The Blazing World

Harriet Burden Notebook D

Rune is inundated with my messages. He has agreed to see me. He wants me to stop “the harassment.” He refused to see me in Manhattan. He wouldn’t meet me in a restaurant. No, he wants to collide here in Red Hook in the open air where no art world types will see us, no tongues will wag. Fine, I said. Fine.

I have lost. Rune will never let go. He will never tell, and without him it is over. I can hold tight to Phinny’s words in Art Lights, to the Brickman piece, but I see how little people care. Somehow my story doesn’t interest them. I wanted to turn Rune back into a whining Ruina, to ruin him, to make him pay; but he owns the game now and makes the rules, if there are any rules anymore, if there ever were any rules. My hand is a swollen, purple mess. I hit him so hard. And I found Bruno. No, that’s a lie. Bruno found me. There he was, as if by magic, to pick me up off the ground. Today he made me chicken soup and watched my face closely as I spooned it into my mouth, and I made all the right sounds to please him.

October 18. I read it in the paper. Rune is dead.

He has made the last move, and he has done it in a contraption that steals from Beneath, and now he is sanctified. How the world loves the artist suicide, not old artists, of course, not old bags like me. No, they must be young or youngish. Thirty-eight is the perfect age to die if you want to cement your fame, to summon the throngs to feast on your beautiful corpse, to chew on your luminous legacy, made more poignant by the now-impossible future. Ah, Rune. Checkmate. And if he didn’t mean to do it? He would have gotten around to killing himself sooner or later. He wanted a beautiful death, didn’t he? And such a death must be planned. It don’t come natur’l. Celebrity is life in the third person. Ethan is right. Some people are better at living the third person than others.

But I sabotaged myself without knowing it, didn’t I? It was as if I had to follow the game to its end, to wind up in that room with Rune and the dead Felix to be threatened, slapped, and humiliated, to be turned back into a cowering, ashamed child who cannot speak up. I was pulled toward it, as if time were nothing, and the past had become both present and future, and the dead could walk again. They tramp through the furrows of your mind, Harry, in that rumpled wilderness of gray matter, the two men you wanted but couldn’t have, your father and your husband. It was not just love. That’s where you went wrong. You know that now. It wasn’t just about love and wanting to be loved. You were not that eternal plaintive female bleating over the ages, I love you, and I want you to love me, and I will wait for you, my love, with my hands folded and my head down. I am not that paragon of virtue, Penelope, waiting for Odysseus and turning away the suitors.

I am Odysseus.

But I found out too late.

I hate you, Father. I hate you, Felix. I hate you both for not seeing that truth, for not recognizing that I am the clever hero.

And Mother, you bent your head and you took his punishment. He shut you out and he shut you down. He did not speak to you. He acted as if you did not exist, because you wanted to speak.

And you, Harry, you bent your head and you took his punishment, and you cannot bear it, can you?

And didn’t you wait at home like Penelope, without any suitors, sadly, just two children? And were you not faithful? And were you not kind? And were you not long-suffering? So are you not Penelope? No, because she did not want to be Odysseus, at least as far as we know she didn’t, but who would want to be Penelope? You did not want to wait, and yet you nearly went mad waiting. And now your son, too, keeps his distance from you, as if you are contaminated. If he identifies with you, he is emasculated, such an old drama; my feminist son is terrified of maternal stench.

I am Odysseus, but I have been Penelope.

But how he loved you back in the day, little, intense, hypersensitive Ethan, whatever he says, whatever he has forgotten. You have that passionate story in your memory fields. And your daughter is with you still. You have Maisie. And you have Aven.

And Rune? He is the sign of your hatred, your envy, your fury, isn’t he?

Did he start it, Harry? Or did you? What did he want from you? Did he only want the pleasure of hurting you through Felix?

“He liked to watch.” That’s what Rune said, that Felix was a voyeur. Does it matter that he rubbed his cock to ecstasy while he looked at others humping on the floor in front of him? No. And does it matter that when you imagine it you feel sad? But why sad, Harry? Didn’t you enjoy tormenting Ruina in the game? Didn’t Rune know it filled you with sadistic joy? Isn’t that why he turned the tables on you? He knew that you played both parts. There’s the rub. And knowing is power. Elementary Freud, dear Watson. A child is being beaten.I

But I didn’t know about Felix. All I knew is that there were secrets and that some of the secrets had names. I wondered what was in his head when we grappled in bed. I wonder if it was Harriet Burden. Was it ever Harriet Burden, wife and helpmeet? Sure it was. In the beginning it was. Rune might have lied about Felix, but even if he were lying, it wouldn’t make much difference now. Rune became the sign of all the boys who studied their Quine and mastered their logic and smoked their pipes and looked at your father with worshipful eyes, the boy you might have been, Harry. But for a twist of fate in the womb, you might have pleased him and triumphed. And Rune became the sign of all the boys Felix showed and Felix loved and Felix made famous and Felix bought and Felix sold. That gets close to the heart of the matter, doesn’t it? What do you say, Dr. F.? Am I getting close to the heart of the matter? Rune, Mr. Third Person, Mr. Swagger, Mr. Glib — the one who counts, the one who wins. And isn’t it just that quality of knowing, of assurance, of entitlement that you detest, Harry, that you find so hard to imitate, the quality they all had? And did they not all condescend to you, Harry? Did they not regard you as an inferior, you who could out-think, out-work, out-do every single one of them?

Yes. They did. And they are all dead. I cannot believe that they are all dead.

November 1, 2003

I am back to my blazing mother Margaret. Margaret, the anti-Milton. She gives birth to worlds. It is not God who speaks here, but Nature:

All paines I can take,

Will do no good, Matter a Braine must make;

Figure must draw a Circle, round, and small,

Where in the midst must stand a Glassy Ball,

Without Convexe, the inside a Concave,

And in the midst a round small hole must have,

That Species may passe, and repasse through,

Life the Prospective every thing to view.II

Mad Madge had no children of her own, no babies to raise up into adults. She had her “Paper Bodies,” her breathing works, and she loved them dearly.III

“So do I likewise not persuade myself, that my philosophy being new, and but lately brought forth, will at first sight prove master of understanding, it may be, not in this age, but if God favour her, she may attain to it in after times: And if she be slighted now and buried in silence, she may perhaps rise more gloriously hereafter; for her ground being sense and reason, she may meet with an age where she will be more regarded than she is in this.”IV

I will leave my bodies behind me, too. I am making them for hereafter, not for the bruising present with its cold, dismissive eyes.

The witch hides herself in her castle by the sea with the bear, her friend and lover. That is how the fairy tale has ended. The old witch and the old bear live happily and sadly together ever after.

December 1. The Natural Mask. That’s me. I am the natural mask. It’s Maisie’s idea. I used the words for Raccoona once, and she’s adopted it for the film about her mother and now she’s letting me explain myself to the camera, me, H.B., in all my pseudonymous mania, and I’m explicating and expounding and pontificating and we’re having good fun together. Now you’ve got a hoarder, a schizophrenic, and your mother, I said to Maisie, a perfect trio. And my Maisie smiles. I can’t tell all. I must keep some secrets, of course, but the telling has almost made me feel that I might be understood. Is it such a vain hope?

Aven looked long and tall and thin today. She has entered what I call “high middle childhood.” She examined my mischievous little people, turned red when she saw my copulating pairs, and laughed wildly at my Ursula who’s taking a shit. She let me draw her into my lap today, let her grandmother revel in the tactile pleasure of holding her young body close to my ribs. I put my nose into her short brown hair. Today, it smelled vaguely of apples.

I. “A Child Is Being Beaten” (1919), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVII (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 179–204.

II. Quoted in Lisa T. Sarasohn, The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy During the Scientific Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 41.

III. In Sociable Letters, published in 1664, Cavendish writes to an imaginary lady friend. In letter CXLIII, she tells her correspondent about her habit of keeping copies of her manuscripts until they are safely printed, after which she burns them: “But howsoever their Paper Bodies are Consumed, like as the Roman Emperours, in Funeral Flames, I cannot say, an eagle flies out of them, or that they turn into a Blazing Star, although they make a great Blazing Light when they Burn; And so leaving them to your Approbation or Condemnation, I rest, Madam, Your faithful Friend and Servant, CL.” Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson, eds., Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader (Toronto: Broadview, 2000), 81–82.

IV. Margaret Cavendish, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1668), ed. Eileen O’Neill (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 12–13.