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CAN ONE BELIEVE THAT POSSIBLY THERE IS A PUBLISHER WHO WOULD BE PREPARED TO READ THE REST OF THIS BOOK AND SEE IT INTO PRINT.
This book moves between Patchogue, Arizona, Bulgaria, France and Estonia with as much ease as going on the number 6 train from Bleecker Street to City Hall in Manhattan.
(the book concerns itself with a number of men: a priest accused of abusing boys, a man whose wife has threatened to kill their child, a psychoanalyst struggling to over-come the futility of his vocation as a therapist and a number of other men who find themselves wandering in southern Arizona... there is a painting by Poussin, "Landscape with Travelers" in the National Gallery in London which organizes in a way this book...)
NOTHING
DOING
By
Thomas
McGonigle
For in that she poured this
ointment on my body, she did it for my burial.
(Matthew 26/12)
Writer: …I’m called the Writer.
Professor: And what do you write about?
Writer: Readers.
Professor: There’s obviously no point in writing about
anything else…
Writer: There’s no point in writing, full
stop. About anything.
(STALKER dir. Andrei Tarkovsky)
Looking
for a house to die in and a place to have a hole dug for my corpse which shall
no longer be mine.
Gone west
to die echoing what was said of the dead in World War One but knowing, I
suppose, is a way of saying I knew it
was getting closer. Once you pictured yourself flung into a tree or bridge
abutment when something didn’t work out with her or him or anything else and
the thought of the resulting tears is sufficient consolation for leaving the
party earlier than expected
If
anything, back then I thought I would have ended up somewhere in North Dakota
as I had long ago been thinking of those little towns slowly closing up shop
and occasionally getting written up as
examples of how things are changing with the passage of shriveling time: the
school closing, the shops going.
But
that was not what happened.
Somewhere
in Arizona between Douglas and Apache or it could have been between McNeil and
Elfrida or between Ajo and Sells I turned off the radio or turned off the CD
player--- I forget what was playing--- and pulled to the side of the road.
It came
down on me… which probably echoes too
many songs…
-----------Does
it go on to this-----------
In the
National Gallery in London there is a painting by Nicholas Poussin. Landscape
with Travelers Resting. Three men
wearing Roman looking tunics are shown.
At the bottom of the painting a man is resting and looking. In the center right a man is adjusting a
sandal. In the upper left part of the
painting a man is walking. The men are
distinguished by the colour of their clothing: yellow, blue and red
Remember,
when Marina was saying as we walked in the Louvre, Look for the yellow as it is
often at the center of the painting about which the eye is to turn. But she was not there in the National Gallery
that afternoon.
What if
the three men are the same man?
Can
that be imposed upon this canvas?
And
then in the catalogue there is another painting mentioned as being painted at
the same time--- Landscape with a Man
scooping Water from a Stream ---
like this one, there is no reference to classical sources. But it was not meant to be shown as a
pendant, the writer of the catalogue asserts.
Three
men together.
The men
in the painting are about the same age.
That has always been a problem for them.
They know and do not know the same things. Of course they do not look out at the world
with the same eyes, though they are being looked at with
left to stutter>
eyes connected to a central
nervous system. The difference in their ages is minimal. They come from
the same town. They have had the same
schooling. They are on the same
road. At the moment they are going in
the same direction. They have come from
the same place though because of the way they are being seen that is possibly a
mistake, an assumption easily made and for the moment without consequence.
Nothing
is being hidden. A person has to start
from some place and three men had to have started from some place. They are stuck into those funny clothes which
to the viewers in the early 17th Century were as remote from their own day as
they are from a viewer today, almost four centuries later though it is possible
this is the costume many viewers would have expected these men to have been
caught in, at this moment, in oil on canvas.
-----------Or
does it go on to this-----
Could
it be believed that on another afternoon I was leaning against my car at the
Sandspit dock in Patchogue in late summer waiting for Pete Phlite to show
up?
Could
it be believed that Pete Phlite and I were sitting on the bench in front of our
cars parked on the Sandspit dock watching the boats enter and leave the
Patchogue River between two jetties made out of great boulders with those small
light houses at the end of each of them?
Could
it be believed that Karolin and I had been waiting at the Sandspit dock for
Pete Phlite to show up after he said, be right over and Karolin then listening,
I would often come down here and watch the boats enter and leave the Patchogue
River when I was a kid in high school or back from college.
Could
it be believed Pete Phlite asked me why I wanted to meet him at the Sandspit
dock in Patchogue?
Could
it be believed I had asked to meet Pete Phlite down at the Sandspit dock--- you
know where--- at the end there, where we can watch the boats enter and leave
the Patchogue River?
Could
it be believed Pete Phlite and I were talking about Al Wells, Sean Patrick Bradford
and George Kamenov while sitting up on the back of the bench in front of our
parked cars down there on the Sandspit dock?
----
jarring transitions?-----
The sun
made me shield my eyes as we watched boats enter and leave the Patchogue
River. I had wanted to talk about
Karolin's stepsister coming unwelcomed by her now many years ago from Estonia
to Edison, New Jersey to see their father a week after he had died unbeknownst
to this woman who had been traveling many days by way of Tartu, Leningrad,
Moscow...
Could
it be believed I was telling Pete Phlite about meeting Al Wells, Sean Patrick Bradford
and George Kamenov and how their lives had intersected mine as did Karolin's
life and the memory she had of her stepsister coming from Estonia many years
ago to see their father a week after he had died.
So,
three men described by saying their names. It would be a mistake to assume the
men whose names have now been revealed are wearing the costumes that might now
only be worn in a high school Latin end of the school year celebration if the
teacher had been trying to inspire the students to the lively nature of what
most people think of as a dead language, morbid and gone, really gone. Existing only in books and possibly in some
Vatican documents, written in the dilemma of finding Latin words that can be
applied to helicopter and ballpoint pen.
------all
these names?-----
If
you blink you miss Apache, as they could say.
A closed up gas-station and some other buildings. A u-turn to go back through the place (a line of cow skulls in
front of that building to be photographed) and another u-turn and pulling off
to the side of the road. Nothing to pick
up as a significant souvenir. Flattened
grass and types of cactii I could not begin to name. No garbage or broken bottles…the constant
wind on the face but no waving trees… a 360 degree turn, a low water tank
across there in a far field… barbed wire fencing on either side of the road…
not a house to be seen… wanting to say, nothing to be seen… but then I would
have to describe how I could be standing by the side of the road… the sharp
incline down from the edge of the shoulder…
Realizing
that in all of this movement not a single car has passed by.
----Arizona
to Patchogue and Arizona and Patchogue…----
Could
it be believed that I was telling Pete Phlite down there on the Sandspit dock I
had come back from the desert in Arizona and wanted to tell him about it and
about meeting Al Wells who had been in our class at Patchogue High School and
about this guy Sean Patrick Bradford who I had met again in Paris last year and
more recently I had been and was still
mourning the death of George Kamenov who had been a Bulgarian
psychoanalyst who had spend much of his life outside of Bulgaria and when he
had gone back to Bulgaria it was to study the curious behavior of the guards
and the prisoners in the Communist
concentration camps which had continued to exist in Bulgaria up into the early 1980s which is hard to believe but it
was not hard for Karolin to believe in any of this as she had met her
stepsister when that now middle aged woman had come to Edison, New Jersey from Estonia a week after their father
had died and who smelled of someplace where… she did not have the words for
the… but wanted this woman to go away as soon as possible while at the same
time…
Could
it be believed I had wanted to talk with Pete Phlite about a lot of such things
as I was still wondering if it was possible to talk and hope my interlocutor who maybe did not
even know where Bulgaria or Estonia were on the map but knew that Paris at
least was in France and could he be found to have an interest in this telling
while I was also interested in talking about someone who had gone to high
school with Al Wells and me at Patchogue High School and who had not really been
back to Patchogue after our parents had died?
