Dhalgren (117 page)

"Who's here to look for?"

"Most people who come usually want to see the Father—but he's closeted with Mr Calkins now, so that would be unfeasible today—unless of course you wanted to wait, or come back at some other—"

"Is Mr Calkins here?" In my head I'd been halfway through an imaginary dialogue which had begun when I'd answered his first question with:
The Kid? Who, me? Naw…

"Yes."

"Could I see him?" I asked.

"Well, I don't… as I said, he's closeted with the Father."

"He'd want to see me," I said. "He's a friend of mine."

"I don't know if I ought to disturb them." His smile fixed some emotion I couldn't understand till he spoke: "And I believe
one
of the reasons Mr Calkins came here was to put some of his friends at a more comfortable distance." Then he giggled. Out loud.

"He's never met me," I said and wondered why. (To explain that the personal reasons which make you want to put friends at a distance had nothing to do with Calkins and me? But that's not what it sounded like.) I let it go.

A bell bonged.

"Oh, I guess—" he glanced at the tower—"Sister Ellen and Brother Paul
didn't
forget after all," and smiled (at some personal joke?) while I watched a model of the monastery I didn't even realize I'd made—the three buildings inhabited solely by the Father, Calkins, and this one here—break down and reassemble into: a community of brothers and sisters, a small garden, goats and chickens, matins, complines, vespers…

"Hey," I said.

He looked at me.

"You go tell Mr Calkins the Kid is here, and find out if he wants to see me. If he doesn't, I'll come back some other time—now that I know where this place is."

He considered, unhappily. "Well, all right." He turned.

"Hey."

He looked back.

"Who are you?"

"Randy… eh, Brother Randolf."

"Okay."

He went off around the corner, with the echo of the bell.

Beneath the chipped keystone the arched door looked as though (a slough of rust below the wrist-thick bolt) it hadn't been opened all year.

And I got back on my trip: I had looked so long for this place; finding it had been accomplished with no care for the goal itself. For minutes I wondered if I couldn't get everything in my life like that. When I finally worked out a sane answer ("No."), I laughed (aloud) and felt better.

"They're all—"

I turned from the miasmas of Holland Lake.

"—all finished for the afternoon," Brother Randy said from the corner. "He'll talk with you. Mr Calkins said he'll talk with you a little while. The Father says it's all right." (I started toward him and he still said:) "You just come with me." I think he was surprised it had worked out like that. I was surprised too; but he was unhappy about it.

"Here" was a white wood lawn chair on a stone porch with columns, along the side of the building.

I sat and gave him a grin.

"They're finished, you see," he offered. "For the afternoon. And the Father says it's all right for him to talk now, if it isn't for too long."

I think he wanted to smile.

I wonder if that thing up under his hood hurt.

"Thanks," I said.

He left.

I looked around the patchy grass, up and down the porch, at the beige stone; inset beside me in the wall was a concrete grill, cast in floral curls. Once I stood up and looked through it close. Another grill behind it was set six inches out of alignment, so you couldn't see inside. I was thinking it was probably for ventilation, when my knee (as I moved across the stone flowers trying to see) hit the chair and the feet scraped, loudly.

"Excuse me …?"

I pulled back a few inches. "Hello?" I said, surprised.

"I didn't realize you were out there yet—until I heard you move."

"Oh." I stepped back from the grill. "I thought you were going to come out here on the porch…" (He chuckled.) "Well, I guess this is okay." I pulled my chair around.

"Good. I'm glad you find this acceptable. It's rather unusual for the Father to allow someone seeking an understanding of the monastic community-as they describe the process here—to have any intercourse at all with people outside the walls. Converse with members is limited. But though I've been here several days, I don't officially start my course of study till sundown this evening. So he's made an exception."

I sat on the arm of the lawn chair. "Well," I said, "if it
goes
down this evening…"

He chuckled again. "Yes. I suppose so."

"What are you doing here?" I asked.

"I guess the best way to describe it is to say that I'm about to embark on a spiritual course of study. I'm not too sure how long it will last- You catch me just in time. Oh—I must warn you: You may ask some questions that I'm not allowed to answer. I've been instructed by the Father that, when asked them, I am simply to remain silent until you speak again."

"Don't worry," I said, "I won't pry into any secrets about your devotional games here," wishing I sort of could.

But the voice said: "No, not questions that have anything to do with the monastary."

And (While he considered further explanation?) I considered the tower exploding slowly, thrusting masonry on blurred air too thin to float brick and bolts and bellrope.

"I don't think there's anything about the monastery you
could
ask I wouldn't be allowed to answer—if I knew the answers. But part of the training is a sort of self-discipline: Any question that sparks certain internal reactions in me, causes me to think certain thoughts, to feel certain feelings, rather than rush into some verbal response that, informative or not, is still put up mainly to repress those thoughts and feelings, I'm supposed to experience them fully in the anxiety of silence."

"Oh," I said. "What sort of thoughts and feelings?" After ten quiet seconds, I laughed. "I'm sorry. I guess that's sort of like not thinking about the white hippopotamus when you're changing the boiling water into gold."

"Rather."

"It sounds interesting. Maybe I'll try it some day," and felt almost like I did the morning I'd told Reverend Amy I'd drop in on one of her services. "Hey, thanks for the note. Thanks for the party, too."

"You're most welcome. If you got my letter, then I must restrain from apologizing any more. Though I'm not surprised at meeting you, I wasn't exactly expecting it now. Dare I ask
if
you enjoyed yourself—though perhaps it's best just to let it lie."

"It was educational. But I don't think it had too much to do with your not showing up. All the scorpions had a good time—I brought the whole nest."

"I should like to have been there!"

"Everybody got drunk. The only people who didn't enjoy themselves probably didn't deserve to. Didn't you get any reports back from your friends?" First I thought I'd asked one of those questions.

"…Yes… Yes, I did. And some of my friends are extremely colorful gossips—sometimes I wonder if that's not how I chose them. I trust nothing occurred to distract you from any writing you're engaged in at present. I was quite sincere about everything I said concerning your next collection in my letter."

"Yeah."

"After some of my friends—my spies—finished their account of the evening, Thelma—do you remember her?—said practically the same thing you just did, almost word for word, about anyone who didn't enjoy himself not deserving to. When she said it, I suspected she was just trying to make me feel better for my absence. But here it is, corroborated by the guest of honor. I best not question it further. I hadn't realized you were a friend of Lanya's."

"That's right," I said. "She used to know you."

"An impressive young lady, both then and, apparently, from report, now. As I was saying, after my spies finished their account, I decided that you are even more the sort of poet Bellona needs than I'd thought before, in every way—except in literary quality which, as I explained in my letter, I am, and intend to remain, unfit to judge."

"The nicest way to put it, Mr Calkins," I said, "is I'm just not interested in the ways you mean. I never was interested in them. I think they're a load of shit anyway. But…"

"You are aware," he said after my embarrassed silence, "the fact that you feel that way makes you that much
more
suited for your role in just the ways
I
mean. Every time you refuse another interview
to
the
Times,
we shall report it, as an inspiring example of your disinterest in in publicity,
in
the
Times.
Thus your image will be further propagated—Of course you
haven't
refused any, up till now. And you said 'But…' " Calkins paused. " 'But' what?"

I felt really uncomfortable on the chair arm. "But… I feel like I may be lying again." I looked down at the creases of my belly, crossed with chain.

If he picked up on the "again" he didn't show it. "Can you tell me how?"

"I remember… I remember a morning in the park, before I ever met Mr Newboy, or even knew anyone would ever want to publish anything I ever wrote, sitting under a tree—bare-ass, with Lanya asleep beside me, and I was writing—no, I was re-copying out something. Suddenly I was struck with… delusions of grandeur? The fantasies were so intense I couldn't
breathe!
They hurt my stomach. I couldn't… write! Which was the point. Those fantasies were all in the terms you're talking about. So I know I have them…" I tried to figure why I'd stopped. When I did, I took a deep breath: "I don't think I'm a poet… any more, Mr Calkins. I'm not sure if I ever was one. For a couple of weeks, once, I might have come close. If I actually was, I'll never know. No one ever can. But one of the things I've lost as well, if I ever knew it, is the clear knowledge of the pitch the vanes of my soul could twist to. I don't know… I'm just assuming you're interested in this because in your letter you mentioned wanting another book."

"My interest," he said, coldly, "is politics. I'm only out to examine that tiny place where it and art are flush. You make the writer's very common mistake: You assume publishing is the only political activity there is. It's one of my more interesting ones; it's also one of my smallest. It suffers

The advantage of transcribing your own conversation: It's the only chance you have to be articulate. This conversation must have been five times as long and ten times as clumsy. Two phrases I really did lift, however, are the ones about "…the clear knowledge of the pitch the vanes of my soul could twist to…" and "… experience them in the anxiety of silence…" Only it occurs to me "… the vanes of my soul…" was his, while "… the anxiety of silence…" was mine.

accordingly, and there's nothing either of us can do about it with Bellona in the shape it is. Then again, perhaps I make a common mistake for a politician. I tend to see all your problems merely as a matter of a little
Dichtung,
a little
Warheit,
with the emphasis on the latter." He paused and I pondered. He came up with something first: "You say you're not interested in the extra-literary surroundings of your work—I take it we both refer to acclaim, prestige, the attendant hero-worship and its inevitable distortions—all those things, in effect, that buttress the audience's pleasure in the artist when the work itself is wanting.
Then
you tell me that, actually, you're no longer interested in the work itself—how else am I to interpret such a statement as 'I am no longer a poet'? Tell me—and I ask because I
am
a politician and I really don't know—can an artist be truly interested in his art and not in those other things? A politician—and this I'll swear—can not be truly (better say, effectively) interested in his community's welfare without at least
wanting
(whether he gets it or not) his community's acclaim. Show me one who doesn't want it (whether he gets it or not) and I'll show you someone out to kill the Jews for their own good or off to conquer Jerusalem and have it dug up as a reservoir for holy water."

"Artists can," I said. "Some very good emperors have been the patrons of some very good poets. But a lot more good poets seem to have gotten by without patronage from any emperors at all, good, bad, or otherwise. Okay: a poet is interested in all those things, acclaim, reputation, image. But as they're a part of life. He's got to be a person who knows what he's doing in a very profound way. Interest in how they work is one thing. Wanting them is another thing—the sort of thing that will mess up any real understanding of how they work. Yes, they're interesting. But I don't want them."

"Are you lying?—'again,' as you put it. Are you fudging?—which is how I'd put it."

"I'm fudging," I said. "But then… I'm also writing."

"You are? What a surprise after all that! Now I've certainly read enough dreadful things by men and women who once wrote a work worth reading to know that the habit of putting words on paper must be tenacious as the devil—But you're making it very difficult for me to maintain my promised objectivity. You must have realized, if only from my euphuistic journalese, I harbor all sorts of literary theories—a failing I share with Caesar, Charlemagne, and Winston Churchill (not to mention Nero and Henry the Eighth):
Now
I want to read your poems from sheer desire to help! But that's just the point where politics, having convinced itself its motives are purely benevolent, should keep its hands off, off, off! Why are you dissatisfied?"

I shrugged, realized he couldn't see it, and wondered how much of him I was losing behind the stonework. "What I write," I said, "doesn't seem to be … true. I mean I can model so little of what it's about. Life is a very terrible thing, mostly, with points of wonder and beauty. Most of what makes it terrible, though, is simply that there's so much of it, blaring in through the five senses. In my loft, alone, in the middle of the night, it comes blaring in. So I work at culling enough from it to construct moments of order." I meshed my fingers, which were cool, and locked them across my stomach, which was hot. "I haven't been given enough tools. I'm a crazy man. I haven't been given enough life. I'm a crazy man in this crazed city. When the problem is anything as complicated as one word spoken between two people, both suspecting they understand it… When you touch your own stomach with your own hand and try to determine who is feeling who… When three people put their hands over my knee, each breathing at a different rate, the heartbeat in the heel of the thumb of one of them jarring with the pulse in the artery edging the bony cap, and one of them is me—what in me can order gets exhausted before it all."