The Housewives’ Guide To Anatomy

“Dear Housewives’ Guide,
My children think I’m a monster. I’m afraid they’re disappearing from my life.
[unsigned]”

Dear anonymous,

Don’t fret! You’ve been a wonderful mother, I’m certain of it, else you wouldn’t be writing in to us with such concerns! Children become larger children and larger children become ghostly children. It’s perfectly natural for them to fade in and out of intelligibility, and it’s unlikely they’ll blink out for good. Relax. Think of how delightful it will be when they’ve grown up and become tangible again. And remember when you were a little ghostly thing: everything with solid edges seemed a monster.

Yours,
n

p.s. - Future enquirers: please do make sure your question is properly in the form of one! Manners, manners!

“One looks up
Reading is a mild form of writing
One and one
Book and book
ONE READER: What are you reading
ONE READER: I am reading the essays of Montaigne
BOOK ONE: He says, “We can only improve ourselves in times like these by walking backwards”
BOOK TWO: Let’s suppress the slightly theatrical element in this
BOOK THREE: And now the god put off the bull’s disguise
ONE READER: The head Thought’s Monster, the heart Mind’s Pathos, the genitals Mind’s Beauty, and Thought’s Measure in the hands and feet
ONE READER: Whoever wrote this book could hardly read
BOOK FOUR: Well, as they say in Bulgaria, if you wish to drown, do not torture yourself with shallow water
BOOK FIVE: Nobody has ever claimed that the private eye novel has to be realistic to seem realistic
ONE READER: That’s “eye” for “I”
ONE READER (continuing): The detective goes into hospitals, bars, brothels, morgues, girls’ schools, and consulates—anywhere there are people
BOOK SIX: As La Bruyere says, “At the beginning of love and at its end lovers are embarrassed to be left alone”
ALONG COMES A NEW READER: Fork up, mouth open, eat and don’t speak, fork down, mouth closed, chew, then fork up, speak and don’t eat, mouth—
THE OLD READER: Not waving in the air—fork not waving in the air
BOOK SEVEN: There is no feast without cruelty
THE EIGHTH BOOK is a good fiction and it begins as good fictions do
Slowly
The morning-star brings back the shining day
OBSERVER (gazing into a baby buggy): An infant two or three months old will smile at even half a painted dummy face if that half face has at least two clearly defined points or circles for eyes
BOOK NINE: The hero asked the woman why the groan, the gesture, the mutilated forehead, the old river
WOMAN: I see that you have a swirling gait—water is often a medium for transformation
READER: Often in old tales a goose personifying persuasion waddles at love’s side through scenes of seduction
BOOK TEN: In this tale a woman discloses that it is her own seduction of her own husband that has aroused her interest in seduction
That prolongation, that extension of change
Yes, says the hero, if you do something then you have something, and 100% is all of it
BOOK ELEVEN: A totality, but it’s irrevocably dark
READER: He’s gone totally blind
BOOK TWELVE: An incitement to the reader, the guilty
READER (interrupting): … but not apologetic
WRITER: I’m not confessing
BOOK TWELVE (continuing toward a conclusion): Beside the bed a crowded bookcase and on the floor sex toys”

The horizon is a line that may slither in anywhere. Although straight in its relaxed moods, it will often bunch, pleat, or coil the better to conceal itself in the depths of a lingerie drawer or broom closet. It is an intestinal presence, and you should guard against its digestive inclinations. Do not assume that its diet is invariably limited to cars, boats, and birds.

In its white state, it may knock holes in sentences before you say them. Parts of the body, especially the hands and feet, may become confused in its presence and congregate in jostling bunches under the ceiling, or in extreme cases even flit from the window.

If your husband’s teeth or genitals seem suddenly too distinct, too brightly outlined, proceed with utmost caution; the horizon may have negotiated a path around them, and be waiting there in ambush. If you feel uncertain, approach him not with your hand but with an implement such as a hairbrush or pencil, and watch carefully to see if the object appears blunted or vanishes at its tip.

In its darkened form, your horizon may confine itself to making suggestions for your conduct: retreat, surrender, or a vow of silence. Even if you take these suggestions seriously, do your best to keep it off balance. Pretend to laugh.

“Gentlemen! Today is the first time that I realize the presence of life! Gentlemen! I beg you to leave me alone for a moment, so I can savor this formidable, spontaneous, and recent life emotion, which today, for the first time, enraptures me and makes me happy to the point of tears.

My joy comes from what is unexperienced of my emotion. My exultation comes from the fact that before I did not feel the presence of life. I have never felt it. If anyone says that I have felt it he is lying. He is lying and his lie hurts me to such a degree that it would make me miserable. My joy comes from my faith in this personal discovery of life, and no one can go against this faith. If anyone would try, his tongue would fall out, his bones would fall out and he would risk picking up others, not his own, to keep himself standing before my eyes.

Never, except now, has life existed. Never, except now, have people walked by. Never, except now, have there been houses and avenues, air and horizons. If my friend Peyriet came over right now, I would tell him that I do not know him and we must begin anew. When, in fact, have I met my friend Peyriet? Today would be the first time we became acquainted. I would tell him to go away and come back and drop in on me, as if he did not know me, that is, for the first time.

Now I do not know anyone or anything. I notice I am in a strange country where everything acquires a Nativity relief, a light of unfading epiphany. No, sir. Do not speak to that gentleman. You do not know him and such unexpected chatter would surprise him. Do not put your foot on that tint stone: who knows it is not a stone and you will plunge into empty space. Be cautious, for we are in a totally inknown world.

What a short time I have lived! My birth is so recent, there is no unit of measure to count my age. I have just been born! I have not even lived yet! Gentlemen: I am so tiny, the day hardly fits inside me.

Never, except now, did I hear the racket of the carts, that carry stone for a great construction on boulevard Haussmann. Never, except now, did I advance parallel to the spring, saying to it: “If death had been something else…” Never, except now, did I see the golden light of the sun on the cupolas of Sacré-Coeur. Never, except now, did a child approach me and look at me deeply with his mouth. Never, except now, did I know a door existed, and another door and the cordial song of the distances.

Let me alone! Life has now struck me in all my death.”

Old Jisper Jaspers was the man of the hour. He worked at the factory until he cut the power to the candy machines. They had to send the prostitutes home, padlock the doors. The floors were covered in mud and bone and the feathers of small children. You couldn’t hear the canary scream over the sound of the ticker tape rattle, the toothless squall of the radio man, frequencies jammed until Jisper Jaspers cut off his left forearm and plugged up the hole with a prosthetic device.

(click for pronunciation)

Dear housewives, I’m still reading the absurdly brilliant book-length poem A Border Comedy by Lyn Hejinian, and still reacting to it with sporadic outbursts of delight. A day or two ago I collided with the following passage:

“UNNAMED: There was once a muscular sandpiper who found a ruby of historic size amid the obscurities and glimmers of the rising tide, also there was a vegetarian bartender once, his shoes squeaked indoors and out, and there was a burly doctor too, and a man with a chirp in his ear which called him terrible names/But to these he answered: No!”

And having read it, I felt the need to analyze my reaction: visceral, jubilant love. The thrill here has something to do with the interaction among three forces: the novelistic tone, which to me carries implications of inevitability (Emma Bovary, Lol Stein, Benjy Compson can only be themselves; they are avatars of a sort of absolute that must have always been there, long before their respective novelists marked them down; the pleasure of a great novel is exactly this feeling, no matter how delusory it may be); the gleeful arbitrariness running against the implied inevitability; and the obvious truth of Hejinian’s claims. With the possible exception of the sandpiper, all of these characters clearly do exist in the form of real people. They’ve existed more than once, in fact. There must be dozens of vegetarian bartenders with squeaky shoes in the United States alone. That I continue to figure the character in my head (bald, gay, tall, very possibly living in Palm Springs or some similar resort town) may narrow the field, but it can’t eliminate him. He’s out there!

However arbitrarily she’s conjured him, his inevitability persists. The call goes out into endlessness, and someone answers. That dynamic of call and response is weirdly, painfully beautiful—as if Hejinian were saying that possibility itself will always answer us.

Each novel, with all its freight of inevitability, is written by an entirely arbitrary human being with no real excuse for being him or herself. Benjy Compson feels more necessary to me than Faulkner does. Faulkner: reputedly kind of an asshole. Benjy Compson: a call to the certainty of his own existence, however that existence refracts through thousands of other people.

Maybe the inevitability of fictional characters comes precisely from the fact that they aren’t tied down to any one body, any one identity. They’re free to split, to arrive and depart wherever they want to, opening their eyes inside of anyone.

Possibly more on this later.

Ovaries are the fruit of a clambering vine, the kudzu of the body. If they are subject to strict and watchful discipline then you may be able to coax their tendrils into elegant topiary, but left unchecked they will spread aggressively. Clusters of them will press on your liver and kidneys, displace the air from your lungs. Soon the interior of your torso will become a tropical confusion of ripe orbs. If you fail to eat enough to provide for their sustenance they may start to turn on each other, or to snake from your orifices in search of small fauna. They are capable of considerable stealth, and you will probably suspect nothing until friends complain that ornamental goldfish are missing from their garden ponds, or that a fox must have slipped in with the poultry.

This does not mean that they should be treated unkindly. Harsh measures will only provoke them. More than one lady who attempted to beat back her ovaries has found herself reduced by a finger, or even a hand. Keep them pruned to begin with and you will not encounter such difficulties. Throw them treats at judicious intervals; grapes are particular favorites.

If you husband your ovaries wisely, you may find they compensate for their lack of moral sense with a distinctive, even otherworldly charisma.

But please keep in mind that just because something appears to be your housewife, or even some straggling facet of your housewife, it may in fact be perfectly innocent of any relationship with her. You will be tempted to identify her too soon, too impulsively—she may well be egging you on to do so, without your ever being aware of it. Never trust your own judgment in these matters.

She may be so subtle that what you take for her reproductive organs is in fact the ceiling vent; give in to your desire to conceal, clog, or otherwise stifle it and you will have nothing but poor air quality to show for your efforts. The housewife will bait you with lascivious implications, twine your shed hairs into towels dropped on the floor, all to make you expend your energies pointlessly. You are at risk of undertaking a futile assault on manifold aspects of your own home. Start with the vent, and you will go on to burning holes in the seats of your chairs and perhaps slipping into miscegenation with them. Try to keep your violence to yourself. Slap your own arms until the fury subsides.

The strobe? You think the strobe will help? If the housewife is clever, she will soon learn to wink open only during the beats of darkness. Your eyes will ache from trying to take in the slippage between pulses of light.
Spinning in your bathroom as you search for her will only leave memories of you imprinted on the tiles. And do you really want to be remembered that way?

The housewife has her own appetites, and may see fit to play with you.

A couple footnotes to yesterday’s post on the middle third of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle:

¹Faithful housewives will recognize that I have a mild obsession with intragenerational incest narratives these days, so do tell me if you think I’m seeing ghosts where none exist, but I can’t help sensing that the spell Charles is casting on Constance is something of a seduction. It would be merely perverse to suggest anything untoward in Constance’s first response to her cousin’s appearance (“‘Merricat,’ Constance said; she turned and looked at me, smiling. ‘It’s our cousin, our cousin Charles Blackwood. I knew him at once; he looks like Father.’”), but there’s something subtly charged about how Merricat and Constance discuss whether Constance should put on their mother’s pearls for dinner (“‘I have never worn pearls[…]It’s not likely that anyone would care,’ Constance said. ‘I would care, if you looked more beautiful.’ Constance laughed, and said, ‘I’m silly now. Why should I want to wear pearls?’ ‘They’re better off in the box where they belong.’”). This wouldn’t be the only instance of the sisters using ’silliness’ to ward off the specter of sexuality. One more quotation, in which talk of Charles leads awkwardly into talk of boyfriends (and then, again, to silliness):

“I think,” Constance said, “that we are going to have to forbid your wandering. It’s time you quieted down a little.”

“Does ‘we’ mean you and Charles?”

“Merricat.” Constance turned toward me, sitting back against her feet and folding her hands before her. “I never realized until lately how wrong I was to let you and Uncle Julian hide here with me[…]We should have been living like other people. You should . . . ” She stopped, and waved her hands helplessly. “You should have boy friends,” she said finally, and then began to laugh because she sounded funny even to herself.

[…] “You are the sillest person I ever saw[…].”

I had assumed all this was hinting toward an inappropriate relationship between Constance and Charles, but now, seeing these out of context, I wonder if what we’re really seeing is a quasi-sexual relationship between the sisters that’s been threatened by Charles’ mere presence. When Merricat says that she “would care” if the pearls made Constance more beautiful, is she saying that she would mind her sister’s preening in front of Charles, or that she, unlike Charles, would care to admire her sister’s beauty? Maybe I am seeing ghosts. Please advise.

(click for pronunciation)

²Toward the end of this section, when Charles discovers that Merricat has filled his bed with muddy leaves and broken glass (and we love her for it, the little rascal!), frustrated with Constance’s lack of interest in punishing her, he turns to Uncle Julian who tells him “‘My niece [Merricat] has been a long time dead, young man. She did not survive the loss of her family; I supposed you knew that.’ ‘What?’ Charles turned furiously to Constance. ‘My niece Mary Katherine died in an orphanage, of neglect, during her sister’s trial for murder. But she is of very little consequence to my book, and so we will have done with her.’”

This is a neat turn for a couple of reasons. Read the rest of this entry »

The middle section of Shirley Jackson’s exquisitely charming We Have Always Lived in the Castle (see part one) is dominated by the appearance of Cousin Charles, estranged cousin to our narrator, Mary Katherine (whom we know by this point as Merricat), and her sister, Constance. We know he’s trouble right off the bat, but we can’t be immediately certain how insidious his intentions are, whether some of the disgust we feel toward him might have merely rubbed off from Merricat’s obsessive desire to maintain their private, isolated life amid the artifacts of the grand family they once belonged to (and whom one of the sisters most likely poisoned)¹. While it soon becomes clear that Charles is looking to run off with the family fortune (he repeatedly inquires about the safe in the drawing room under the clumsy guise of familial concern), Merricat is much more worried about how he seems to be convincing her sister she ought to travel off the family grounds, to live a more normal life.

The book does an excellent job making us loathe him. Along with Merricat, we hate how he’s insinuated himself into their lives and home. He moves into their father’s bedroom. He wants to send their invalid Uncle Julian off to a nursing home. He lacks the others’ respect for the dead and their artifacts, ridiculing Merricat’s sentimental attachments, scolding Julian for continuing to obsess over the family’s tragedy story². And, with Merricat, we’re frustrated that Constance doesn’t seem to mind.

There’s one aspect of this loathing, however, that makes the reader complicit in something uncomfortable. When Charles gets angry with Merricat after discovering some gold coins she’s buried in the yard (and, earlier, when he discovers she’s nailed her father’s watch to a tree to ward off trouble) we’re made to hate him for his small-mindedness, partly because these little superstitious acts are so tied up with what we adore about Merricat, but largely because what feels like his undue concern over ‘things of value’ serves as a marker of his ulterior, financial motives. But in this latter feeling, in our disgust toward him, we’ve become complicit both in the family’s cavalier Old Money attitude toward their wealth and with their disdain for the less well-off who apparently need to treat money as something truly of value. It’s a doubly uncomfortable position since, as we saw last week, the book’s first chapter even goes so far as to conflate the townsfolk’s disgust at the murders with their resentment of the Blackwoods’ wealth. But our sympathy for Merricat is so pleasurable we decide to overlook it.

When your hand is holding a knife it may try to circle in on itself and surgically excise the possibility of further movement.

You might have the nagging feeling that your exhalations stop short: you wish for glassy pirouettes and instead produce forms that more nearly resemble flaccid teapots.

Your footsteps bury themselves in the middle of a busy street, and refuse to emerge no matter how you coax them.

The hinges along your heart’s back seam allow it to feign breaking and then clap itself shut again when no one is looking.

It was last October when I read the first half of Lyn Hejinian’s A Border Comedy, and I was already a fan of her marvelous not-really-autobiography My Life–a book which must surely establish her as the ultimate in honorary housewives, if only for the line “Jameson speaks of a ‘collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity’, and I put pen to page scrupulously and write, ‘I prefer the realm of Necessity’.” My Life is a work of delirious madness primarily concerned with things like bringing in the groceries–a truly nervy gerrymandering of visionary territory that earned her my undying ardor. Oh, and then I saw her read, and she kicked ass.

But halfway through A Border Comedy I put it aside, and not because I didn’t love it. It was only a few days ago that I picked it up again. Maybe the stakes were too high, and too exhausting. My Life is basically a portrayal of each human life as porous, filtering every other possible life and snagging loose fragments of all of them. One critic (Kornelia Freitag) wrote that it reads like a collection of sentences taken from every possible story, all endlessly alluding to their continuity beyond the text’s confines. Lives (in their narrative form, anyway) infiltrate each other, twist other lives into new shapes. But in My Life the sentences retain a solidity, an integrity, even as they nose and jostle at each other and shove each other off on strange trajectories. Still, through all the hubbub, the sentence remains the inviolable unit, and the sentences imply stories.

A Border Comedy is a rougher, funnier, perhaps more sadistic work, because now the unit is the word (or sometimes the phrase) and each individual fragment is at the mercy of the corrupting influence of every word near it. The insinuation is no longer just that stories and lives are infinite, mutually distorting, but that meanings are. The DNA of every word is contaminated by all the words around it, so that it mutates with each fresh repetition. Disturbing things start to wriggle out of the petri dish: “I may sleep you to the bed, you bandage me to the hand, I poison you to the spider, the spider cloud you to the skyline, the skyline unknowingly cog the sky…”

It’s a book, I think, about the metamorphic possibilities of language, about words as shape shifters. And that brings us back, for the moment, to Marina Warner, who quotes yet another critic, Michel de Certeau, on metamorphosis: “It carries the sign from one space to another, and it produces the new space. It is by this metamorphosis that a chart of knowledge is transformed into a garden of delights.”

Is this just the same old instability-of-the-signifier business? I feel like it isn’t. I feel like we’re messing with something a lot scarier, here, than just instability.

This is signifying as a slapstick pursuit of meaning, a cruelly comic effort to smash it flat with each word we speak, before it has time to transform itself and thereby escape us.

This is meaning as the nightmare mutating cockroaches of the mind.

A couple footnotes to yesterday’s post on Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle:

¹The book can’t help but raise, of course, the question of why the daughter was doing all the family’s cooking in the first place: even in her death, the specter of the Bad Mother is endlessly and ultimately responsible.

²This redoubling of the sugar’s significance — first as money-excess and then, excessively itself, as a shameless reminder of an intra-family murder — is mirrored in the way Mary, through a sort of imaginary, magical thinking, imbues ordinary objects (and words!) with power. (She has always buried things just under the topsoil, like she’s marking the family land as her own, or planting her family’s history so it can later sprout. She has a book nailed to a tree by the border, to ward off trouble. She tells herself, I’ll pick three words and as long as no one says these words out loud we’ll be safe.)

Both the book’s play with the sugar and Mary’s play with her special objects and words are a sort of fetishization of the mundane, something we also saw in Les Enfants with its drawer of special objects (the first blockquote in this post). A possible generalization: the more whimsical fetishization, excessively cathecting onto the ordinary (discarded object), is the flip-side of the uncanny, which can take the ordinary (sugar bowl) and make it horrifying.

(click for pronunciation)

Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle has such a charming, curious opening, and until the end of the second chapter we’re not sure what kind of book we’re reading: a more or less realistic story of a culture gone awry (like her now-canonized “The Lottery,” which you most likely read in grade school) or a story of the outright supernatural (like her The Haunting of Hill House).

It turns out, I’m pretty sure, that as we saw with the uncanny elements in Les Enfants Terribles, the potentially supernatural in this book serves as a marker pointing toward or intensifying a purely realistic family drama. Until the end of the second chapter, however, we just sense that something is or has gone wrong. The eighteen year old narrator walks through town to pick up groceries, careful to avoid people. Her whimsy, specifically in response to the townsfolks’ hatred toward her and her family (as we saw in the quotation posted last week, imagining herself on the moon), calls into question the veracity of the less whimsical, but still unusual, things she hints at.

The book’s first paragraph, for example, even suggests that we might be reading a story with werewolves in it. I’ll quote it because it gives a nice sense of how Mary’s curious strangeness is bound up in these nice, too-simple sentences:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

It’s the town’s hatred toward Mary Katherine and her family that dominates the first chapter, but we’re not let in yet on precisely why there’s such hostility. It’s strongly suggested that class inequity is the main issue. The town is mostly impoverished, and the Blackwood family – what’s left of it – lives off on a big, fenced-in plot of land (perhaps having taken their money out of the banks shortly before the depression hit?). They can afford to send Mary Katherine out shopping once a week for a lavish list of groceries. And while some off-hand remarks suggest something more is going on, we think these uncanny bits might just be a way for the book to explore class as something sinister. Mary Katherine talks about the townsfolk like they’re irrational monsters. The townsfolk seem to treat her almost like she’s a ghost. Or maybe she’s contagious. Or maybe she’s a monster. Or her sister is.

But it turns out the book’s first chapter is playing a sort of double game. We later realize we couldn’t help but misinterpret, for example, what’s going on in the grocery store when someone gasps at Mary’s asking for a fresh sack of sugar. We think, on first reading, that it must be the excess of it, that sugar must be something audaciously scarce. Likewise, when the grocery list has been fully recited and someone in the store says “The Blackwoods always did set a fine table” we think it must be resentment about what the Blackwoods have and do not share. But there’s an excess of response here that suggests there’s something more that we’re not comprehending:

”The Blackwoods always did set a fine table.” […]and someone giggled and someone else said “Shh.” I never turned; it was enough to feel them all there in the back of me without looking into their flat grey faces with the hating eyes. I wish you were all dead, I thought, and longed to say it out loud. […] I would have liked to come into the grocery store some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain and dying. I would then help myself to groceries, I thought, stepping over their bodies, taking whatever I fancied from the shelves[…].

(And if this is ultimately about class, then Mary definitely isn’t coming off too well, dreaming of robbing the less well-to-do who feel contempt for her).

But by the end of the second chapter we learn that the sugar Mary requests is a special object, that the Blackwood family, less the surviving three members, were killed one night six years ago when their sugar bowl was laced with arsenic, and that Mary’s older sister (who even now cooks all the meals every day for the three survivors¹), was accused of committing the murders, though later acquitted. So there’s the uncanny referent: killing those closest to you, through their sweet dessert berries, no less. The danger posed by sweet, innocent-seeming loved ones and their too-sweet treats².

This is a great book so far: The townsfolk (particularly a representative visitor in chapter two who comes to gawk at the family’s dining room table) don’t believe in Constance’s innocence. She washed the sugar bowl right after dinner – but not any of the other dishes – because, she says, there was a spider in it? We don’t know what to think yet. And Mary is excessively afraid when Constance starts mentioning she might like to go off their property some day (something that reads as potentially supernatural until it gets recontextualized by the murder story). And Mary’s narration, her anger, her guilty feelings toward her uncle who was poisoned, but not mortally so, continually reminding herself to be kind to him, clearly suggests she was the murderer, but the story moves along without turning into a murder mystery. It’s much more interested in the aftermath, in memory, in fear of the world, in the strange family dynamic. And – one more charming thing – her uncle, enfeebled, prone to memory loss, talks endlessly of the memoir he’s writing, his “papers” about that tragic day’s events, no detail too small to note.