The Blazing World

Harriet Burden Notebook C

Where did they come from? The penis with wings, his penis, the empty suit jackets and pants aloft and running with Felix paraphernalia — reading glasses, cologne, gleaming nail file (file X), a blank canvas (hope) — the giant Felix squashed into one of my rooms like Alice, the tiny Felixes lined up in a row, clad in various outfits, husband dolls, I called them. Somehow my father began to come in, too. The book man sleeping on a page of Spinoza, skipping over Leibniz (he loved Leibniz), a small daddy Luftmensch hovering just above a flight of stairs, words inscribed all over his two-piece suit. The elusive one, my elusive ones, began to mingle in the drawings and the sculptures, their faces and their clothes, mergings of desire, maddening beloveds mixed up in Harry’s mind. And anger, too, at their power over me. That’s why they grew and shrank.

I didn’t know how to make my mother. That would come later. There was some problem rendering a person I had once been inside.

I did not have to chase her.

I chased the men howling Look at me!

Knowledge.I Husserl’s student Edith Stein is the best philosopher on the subject, and she lived it, lived her words.II Philosophy is hard to picture. I began to wonder if I could represent empathy, for example, build an empathy box. I doodled possible forms for the inside. I made notes. I hummed. I listened to the St. Matthew Passion a lot. I understood that my freedom had arrived. There was nothing and no one in my way except the burden of Burden herself. The wide-open future, the great yawn of absence, made me dizzy, anxious, and, occasionally, high, as if I had doped myself, but I hadn’t. I was the ruler of my own little Brooklyn fiefdom, a rich widow woman, long past babies and toddlers and teenagers, and my brain was fat with ideas.

But then came the loneliness at night, the restless wanting that reminded me of my years alone in my first apartment in the city when I was at Cooper Union. I was hurled back to my young self — the solitary girl artist with vague cravings for a future that somehow involved both fame and love. I began to understand that the feelings I had assigned to my youth were not really about that time of life. The agitation I felt after a long day of work was the same disquiet I had felt as a person who had barely emerged from childhood. I pined for a Someone, a potential personage to fill up the remaining hours. Felix, old friend and interlocutor, delicate, evasive, acerbic, philandering, kind Felix was gone. You’ve driven me to my wits’ end! (I had been a sometime screamer.) But that end had never been reached. My wits had stayed, and so had his, and we had repaired the damage to them regularly. There was no fixing anymore. No fixing. No Felix. I struggled to comprehend the void, and the fact that I had begun to register it as real took the form of that empty other being, a lacuna, a hole in the mind, but it was not the hole named Felix.

And so I’d walk over to Sunny’s Bar, where I’d sit and look at the people and listen to them talk, a balm of voices. Sometimes there was music. Once I heard a poetry reading and afterward talked to the poet, who had big eyes and red lipstick, much younger even than Ethan, and, although I found her poems terrible, I rather liked her. She called herself April Rain, an idea I supposed had come to her while writing. The girl had a large duffel bag with a gaping zipper, and she had tied a couple of sweaters and a hat on to it, and when she picked up the load and began to walk, I told her she looked like an immigrant staggering off the pier in 1867, and she explained to me that she was sleeping on a friend’s sofa because she was “between places,” and I took her home.

April Rain, little white girl with bird tattoos on her lower arms and quantities of shattered glass in her poems that occasionally caused bleeding, was my first artist in residence. She didn’t stay more than a week. One night she found a disheveled beau at Sunny’s and never returned, but while she lasted, I liked having her around, and her presence staved off the jostling pains of evening. While looking at Ms. Rain’s soft pale face and plump cheeks as we ate our lentils or roasted vegetables (she was vegetarian) and chatted about Hildegard of Bingen or Christopher Smart, I forgot what I looked like. I forgot that I had wrinkles, breasts that needed a mighty brassiere to hold them up, and a middle-aged gut that protruded like a melon. This amnesia is our phenomenology of the everyday — we don’t see ourselves — and what we see becomes us while we’re looking at it. One night after saying good night to my twenty-two-year-old bardess, I looked in the mirror before bed, surprised myself with my own face, and burst into tears. Felix loved this aging mug, I thought. He praised it and stroked it. There’s no one to love it now.

It may have been self-pity — the sense that I had grown too ugly to warm up any man’s bed — that lay behind the idea that some of my constructed beings needed to have a bit of heat. My mother had had a penchant for electric mattress pads that toasted her through the night; the problem, as she explained it, was her circulation and ossified feet. My blood doesn’t run; it crawls, and it seems never to arrive at my toes. My parents’ pad had two settings, one for each side of the bed. She would set hers on six and make sure my father’s side was turned off so he didn’t cook in his sleep. After he died, she raised her level to ten, but she left his side cold, a memorial chill. No extra technology was required for my carcasses, although I fiddled with the wiring before I was truly happy with it. I began with a life-size effigy of Felix; it was an idea of him, not a likeness, his slender stuffed form covered with material I painted in blues and greens with a little yellow and dabs of red, man as canvas, but I added short white hair on the top of his head. When I plugged him in, his soft body ran a fever.

The pleasure this gave me was ludicrous. I couldn’t say then why the hot creature filled me with joy, but it did. I touched his colored sides gingerly to feel his warmth. I put my arms around him. I sat him next to me on the sofa. I called him my transitional object. Aven adored him. Ethan hated him. Maisie tolerated him. Rachel was both amused by and serious about him and the others. She wanted me to try for a gallery again, to go out like Willie Loman and hawk my wares and get attention, attention. But hadn’t they given their verdict over and over again? No one wanted Mrs. Lord’s handicrafts and dollies. Who was I, St. Sebastian?

I was telling Dr. Fertig about my heating mechanism for the bodies when the obvious reason for my elation came to me. Anima. Animate.

And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

It was preposterous. Harry Burden, demigod of the studio, trying to resurrect her dead husband and father over and over again, the machinery of grief churning away as she sewed and stuffed and wired and sawed and molded and soldered, but it helped. It helped, and I had come to a pass where I accepted help in all forms.

After a year of frantic spousal and paternal or perhaps spouernal creation, I began to muse about the creatures that lived in my memory, not only actual persons, but those borrowed from my vast collection of books. I don’t mean just characters but ideas, voices, shapes, figures, articulated thoughts, unarticulated feelings. I would call them metamorphs, and they would be cool or warm or hot or room temperature.

It may have been April Rain who told some of the other young stragglers around the neighborhood that I had rooms and beds to spare, but it’s more likely that it was Edgar Holloway III, a refugee from the Upper East Side and musician friend of Ethan’s, several years out of college, who sought work to supplement his rock ’n’ roll dreams. Edgar became my construction assistant. A stocky boy with an upturned nose that looked too small for his face, he was strong, docile, and a quick study when it came to materials and building. He was remarkably dull when it came to conversation, however, but this liberated me from any need to entertain him or explicate the meanings of my rooms or the critters I was putting inside them. I wasn’t sure what I was doing anyway.

What I did know was that I had been sitting on myself for years and that something had happened to me. Dr. Fertig used the word inhibition. I had become less inhibited, untied and unfettered. I could thank all the vomiting. The symptom had prompted the talk and the turn. I had become Harriet Unbound, only fifty-five then, but counting, and I did wonder about other paths, the alternative existences, the other Harry Burden who might have, could have, should have unleashed herself earlier, or a Harry Burden who had looked like April Rain, petite and pinkish, or a Harry who had been born a boy, a real Harry, not a Harriet. I would have made a strapping young man with my height and wild hair. Hadn’t I heard my mother bemoan all those inches wasted on a girl? The thought of another body, another style of being haunted me. Was this a form of regret? I wondered what my consciousness would feel like in Edgar’s body. I certainly did not want Edgar’s mind, filled to the brim with techno bands and run-on sentences with the word man popping up in them as continual, meaningless punctuation. The fantasy that began to take shape revolved around possible trajectories for me, an artist of multifarious shapes.

I suspected that if I had come in another package my work might have been embraced or, at least, approached with greater seriousness. I didn’t believe that there had been a plot against me. Much of prejudice is unconscious. What appears on the surface is an unidentified aversion, which is then justified in some rational way. Perhaps being ignored is worse — that look of boredom in the eyes of the other person, that assurance that nothing from me could be of any possible interest. Nevertheless, I had hoarded my direct hits and humiliations, and they had made me gun-shy.

Not to my face: That’s Felix Lord’s wife. She makes dollhouses. Titters.

To my face: I heard that Jonathan took your work because he’s a friend of Felix. Plus they needed a woman in the stable.

In a rag: The show at Jonathan Palmer by Harriet Burden, wife of legendary art dealer Felix Lord, consists of small architectural works cluttered with various figures and texts. The work has no discipline or focus and seems to be an odd blend of pretentiousness and naïveté. One can only wonder why these pieces were deemed worthy of exhibition.III

Time had made the feelings worse, not better. Despite Rachel’s prompting that I return to the fray, I knew that youth was the desired commodity and that, despite the Guerrilla Girls, it was still better to have a penis.IV I was over the hill and had never had a penis. It was too late for me to go as myself. I had disappeared for good, and the ease with which I had done so had made it clear to me how shallow my relations had been with all of them. They had come to the memorial service, or at least some of them had. By the time he died, Felix’s heyday had passed. He had become historical, the dealer to P. and L. and T. of days gone by. His wife was ahistorical, but what if I could return as another person? I began to make up stories of ingenious disguise. Like a latter-day Holmes, I would dissolve into my costumes and fool even the children and Rachel with my clever personas. I drew images of possible Harrys: Superman Harry with cape; homeless, sexually ambiguous Harry hauling bottles; old man dandy Harry with short, neat white beard; Harry as male cross-dresser (quite convincing); Harry grinning with modest-size-in-the-Hellenic-tradition male genitalia. And I took some inspiration from the past:

[An] His[toric]al and Phy[s]ic[al] Dissertation on the Case of Catherine Vizzani, containing the Adventures of a Young Woman, born at Rome, who for eight years passed in the Habit of a Man, was killed for an Amour with a young Lady; and being found on Dissection, a true Virgin, narrowly escaped being treated as a Saint by the Populace. With some curious and anatomical Remarks on the Nature and Existence of the Hymen. By Giovanni Bianchi, Professor of Anatomy at Sienna, the Surgeon who dissected her. To which are added, certain needful Remarks by the English Editor. (London: Meyer, 1751)

Not long after Professor Bianchi’s treatise was published in England, translated and edited by John Cleland, the notorious author of Fanny Hill, Charles d’Eon de Beaumont, French diplomat, spy, and captain of the dragoons, began to appear in public wearing women’s clothing. He explained that he had been raised as a boy but was in fact a woman. She published a memoir called La Vie militaire, politique et privée de Madmoiselle d’Eon. At her death, she was discovered to have male genitalia.

There was also the remarkable case of Dr. James Barry, who entered medical school at the University of Edinburgh in 1809, passed his examination for the Royal College of Surgeons in England in 1813, became a surgeon in the military, traveled from post to post, and rose through the ranks. When his career ended, he was inspector general in charge of military hospitals in Canada. He died in London in 1865 from dysentery. It was then discovered that he had been a she. Barred from medicine by her sex, she had changed it.

Billie Tipton, successful jazz musician, born Dorothy Lucille Tipton in 1914, was denied a spot in her high school band because she was a girl, began performing as a man, and then moved entirely into a masculine life, had a long-term relationship with one Kitty Oakes, a former stripper, and adopted three sons with her. None of them knew until his death in 1989 that anatomically Billie had been a woman.

There are many stories and as many reasons for leaving the feminine behind and adopting the masculine, or dropping either one for the other, as was convenient. There were women who followed their husbands to war and fought to be near them, and women who fought purely from patriotic fervor and, after the battle, returned to being women. There were women who posed as men to inherit their fathers’ fortunes and women who had lost everything — husbands and children and money — who felt too vulnerable to go on as women and turned themselves into men. Many of them had sympathetic mothers and fathers and siblings and friends who kept their secret. Some garments, a name, a differently inflected voice, and the gestures to go with them were all that was required. After a time being a man became effortless. Moreover, it became real.

But was I interested in experimenting with my own body, strapping down my boobs and packing my pants? Did I want to live as a man? No. What interested me were perceptions and their mutability, the fact that we mostly see what we expect to see. Didn’t the Harry I saw in the mirror change enough as it was? I often wondered if I could truly see myself at all. One day I found myself all-right-looking and relatively slim — for me, that is — and the next day I saw a sagging, bulbous grotesque. How could one account for the change except with the thought that self-image is unreliable at best? No, I wanted to leave my body out of it and take artistic excursions behind other names, and I wanted more than a “George Eliot” as cover. I wanted my own indirect communications à la Kierkegaard, whose masks clashed and fought, works in which the ironies were thick and thin and nearly invisible. Where would I find a Victor Eremita, an A and a B, a Judge William, a Johannes de Silentio, a Constantin Constantius, a Vigilius Haufniensis, a Nicolaus Notabene, a Hilarius Bookbinder, an Inter et Inter, a Johannes Climacus, and an Anti-Climacus all my own?V How such transformations could be achieved in my case was fuzzy at best: no more than mental doodles, but I found them fertile.

Hadn’t S.K., under his pseudonym Notabene, written a series of prefaces that were followed by no text?VI What if I invented an artist who was all art criticism, all catalogue copy, and no work? How many artists, after all, had been catapulted into importance by drivel written by all those hacks who had taken the linguistic turn? Ah, écriture! The artist would have to be a young man, an enfant terrible whose emptiness generates page after page after page of text. Oh, the fun of it! I gave it a shot:

The aporia in the work of X is achieved through the processes of auto-induction into absence. The implied, hence invisible, autoerotic acts with a sexual origin facilitate an abysmal collapse, the phantasms of rupture and the withdrawal of the object of desire.

Dead end. I knew that manufacturing this pretentious, hackneyed prose would kill me.

I, Harriet Burden, hereby confess that my diverse fantasies were driven:

1. by a general desire for revenge against twits, dunderheads, and fools,

2. by an ongoing, wrenching intellectual isolation that resulted in loneliness because I roamed in too many books that no one could talk to me about,

3. by a growing sense that I had always been misunderstood and was madly begging to be seen, truly seen, but nothing I did made any difference.

In my frustration and misery I would wind myself up every day as if I were my old toy monkey with the cymbals, listen to myself crash them, and then, nota bene, I would cry and, when I cried, I would long for my mother, not the small dying mother in the hospital but the big mother of my childhood, who had held and rocked me and tutted and stroked and taken my temperature and read to me. Mommy’s girl, except Mommy was not oversized but short and curvy and wore high heels. Your father likes my legs in heels, you know. But then, after I had wailed for a while, I would remember the wet shine of two fallen tears on my mother’s shrunken cheeks and the IV in her blue-veined hand many years later. I did not say, You’ll get well, Mommy, because she would not get well. Who knows how long I’ll last? Not long. And yet in hospice, my mother fussed about the food, the sheets, her pajamas, the nurses. A week before she died, she asked me to open her purse and apply a little lipstick because she was too weak to do it herself, and when she lapsed into a morphine haze at the very end, I took out the gold tube and dabbed her thin mouth with the rose-colored stick.

Orphaned.

What I am trying to articulate is that my self-imposed exile in Red Hook was not uneventful from an internal point of view. Time was forever collapsing in on me. Dead and imaginary people played a larger part in my quotidian reality than the living did. I lurched backward to recover shreds of memory and forward to fashion an imaginary future. As for the actual breathing people in my life, I faithfully kept my weekly appointment with Dr. Fertig, with whom I was making “progress,” after which I would meet Rachel for tea or a glass of wine somewhere near her office on Park Avenue and Ninety-First, and the old intimacy between us never seemed to lessen even when we bickered and she accused me of being “obsessive.” Maisie worried about me. I could see it in her eyes, and she worried aloud about Aven and about Oscar, and I worried in turn that she would give up too much for the family and her own work would suffer, and Ethan wrote stories in cafés and ran his very small magazine, The Neo-Situationist Bugle, with Leonard Rudnitzky, his good friend from Oberlin. My son talked a lot about commodification and the spectacle and alienation and the visionary Guy Debord, who served as his Romantic hero.VII Ethan didn’t seem to understand the man’s hyperbole, only that his thought had come true on the Internet: Everything that was directly lived has moved into representation. What about a stomachache?

My son, the revolutionary, was secretive about his private life (girls) and, I feared, a little angry at me for taking on a new life at my age, which I suspected he viewed as vaguely indecent and something of a betrayal of his father’s memory, although he could not say it. He was, I’m afraid, alienated from himself. The little boy who used to hide in the closet with his stiff little figures and narrate their battles and truces had grown up. He could not remember his baby self and how his mother had walked him back and forth and jiggled and rocked him for hour after hour and had sung in his ear very softly because it had been so hard for him to settle into sleep. But then, none of us remembers infancy, that archaic age in the land of the mother giant.

Anton Tisch looked right. He was tall, almost my height, a skinny kid in loose jeans with a significant nose and searching eyes that seemed unable to fix on anything for long, which gave him a distracted air that could be interpreted as restless intelligence under the right circumstances. And he was an artist. I met him at Sunny’s in early ’97 on a very cold night. There was snow. I remember the rhythmic presence of cold air as the door opened and closed, the pounding of boots, and lamp-lit white beyond the window. I had the Barometer with me, ambulatory weather vane and exquisite draftsman, whom I had harbored for some weeks. Not only did the Barometer register every incremental rise and drop in air pressure through his bodily instrument — his preternaturally sensitive head — at some juncture he had actually gained control over this aspect of the environment and would lower or raise it by a hectopascal or two. I knew nothing of hectopascals until the Barometer entered my life, but I loved the term, named after Blaise, that genius of the much and the many. The Barometer and I got along rather well, although the man lived in a cocoon of his own making, and dialogue — true back-and-forth exchanges — was nearly impossible.

By then I had become a Sunny’s regular. In gratitude for services rendered and reliable camaraderie, I had presented the establishment with a framed ink drawing of the bar and some of its lurid and not-so-lurid characters, and the gift had been mounted on a wall. I mention this because Anton Tisch had paused in front of it. The vanity of the artist is such that I knew the identities of those who had even glanced at the small work in my presence — they were few indeed — and my happiness at the sight of the angular young man with short brown curls inspecting my rendition of Sunny’s knew no bounds, well, perhaps a few bounds, but it definitely swelled.

Still, I was shy. The Barometer had been highly excitable because of the snow, but for some reason he, too, saw the young Tisch ogling the drawing and, in a voice quite unlike his own and in a manner entirely out of character, he shouted at the stranger: Harry did it! As I recall, it took a little time to establish that I was Harry, but once that business was cleared away, Anton Tisch, whom the Barometer took to calling “Table” almost immediately, sat down with us and we settled in for an evening of alcohol and chitchat. The content of that talk has vanished. Over time, however, I learned that the boy had attended the School of Visual Arts, did not know who Giorgione was but considered Warhol the most important artist of all time, which must have explained his silk-screen obsession. Rather than celebrities, Tisch did silk screens of his friends, presumably because their proverbial fifteen minutes had or would come. He explained that his art referred directly to Warhol while also pointing to the phenomenon of reality TV, although it was difficult to glean this information from the banal images he showed me. He liked the term conceptual and used it a lot, not unlike the way Edgar used man. Anton was not a bad kid. He was just stupendously, heartbreakingly ignorant.

I. Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). German philosopher who founded phenomenology, the study of the structures of consciousness from a first-person perspective. In Notebook H, Burden writes about the “affinities of mind” between Descartes and Husserl, their love of mathematics and logical certainties, and their shared radical doubt. “Husserl’s doubt,” she writes, “is not Descartes’ doubt. Descartes’ cogito is bedrock for deduction, which rises up from within the mental cave. Husserl’s cogito me cogitare is consciousness as relation to and toward the world.” Husserl was influenced by William James’s idea of consciousness as a stream, and he understood empathy as the path to intersubjectivity. See Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003).

II. Edith Stein (1891–1942) wrote her doctoral dissertation under Husserl, but her ideas depart from his and in certain instances resemble the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whom Burden quotes extensively in the notebooks. See Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1989). Stein edited Volume 2 of Husserl’s Ideas for publication. She was born a Jew, but she had a conversion experience after reading St. Theresa of Avila’s autobiography, converted to Catholicism, and became a Carmelite nun. Although she moved to the Netherlands to escape the Nazi threat, she was deported to Auschwitz and died there in 1942. In 1987, she was beatified by the Catholic Church.

III. Anthony Flood, “A Muddy Aesthetic,” Art Lights, January 1979.

IV. The organization was founded in 1985 in reaction to the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture, showcasing 169 artists, only seventeen of whom were women. The Guerrilla Girls stage anonymous protests and actions to call attention to sexism and racism in the visual arts.

V. In Notebook K, Burden devotes seventy-five pages to Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms and his “indirect communications.” From S.K.’s posthumously published The Point of View for My Work as an Author: A Direct Communication, A Report to History, Burden records the following quote: “One can deceive a person out of what is true and — to recall old Socrates — one can deceive a person into what is true. Yes, only in this way can a deluded person actually be brought into what is true — by deceiving him” (Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. XXII, trans. Howard and Edna Hong [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989], 53). Burden writes, “The path to the truth is doubled, masked, ironic. This is my path, not straight, but twisted!”

VI. Kierkegaard wrote eight satirical prefaces under the pseudonym Nicolaus Notabene. Søren Kierkegaard, Prefaces, Writing Sampler, ed. and trans. Todd W. Nichol (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).

VII. Guy Debord (1931–1994), self-proclaimed leader of the Situationist International (SI), founded in 1957. This small group of Parisian artists and intellectuals (it never had more than twelve members) initially hoped to integrate art and life into an indistinguishable whole and eliminate the distinction between actor and spectator. By the 1960s, the group’s anticapitalist critique, inspired by the anarchist movement, extended beyond art to society in general. In Debord’s most famous work, Society of the Spectacle, published in 1967, he argues that images have come to dominate life, that they have become the “currency” of a society that is continually creating “pseudo needs” in its populace. The group disbanded in 1972 due to internal strife. In 1994, Debord committed suicide. Although the French press had largely ignored both the Situationists and Debord’s work, after his death, he became a celebrity.