The Blazing World

Harriet Burden Notebook U

April 9, 2003

My anger is returning, a sweet fury.

He will not get away with this. I have made a vow.

I am leaving messages, sending e-mails. He will not get away with this.

Bruno says: Your philosophies will bury you alive. No one knows what you’re talking about, Harry.

You are all alone with your thoughts.

Today, you accused Dr. F. of not listening. Why? Why did you accuse him? Fierce and caustic you were. Then we talked about it. He is listening. He is always listening to you, and you felt bad, bad again.

April 20, 2003

Four works have vanished from the studio overnight. I am desperate. My windows. It seems impossible, but they are gone. I will look again tomorrow. Perhaps one of the assistants has moved them. No one can get into this building without using supernatural powers. Bruno tells me to remain calm. I must.

(Undated)

I wait for redemption from R.B. And before I sleep, a few notes on the beloveds:

Bruno’s Confessions are getting fatter. He himself is growing fatter. Fat old granddad.

Ethan’s story is called “Less Than Me.” I have been wondering what he means by it. His character S wakes up one morning and is somehow different. Some crucial aspect of herself has gone missing, her me-ness, her essence, her soul has fled her body. She doesn’t look any different in the mirror. Her apartment is the same. Her clothes are hanging in the closet. Her cat knows her, and yet, she is certain she is not the same. She begins to behave differently. She is a vegan but finds herself ordering meat dumplings from a Chinese restaurant. She takes a cab to work. She never splurges on cabs. She speaks her mind to a colleague at work. She never speaks her mind, and so forth. She begins to suspect her upstairs neighbor O, whom she has never met, a loose and merry girl with a bright wardrobe and a slew of boyfriends she bangs loudly enough for S to hear the couplings through the ceiling. Ethan doesn’t explain the suspicion. It just happens as it might in a dream, or in a fit of paranoia or a delusion. S spies on O. She keeps tabs on her comings and goings. She follows her in the street. She finds out everything she can about O, her favorite movies, books, shopping habits, but every new clue tells her nothing. Then S decides to build a monument to her lost self, an object that will be all that she is not anymore. She works hard every night after work and finally she finishes “the Thing.” We don’t really know what the Thing looks like, but it is some kind of body with writing and images on it. S invites O for dinner. O arrives, looks at the Thing, and says, Oh, it’s me.I

I called up Ethan. I was excited, pleased, wanted to tell him what I thought. We are more than the accumulation of empirical data, I said, more than a heap of recorded trivia, more than our wanderings and our meetings and our jobs, but what is that moreness? Is it what we create between us? Is it a neurological business? Is it the product of narrative, of the imaginary? It’s so interesting, I said. But Ethan was sullen, monosyllabic, said I had no idea what he had meant to say. S and O were signs in an arbitrary game of exchange. I said nothing to that. Then I said we artists mostly don’t know what we’re doing, and he told me not to tell him what he knows or doesn’t know. He never takes off that horrible wool hat. He’s worn it for about a year now, a helmet, really, to hide under. When I said we two seemed to have a headwear theme going in the family, he looked horrified. He does not want to be like his mother. I believe he wanted to rip the hat off immediately, but he is too proud. I don’t know how to reach across the chasm. I do everything wrong.

I did not say a word about it to him. But is it possible Ethan doesn’t know that his “Thing” resembles nothing so much as some of his mother’s artworks?

Aven is my number girl. She is seven, and she tells me her sevens are green. Her threes are yellow. She is my mathematical child, a child for whom the equations glow. The Radish is long forgotten. Maybe I am the only one who thinks of her anymore. My granddaughter has had her hair cut very short — a compromise. She wanted a Mohawk, but her father and mother refused. Hair grows, I, the indulgent grandmother, said to Maisie, but she said, Oscar is afraid she’ll be teased. She’s already strange. And I remembered my girlish strangeness.

You’re still strange, Harry, strange and estranged.

I eagerly await my coming out. It will happen. I am tense with excitement. It shall work. I bid you good night, whoever you are.

May 5, 2003

I believe Rune is the Barometer’s angel. The Barometer has drawn me another image of the intruder he claims he has seen coming and going at night. He likes the phrase the dead of night. And then he plays, Dire night, wee hours, hours of wee and woe, our wee, woeful hours. Wee Willie Winkie goes through the town. Upstairs and downstairs in his nightgown. We chanted it together. His drawing is of a huge muscular man with wings. When I looked into the Barometer’s eyes as he held out the paper to me, I imagined I was seeing Alan Dudek, the Barometer before he was the Barometer. I thought it was Alan for a moment because his gaze looked unclouded. He has moments of clarity, of a consciousness undiluted by madness. He is part theater, not all theater, but there is a piece of his illness he plays and plays with. This must be acknowledged. After all, we all play parts. We shouldn’t be so naïve as to believe that insane people are incapable of dissimulation. My mad friend has his masks, too, his games and subterfuges to avoid the all-important weekly bath or shower. But he also has access to the rumblings underground, a psychotic gift. He feels what we have suppressed, what we fear but cannot say. Isn’t this a kind of weather we make among us? I have studied the drawing. The longer I look at it, the more it looks like Rune to me. Bruno thinks I have joined the ranks of the mentally ill, that I’m in the grip of a paranoid fantasy.

I used his old name. Alan, I said, did you let him in? Did you let the angel in?

He looked surprised. He dug his nails into the skin above his wrist. I told him to stop scratching and repeated the question. He shook his head and said, He will cut out my brain and boil it for a stew.

Did Rune threaten him? If you tell, I’ll boil your brain and eat it. The idea is too vivid for Rune and its expression too precise. Rune’s diction rarely moves beyond the borrowed and the banal because Rune uses words to create a public being that hides what others would hate if they could see it. His language must socialize the treachery beneath. Beneath! The Barometer, on the other hand, is an ambulatory high tide of verbiage, but those waves of words include the occasional oracular insight. The problem is how to extract the prophesy from the verbal flood.

You must complete your Maskings without anyone to help you. There is R.B., after all. And there are the others, your several secret other ones.II The game is not over.

I. Ethan Lord, “Less Than Me,” The Paradoxical Review 28 (Spring/Summer 2003).

II. R.B. must refer to Richard Brickman. The question of “others” remains open, but it seems possible, even likely, that Burden published articles under other names in various journals.