earth to do the errands of Pluto and Proserpine on the rare occasions when they have business here.”
The lights slowly came up again, revealing a perspective view of a busy main street in a large American city. The dark outline of the disc still persisted in the sky, yet the climate seemed warm and sunny, though there were Christmas decorations strung across the street and along the facades of department stores, and on a nearby street corner stood a Salvation Army Santa Claus with his bell and cauldron. It could have been downtown Los Angeles in the late 30s or early- to mid-40s, judging from the women’s fashions and the models of cars that crawled along the street as though pulled by invisible strings.
Walking in place on a sidewalk which was actually a treadmill moving toward the back of the stage was a couple in their early thirties. Mania (for the woman was none other than she) was dressed in the style of Joan Crawford in
Mildred Pierce,
in a severe suit with padded shoulders and a pillbox with a veil crowning the pincurls of her upswept hairdo, which also cascaded to her shoulders, ending in more pincurls. Instead of the sheaf of gladioli she now clutched a black handbag suspended on a strap over her shoulder, and in place of the hyena, one of those
little white dogs
on the end of a leash kept sniffing the legs of pedestrians who were in truth mere celluloid phantoms, part of the process shot which made up the whole downtown backdrop. The man at her side wore a broad-brimmed hat, loose-fitting sport coat and baggy gabardine slacks; he bore a certain resemblance to the actor Bruce Bennett but closer inspection revealed him to be the statue of Mercury, with the paint still peeling from his face around the empty eye sockets. At first it looked as though the two were enjoying the holiday atmosphere and drinking in the sights and sounds of the city. Gradually, however, Mania’s expression darkened; finally she stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and pulled at her escort’s sleeve.
“Listen, Herman,” she said, perhaps addressing Bruce Bennett by his real name, Herman Brix, “you said you were going to take me to this swell place and all, where I was supposed to meet a lot of interesting people who could help me in my career. All we do is walk down this dopey street looking in store windows and waiting for the stoplights to change. Is this your idea of a good time?”
“But this is all part of it, hon, part of what I promised you,” Mercury rejoined. “Don’t you feel the atmosphere yet? That powder-blue sky of the eternal postcard, with the haze of mountain peaks barely visible; the salmon-colored pavement with its little green and blue cars that look so still though they are supposed to be in motion? The window shoppers, people like you and me …?”
“
That’s
what I thought,” Mania pouted, stamping one of her feet in its platform shoe so loudly that several of the extras turned to look. “Atmosphere—that’s what it was all along, wasn’t it? A question of ambience, poetry, something like that. I might as well have stayed in my cave for all the good it’s going to do me. After all, I’m used to not blending in with the environment—it’s my business not to. But I thought you were going to take me away from all that, to some place where scenery made no difference any more, where I could be what everybody accuses me of being and what I suppose I must be—my tired, tyrannical self, as separate from local color as geometry is from the hideous verticals of these avenues and buildings and the festoons that extend them into the shrinking consciousness. Have you forgotten the words of St. Augustine: ‘Multiply in your imagination the light of the sun, make it greater and brighter as you will, a thousand times or out of number. God will not be there’?”
Then we all realized what should have been obvious from the start: that the setting would go on evolving eternally, rolling its waves across our vision like an ocean, each one new yet recognizably a part of the same series, which was creation itself. Scenes from movies, plays, operas, television; decisive or little-known episodes from history; prenatal and other early memories from our own solitary, separate pasts; events yet to come from life or art; calamities or moments of relaxation; universal or personal tragedies; or little vignettes from daily life that you just had to stop and laugh at, they were so funny, like the dog chasing its tail on the living-room rug. The sunny city in California faded away and another scene took its place, and another and another. And the corollary of all this was that we would go on witnessing these tableaux, not that anything prevented us from leaving the theater, but there was no alternative to our interest in finding out what would happen next. This was the only thing that mattered for us, so we stayed on although we could have stood up and walked away in disgust at any given moment. And event followed event according to an inner logic of its own. We saw the set for the first act of
La Bohème,
picturesque poverty on a scale large enough to fill the stages of the world’s greatest opera houses, from Leningrad to Buenos Aires, punctuated only by a skylight, an easel or two and a stove with a smoking stovepipe, but entirely filled up with the boisterous and sincere camaraderie of Rodolfo, Marcello, Colline and their friends; a ripe, generous atmosphere into which Mimi is introduced like the first splinter of unavoidable death, and the scene melts imperceptibly into the terrace of the Café Momus, where the friends have gathered to drink and discuss philosophy, when suddenly the blond actress who had earlier been seen as Daffy Down Dilly returns as Musetta, mocking her elderly protector and pouring out peal after peal of deathless melody concerning the joys and advantages of life as a
grisette
, meanwhile clutching a small velvet handbag in which the contour of a small revolver was clearly visible, for as we well knew from previous experience, she was the symbol of the unexpectedness and exuberance of death, which we had waited to have come round again and which we would be meeting many times more during the course of the performance. There were murky scenes from television with a preponderance of excerpts from Jacques Cousteau documentaries with snorkeling figures disappearing down aqueous perspectives, past arrangements of coral still-lifes and white, fanlike creatures made of snowy tripe whose trailing vinelike tentacles could paralyze a man for life, and a seeming excess of silver bubbles constantly being emitted from here and there to sweep upward to the top of the screen, where they vanished. There were old clips from
Lucy
,
Lassie
and
The Waltons,
there was Walter Cronkite bidding us urgent good evening years ago. Mostly there were just moments: a street corner viewed from above, bare branches flailing the sky, a child in a doorway, a painted Pennsylvania Dutch chest, a full moon disappearing behind a dark cloud to the accompaniment of a Japanese flute, a ballerina in a frosted white dress lifted up into the light.
Always behind it the circle in the sky remained fixed like a ghost on a television screen. The setting was now the last act of Ibsen’s
When We Dead Awaken:
“A wild, broken mountaintop, with a sheer precipice behind. To the right tower snowy peaks, losing themselves high up in drifting mist. To the left, on a scree, stands an old, tumbledown hut. It is early morning. Dawn is breaking, the sun has not yet risen.” Here the disc in the sky could begin to take on the properties of the sun that had been denied it for so long: as though made of wet wool, it began little by little to soak up and distribute light. The figure of Mercury had become both more theatrical and more human: no longer a statue, he was draped in a freshly laundered chlamys that set off his well-formed but slight physique; the broad-brimmed
petasus
sat charmingly on his curls. He sat, legs spread apart, on an iron park bench, digging absent-mindedly at the ground with his staff from which leaves rather than serpents sprouted, occasionally bending over to scratch the part of his heel behind the strap of his winged sandal. The morning mists were evaporating; the light was becoming the ordinary yellow daylight of the theater. Resting both hands on his staff, he leaned forward to address the audience, cocking his head in the shrewd bumpkin manner of a Will Rogers.