Текст книги "Wittgenstein's Mistress"

Автор книги: David Markson

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 14 страниц)

Or that they actually named a disease after one of those baseball players?

One would certainly give almost anything to understand how one's head sometimes manages to jump about the way it does.

Esther was from my father's side of the family, actually.

I have just made some souchong tea.

Before I came back to the typewriter I went upstairs and took the framed snapshot out of the drawer in the table beside my bed, for just a moment.

I did not put it back on the table itself, however.

There was no book by Marco Antonio Montes de Oca in the carton either, if I happen to have given that impression.

On the other hand there were no less than seven books by Martin Heidegger.

I have no way of indicating the titles of any of these, of course, short of returning to the basement and copying out the German, which it would certainly seem pointless to trouble myself with.

When I say it would seem pointless, naturally what I mean is that I would still not understand one word of the German in any event.

A word that certainly did catch my attention was the word Dasein,however, since it seemed to appear on practically every page I opened to.

Martin Heidegger himself remaining somebody I know no more about than I know about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, on the other hand.

Except for now knowing that he was certainly partial to the word Dasein,obviously.

Then again as I believe I have said one is frequently apt to come upon a name such as Martin Heidegger's in one's reading, even if one is scarcely apt to be reading any books by Martin Heidegger himself.

At least this would presumably remain the case if one happened to ever do any reading, which as I have also said I have stopped doing.

In fact I cannot remember the last book I read, even if it may on occasion have appeared to have been a life of Brahms.

All things considered I still do not believe it has ever been verified that I did read a life of Brahms, however.

As a matter of fact it has only at this moment struck me that every solitary thing I know about Brahms could have been learned by reading the backs of the jackets on phonograph records.

Possibly I have not mentioned reading the backs of the jackets on phonograph records before.

It is a thing one does, however.

Well, or did, in any event, since it can now also be fairly definitely stated that I have not read the back of the jacket on a phonograph record for basically as many years as I have not read a book.

In fact there are no phonograph records in this house.

Well, there is no phonograph either, when one comes down to that.

Actually, this may have surprised me when I first came to the house, although it is not something to which I have given any thought since I perhaps first gave it some thought.

Well, as I have furthermore said, I have not played any music since having gotten rid of my baggage in any case, said baggage having naturally included such things as generators for operating such things as phonographs.

None of this is counting whatever music I hear in my head, conversely.

Well, or even in certain vehicles when I have turned on the ignition and it has happened that the tape deck has been set to the on position.

Hearing Kathleen Ferrier singing Vincenzo Bellini under either of those circumstances being hardly the same thing as making a deliberate decision to hear Kathleen Ferrier singing Vincenzo Bellini, obviously.

Although what I am now suddenly forced to wonder is if certain things I do know about Brahms would have appeared on the backs of the jackets on phonograph records after all.

Such as about his affairs with Jane Avril or with Katharine Hepburn, for instance.

Or for that matter how do I know that Beethoven would sometimes write music all over the walls of his house when he could not get his hands on any staff paper quickly enough?

Or that George Frederick Handel once threatened to throw a soprano out of a window because she refused to sing an aria the way he had written it?

Or that the first time Tchaikovsky ever conducted an orchestra he was positive that his head was going to fall off, and held on to his head with one hand through the entire performance?

Well, or on another level altogether, would anybody writing the information for any of such jackets have actually troubled to put down that Brahms was known for carrying candy in his pocket to give to children when he visited people who had children?

Certainly nobody writing such information would have put down that one of the children to whom Brahms now and again gave some of that candy might very well have been Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Perhaps I have not mentioned that one of the children to whom Brahms now and again gave some of that candy might very well have been Ludwig Wittgenstein.

On my honor, however, Brahms frequently visited at the home of the Wittgenstein family, in Vienna, when Ludwig Wittgenstein was a child.

So if it is a fact that Brahms was known for carrying candy in his pocket to give to children when he visited people who had children, then surely it is likely that Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of the children he gave candy to.

Very possibly this was what was in Wittgenstein's own mind all of those years later, in fact, when he said that you do not need a lot of money to give a nice present, but you do need a lot of time.

By which I mean that if the person Wittgenstein had wished to give a present to had been a child, he could have naturally taken care of the problem exactly the way Brahms generally did.

Doubtless one does not stroll about Cambridge carrying candy in one's pocket to give to Bertrand Russell or to Alfred North Whitehead, however.

Although what one might now wish one's self is that Wittgenstein had been in the basement with me yesterday, so as to have given me some help with that Dasein.

Well, or perhaps even with that other word, bricolage,that I woke up with in my head, that morning.

Or likewise with the whole sentence that I also must have said to myself a hundred times, a little later on, about the world being everything that is the case.

Surely if Wittgenstein was as intelligent as one was generally led to believe he ought to have been able to tell me if that had meant anything, either.

Then again, something else I once read about Wittgenstein was that he used to think so hard that you could actually seehim doing it.

And certainly I would have had no desire to put the man to that sort of trouble.

Although what this for some reason now reminds me of is that I do know one thing about Martin Heidegger after all.

I have no idea how I know it, to tell the truth, although doubtless it is from another one of those footnotes. What I know is that Martin Heidegger once owned a pair of boots that had actually belonged to Vincent Van Gogh, and used to put them on when he went for walks in the woods.

I have no doubt that this is a fact either, incidentally. Especially since it may have been Martin Heidegger who made the very statement I mentioned a long while ago, about anxiety being the fundamental mood of existence.

So that what he surely would have admired about Van Gogh to begin with would have been the way Van Gogh could make even a pair of boots seem to have anxiety in them.

Even if there was only the smallest likelihood that a pair of boots Van Gogh used to wear were the same pair he also once painted a painting of, obviously.

Unless of course he had painted with only his socks on, that day.

Or had borrowed a second pair of boots.

And on third thought it may have been Kierkegaard's boots that I was thinking about, and Van Gogh who had owned those.

Actually I rarely read footnotes.

Although doubtless it is also partly age, which will sometimes blur certain distinctions.

And by now there could well be a question of hormones too, and of change of life.

In fact the entire story may have had something to do with somebody sitting in one of Pascal's chairs.

And what I had really intended to have said by now was that I was familiar with the names of the writers on certain other of the books from the carton as well, besides the seven by Martin Heidegger.

Such as Johannes Keats, for instance.

Although there was also a translation of Anna Kareninain which case it was the title itself that I was able to recognize.

This simply being because the title in German appeared to be virtually identical with the title in English, as it happened.

But what I find interesting about this is that if the copy of that book had been the original book itself, and had not been translated, I would not have been able to make sense out of the title at all.

When one says that one does not read one word of Russian one is saying so even more truthfully than when one says that one does not read one word of German, obviously.

In spite of practically every other word in the latter looking like Brontë. Or Dürer.

Though there were also several items in the carton that I was not able to identify in any way whatsoever.

By which I mean that there were certain volumes on which I could not make sense out of the titles and did not recognize the names of the writers either.

Doubtless none of these was a book which had been translated from English, however, where I have the largest familiarity with writers, but had been written in German to begin with.

Which is scarcely to say that I am not familiar with certain German writers also, on the other hand.

Certainly I am familiar with Friedrich Nietzsche, for instance.

Well, or with Goethe.

Although by saying that I am familiar with either of these writers I do not necessarily mean that I am extraordinarily familiar with them.

As a matter of fact by saying that I am familiar with them I do not even necessarily mean that I have read a solitary word that either one of them ever wrote.

Actually the sum total of that familiarity may well extend no farther than to my reading of the backs of the jackets on phonograph records.

Such as the back of the jacket on Thus Spake Zarathustra,by Richard Strauss, for instance.

Or the back of the jacket on The Alto Rhapsody.

Possibly my including the back of the jacket on The Alto Rhapsodywould appear to be less relevant than my including the back of the jacket on Thus Spake Zarathustra.

Certainly if I had never read the back of a jacket on The Alto RhapsodyI would not be familiar with the fact that what Brahms had based The Alto Rhapsodyon was a poem by Goethe, however.

Neither am I forgetting The Damnation of Faust,by Berlioz, on the other hand.

Or Gounod's Faust.

Or Liszt's Faust Symphony.

Even if I am perhaps now showing off again.

In either event it was certainly not my intention to demean any German writers by remarking that I did not recognize their names.

Possibly any number of these writers were quite famous in Germany and the news had simply not reached me by the time I stopped reading.

Doubtless I would have heard of many of them within a few more years.

Then again, perhaps some of the writers whose books I took from the carton were not German writers after all. Quite possibly there were just as many French writers whose names I did not recognize. Or Italian writers.

In fact this could have been just as true of certain writers who wrote in Spanish.

Surely it is no more than chance that I had ever heard of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz herself, actually. Or of Marco Antonio Montes de Oca.

Moreover even after having heard of them I might very well have forgotten about them again entirely, if their names had not had a certain resonance.

So perhaps it was not necessary for me to have apologized to any German writers after all.

Franz Liszt was one more person who was in the movie Song of Lovewith Bach and Clara Schumann, by the way.

I bring this up just in passing.

Well, or because of just having mentioned Liszt.

And Rainer Maria Rilke was another German writer I could have said I was similarly familiar with, had I wished.

Although what I am really still thinking about is how you could actually seeWittgenstein thinking, that way.

Even if thinking is what philosophers obviously do,on the other hand.

So quite possibly the lot of them were like that. Possibly every single philosopher from all the way back to Zeno used to walk around letting people see that they were thinking.

Possibly they even did this when they did not have a single thing more on their minds than the most inconsequential perplexities, as a matter of fact.

Not that inconsequential perplexities cannot now and again become the fundamental mood of existence too, of course.

Still, all I am suggesting is that quite possibly the only thing that Wittgenstein himself had on his mind when people believed he was thinking so hard may very well have been a seagull.

This would be the seagull which had come to his window each morning to be fed, that I am speaking about. One time when he lived near Galway Bay, in Ireland.

Possibly I have not mentioned that Wittgenstein had a pet seagull which came to his window each morning to be fed.

Or even that he ever lived in Ireland.

Or rather what occurs to me is that I may have said it was somebody else who had the pet seagull. And in another place altogether.

On my honor, it was Wittgenstein who had it. At Galway Bay.

Wittgenstein also played an instrument, incidentally.

And sometimes did some sculpture.

I enjoy knowing both of those things about Wittgenstein.

In fact I also enjoy knowing that he once worked as a gardener, in a monastery.

And inherited a good deal of money, but gave it all away.

In fact I believe I would have liked Wittgenstein.

Especially since what he did with the money, once he did decide to give it away, was to arrange to have it be used to help other writers who did not have any.

Such as Rainer Maria Rilke.

Actually, the next time I am in a town where there is a bookstore to let myself into, perhaps I will try to find something to read by Wittgenstein after all.

Galway Bay has a much lovelier sound when one says it out loud than when one merely looks at it on the page, by the way.

Well, doubtless it has no sound at all, when one merely looks at it on the page.

In fact even such words as Maria Callas do not have any sound when one is merely looking at them on the page, come to think about it.

Or Lucia di Lammermoor.

Hm. So what color were my red roses when I typed those words also, then?

In any case it had never crossed my mind that one might actually name a seagull before, I do not believe.

Galway Bay. Cádiz. Lake Como. Pamplona. Lesbos. Bordeaux.

Shostakovitch.

Oh, well. Meanwhile I have just been out to the dunes.

While I was peeing, I thought about Lawrence of Arabia.

This is scarcely to suggest that there is any particular connection between taking a pee and Lawrence of Arabia, however.

The reason I thought about Lawrence of Arabia, as a matter of fact, was simply because there was only one other book from the carton that I was able to recognize, and that happened to be a life of Lawrence of Arabia.

The reason I recognized that one, as it happened, was because the name Lawrence of Arabia had been kept in English in the title, in quotation marks.

Actually, I might have recognized it as a life of Lawrence of Arabia at any rate, since the book also contained several photographs of Lawrence of Arabia, but I had already made the assumption that it was a life of Lawrence of Arabia before noticing these.

Once I did notice the photographs I was delighted to accept this as a verification of my assumption, however.

Lawrence of Arabia did not look very much like Peter OToole, by the way, even though in some of the photographs he was dressed like Peter OToole.

This would be Peter OToole the way he was dressed in the film about Lawrence of Arabia, naturally.

I believe I have mentioned having seen Peter OToole in the film about Lawrence of Arabia.

Although on the other hand when I say that Lawrence of Arabia did not look very much like Peter OToole, I should perhaps also say that I am in no way certain of what Lawrence of Arabia actually looked like.

Granting, I have just said it was only yesterday that I saw certain photographs of Lawrence of Arabia.

Still, when I say that the photographs I saw yesterday were of Lawrence of Arabia, this itself may very well be no more than one additional assumption.

Naturally I could not make sense out of the captions that went along with the photographs.

What I was basically basing this assumption on, therefore, was the fact that the person in the photographs was dressed in some of them the way Peter OToole was dressed in the film about Lawrence of Arabia.

Nonetheless one is still forced to allow for the possibility that the photographs may not have been photographs of Lawrence of Arabia after all.

Or even that the book itself may not have been a life of Lawrence of Arabia.

One doubts that either of these possibilities would be particularly extreme, but they remain possibilities nonetheless.

Certainly with the remainder of the title and every single word in the actual book being in German, there is no denying that some small margin for error must continue to exist.

Even if on second thought every single word in the book was not actually in German.

In addition to Lawrence of Arabia's name, certain other names similarly appeared in English.

Although doubtless when one says that certain other names appeared in English, one is really only saying that in a manner of speaking.

Surely somebody who was reading the book in German would not stop on such occasions as when he came to the name Winston Churchill, say, or to the name T. E. Shaw, and say to himself, this book I am reading is in German but the names Winston Churchill and T. E. Shaw are in English.

Even if it is perhaps amusing to think of Winston Churchill as not being an English name.

Still, this is not basically a thing one does.

Any more than when I myself was reading a translation of a Greek play I did not stop on such occasions as when I came to the name Clytemnestra, say, or to Electra, and say to myself, this play I am reading is in Gilbert Murray but the names Clytemnestra and Electra are in Greek.

Even if on another level altogether that other name has had to begin to trouble me again, naturally.

Or at least to the extent that after having thought about somebody called T. E. Shaw this often I do wish that the man might have done something more that I knew about than simply having translated the Odyssey.

Although one can now safely assume he was in some way connected to Lawrence of Arabia also, of course.

Had his name appeared in any of the captions I might have at least had a look at him as well, even if that would have hardly eliminated the problem.

Each of the photographs was only of Lawrence of Arabia, however.

Still, it undeniably does remain an interesting coincidence to have been thinking about somebody one knows so little about and then to have noticed his name in a book not that long afterward, even if one has no way of making sense out of the book in which his name happened to be noticed.

And at least it would now appear fairly certain that he was not a baseball player, as I had perhaps once thought.

Certainly there was no connection between Lawrence of Arabia and baseball in the movie, at any rate.

All things considered, most likely T. E. Shaw was somebody Lawrence of Arabia once fought with in Arabia, which I do remember many scenes of in the movie.

Although when I say fought with, I should perhaps point out that I mean fought on the same side as, incidentally.

Frequently when one says that somebody fought with somebody one could just as readily mean that the person was fighting against that person, as it happens.

So that when Marlon Brando and Benito Juarez were in Mexico, for instance, as in another movie I once saw, one could say that one side was fighting with the other side and mean exactly the opposite from what one means when one says that T. E. Shaw most likely was somebody that Lawrence of Arabia was fighting with in Arabia.

For some curious reason one's meaning would generally appear to be understood in such cases, however.

Naturally Lawrence of Arabia would not have been called of Arabia until some time after he had gotten to Arabia either, by the way.

And what has also only now struck me is that when one is reading certain translations in which what one keeps coming to is a name like Rodion Romanovitch, on the other hand, possibly one does stop and say that the name one has just come to is not an English name after all.

Well, or when the people who do the translations make use of peculiar spellings, as well. Such as for Klytaemnestra.

Or Elektra.

But in the meantime something I believe I may not have indicated, when I indicated that the life of Lawrence of Arabia was the only other book from the carton I was able to recognize, was that it was also the last book from the carton.

Why I find this worth pointing out, as it happens, is that when one says that a certain book was the last book from a carton, what one almost always happens to be saying at the same time is that it was also the first book to have been put into that carton.

And the reason for any particular book being the first book to have been put into a carton, generally, is because it also happens to have been the largest book among those being put in.

As a matter of fact this can practically be taken as a general rule. Almost categorically, if the other books are put into the carton before the largest book there will scarcely ever be any way to fit in the largest book when one finally gets to the largest book.

So what I actually ought to have said that I find worth pointing out is that I have never been able to understand this at all.

Surely there has got to be the identical amount of space in the carton no matter which way the books go in.

Just go try putting books into a carton without putting the largest book in first, however.

In fact now that I think about it, either Archimedes or Galileo may have once proved something quite extraordinary in regard to this, even if for some reason how they proved it was by putting books into a bathtub instead of into a carton.

Well, doubtless the reason they put the books into a bathtub was because their own edition of the life of Lawrence of Arabia would not fit into the carton at the end either, which would have been what led Archimedes or Galileo to do the experiment to begin with.

I have no idea any longer how much water one needs in the bathtub to conduct one's own version of this experiment, on the other hand.

Science generally being a subject one has a tendency to forget as one gets older, unfortunately.

Conversely, what I do only this tardily come to realize is why those eight or nine cartons of books must have been put into the basement after all, which I believe I have said is something else that has more than once perplexed me.

Almost certainly what must have happened was that nobody living in the house at the time was able to make any more sense out of most foreign languages than I myself am able to do now.

Now heavens, how weary I have gotten of looking at that word Daseinand having no idea what it means, one can surely imagine one of these people finally deciding.

Or, now heavens, how weary I have gotten of noticing that silly volume which appears to be called The Way of All Meat.

Downstairs they go, every last one of the troublesome things.

Granting that this would in no way explain why the translation of The Trojan Womenhappened to be included, although surely this can be dismissed as an oversight.

When one comes down to it there are easier things to do than filling eight or nine cartons with books.

Filling eleven cartons with books not being one of them, in fact.

But what this same assumption would meanwhile also appear to solve, as it happens, is that question as to whether the shelves in this house are to be thought of as being half empty or half filled, which one certainly finds it agreeable to be able to stop fretting over.

Even if what this next reminds me of, which I have not yet come to grips with at all, is the matter of the atlas.

Doubtless I have not even mentioned the atlas lately, to tell the truth.

Which is not to imply that I have not been thinking about the atlas, however.

The reason I have been thinking about it, basically, is because of the way in which the atlas has always had to lie on its side, which I suspect I did once point out was because of its being too tall for the shelves.

Now naturally, there would have always been people in this world who would have failed to make allowances for such taller books when they were building bookshelves.

But what I am actually getting at, here, is that this very same failure might also explain why there does not happen to be one solitary book about art in this house, which is still one further item I have mentioned being perplexed by.

Obviously, your ordinary book about art is quite tall.

So in fact who is to argue, now, that quite possibly there might not have once been just as many books about art on these shelves as there were books in foreign languages, until such time as somebody grew exactly as weary of having a house full of books that were forced to lie flat as he did of having a house full of books he was not able to read?

Downstairs they go, every last one of the troublesome things.

Which is to say that quite possibly there are just as many books about art in those cartons as there are books in German, and all I did was open the wrong one by which to be made aware of this.

As a matter of fact it is not even impossible that every solitary remaining book in that basement is a book about art.

Nor does the simple happenstance of my having found no such books in the one carton I did open in any way eliminate this possibility, surely.

As a matter of fact I could go back down there at this very instant and check.

Nor would I even be required to move the lawnmower again, come to think about it, what with not having put back the lawn-mower once I did move it.

I have no intention whatsoever of going back down there to check.

At this very instant or at most likely any other.

And especially since I have still not even come close to resolving the question as to why I went down there yesterday to begin with.

Even if I did not go downstairs to the basement yesterday.

To tell the truth it has actually already gotten to be the day after tomorrow.

Or even more probably the day after that.

Moreover it is raining.

In fact it has been raining since the morning on which I threw out my red roses, which I did not put in either.

By either, of course, I mean also not having put in the days.

Either.

Well, I believe it was some time ago that I indicated that I sometimes indicate them and I sometimes do not.

Possibly it began to rain on the day after the day after I went to the basement.

On the day before the day after the day after I went to the basement I was still typing.

I think.

In any case what I have also not put in is that the first day's rain broke a window.

Or rather it was the wind that did that, that night.

Such things can happen.

Oh, dear, the wind has just broken one of the windows in one of the rooms downstairs, having doubtless been all I thought.

This would have been right after I had heard the glass, naturally.

And while I was upstairs.

Actually, a certain amount of the rain is still coming in. Not much, any longer, but some.

Well, most of the wind actually died down again quite quickly, as it turned out.

So that now the whole notion of a warm steady rain is quite agreeable, even.

Even if I am finally convinced that the pain in my shoulder is arthritic after all.

The same thing would hold true for the pain in my ankle, presumably.

Possibly I have not mentioned my ankle in some time.

This would be the ankle I broke when I unexpectedly got my period in the middle of carrying a nine-foot canvas up the main central staircase in the Hermitage and fell, that I am talking about.

Then again the ankle may not have been broken but merely sprained.

The next morning it was swollen to twice its normal size nonetheless.

One moment I had been halfway up the stairs, and a moment after that I was making believe I was Icarus.

In fact very probably it would have been a wind which caused that too, since there were similarly all sorts of broken windows in the museum on its own part, by then.

Although what I had actually just done was shift the way in which I was standing, naturally, so as to close my thighs.

Forgetting for the same instant that I was carrying forty-five square feet of canvas, on stretchers, up a stone stairway.

And naturally all of this had occurred with what seemed no warning whatsoever, either.

Although doubtless I had been feeling out of sorts for some days, which I would have invariably laid to other causes.

At any rate it is that ankle that I mean.

And outside of which I would most likely not mind the rain in the least, as I started to say.

With the exception of missing my sunsets, perhaps.

Although what I have basically been doing about the rain is ignoring it, to tell the truth.

How I do that is by walking in it.

I did not fail to notice that those last two sentences must certainly look like a contradiction, by the way.

Even if they are no such thing.

One can very agreeably ignore a rain by walking in it.

In fact it is when one allows a rain to prevent one from walking in it that one is failing to ignore it.

Surely by saying, dear me, I will get soaked through and through if I walk in this rain, for instance, one is in no way ignoring that rain.

Then again, doubtless it is rather easier to ignore it in my own particular manner of doing so if one happens to have no clothes on at the time.

Well, or no more than underpants.

Although as a matter of fact I stepped out of those on the front deck each time I decided to walk, also.

Well, doubtless I had already gotten soaked while I was out there deciding about the walk in either case.

So that by then it would have scarcely made any difference whether I kept on my underpants or not.