“Play,” Margie says, “is all that I do.” We are in her studio — a sanctuary in sumptuous and harmonious disorder devoted to the noble games she plays with such spunk and hilarity. “When I’ve got my materials, I just want to see what that one little thing is gonna jump off to.”
Looking up into a snarl of red wire, I know we all burn more brightly beneath her stars.
Houses on Fire
Our food is perverse.1
Werner Herzog’s great film, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser,2 offers a stunning glimpse of all Kaspar lost when, at the age of four, he was isolated in a dungeon. For twelve years he lived like an eel in the twilight. Kaspar was very likely the heir to the throne of Baden, and Herzog provides him with a flickering memory of an exotic and beautiful landscape painted on glass and projected on the wall by the flame of a magic lantern. These ardent images evoke the wealth of beauties lost, the extremity of that loss, and the untenable despair any memory of loss exacted. As when in 1828 Kaspar visited the Veste castle in Nuremberg — so like his childhood home — and fell senseless to the ground. “The dead move among us in our memory,” writes Joy Williams, “and that is the resurrection.”3 But in those savagely eroded years, nothing moved, neither the dead nor the living. Kaspar remembered nothing. He could not dream. Spelled as in a fairy tale, he was suspended in time. Paradoxically, it was this suspension that kept him alive.
“The unconscious spreads its great dark web,” writes Kathryn Davis, “where the villainous agents of our fate lurk side by side with the magical agents of reversal.”4 Reversal would come, if briefly. After his release, Kaspar eagerly searched out his memories and began to dream. He longed to be fully alive and aware. He was perplexed and fascinated by the limbo that had for so many years claimed him. When a first attempt was made on his life and he lay in fever and delirium, he cried out to his vanished and unknown aggressor, “You have killed me, before I understand what life is.”5 Yet when one looks at Kaspar’s luminous paintings, it is evident he had returned to the world and burned in Beauty’s embrace. Whereas, to evoke beauty in captivity was an impossibility, a lethal risk.
Beauty’s power to rend the heart and sear the mind is the subject of Clarice Lispector’s The Imitation of the Rose, in which the repressed, mousy Laura, who has only just returned from “the perfection of the planet Mars,”6 is made to sip milk for safety’s sake, on the hour. Yet she must also relax! “Take things easy. . It doesn’t matter if I get fat,”7 Laura thinks, “beauty has never been the most important thing.”8 And yet nothing matters more to this woman who was raised in a convent and wears dresses the color of dung. A bouquet of roses undoes her; the roses release her from servitude only to send her careening back to Mars (Lispector’s word for psychosis). “Like someone depraved, she watched with vague longing the tempting perfection of the roses. . with her mouth a little dry, she watched them. Vacantly, sorrowfully, she watched them. . parched by envy and desire.”9
The repressed imagination and the renunciation of the beautiful surface again in Lispector’s novel Near to the Wild Heart. Steeped in isolation, the child Joanna wonders, “What’s going to happen now, now, now?10. . For the silenced dragged out zzzzzz11. . and there was a great still moment with nothing inside it.”12 When in despair, her face burning, she asks her father, “What shall I do?” he thunders, “Go bang your head against the wall.”13
Later, when Joanna has become a woman, her loneliness persists; in solitude she continues “slowly living the thread of her childhood and eyes sparkling, she burns like the air that comes from a stove whose lid is lifted.”14
Such fevers also spire in the fantastic stories of Jean Ray. In one, a visit to a cannibal house causes the narrator to recall “the bitch who was his mother” serving him a meager supper and crying, “Eat! Who knows who will eat you!”15 The infernal house will go up in flames; writes Kathryn Davis, “Sooner or later, the house will get the best of you. . Every house in the world, no matter how well built, will eventually catch fire.”16 If Beauty is dangerous, its danger quickens in the house from which it has been banished.
In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the soul must traverse a lake of fire in order to reach the afterlife. It has long intrigued me that the dead — whose chambers were stacked with serviceable things — carried no luggage. Their furniture, cosmetics, roast ducklings, and flasks of wine would be spirited across that lake and show up on the other side as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. The dubious idea of finding a hot meal waiting reoccurred to me while reading Kathryn Davis’s splendid novel Hell. “If you wrap your dead you can trick yourself into thinking they’re actually headed somewhere like packages.”17
In this tirelessly brilliant enchantment, something of a fairy tale (think: Memoirs of a Midget), Bildungsroman, roman à clef, murder mystery (all this!), a family home and a dollhouse within it ceaselessly shift places and most often cannot be told apart. (Unless, for example, a baby’s head falls off and topples to the floor.) In fact “all the houses are haunted. Just because the house is a little house inside a big house it doesn’t mean it escapes God’s notice.”18 Recall that Yahweh chose to make Adam of mud; he hates his children and would gladly banish them from Paradise. Here all the gods haunt these rooms, and some mythic people too: “Beware when you open the front door, Pandora (is always) getting ready to open her famous box.”19 Like any place of sacrifice, the grill is on, “the gods prefer their food red,”20 and “the smell of scorched meat drifts up the stairs.21. . The gods go for the liver,”22 and should you bend your ear to the “kitchen’s ceaselessly muttering exhaust fan you will hear Mrrrt, mrrrt, murder.”23 Even lying in the safety of one’s bed, one cannot help but “hear the clamor” and feel “the heat of the stars.”24 Considering God’s malevolence, is it surprising we belong to a “family given to the idea of apocalypse, some of us because we know we deserve to die, others because it suggests a convenient way out?”25 Face it! “There is no escaping the house where you were born.”26 Time is never on our side: “The clock strikes, the shadows lengthen and from the dining room comes the sound of stamping, followed by a vague shuffling noise, lax yet oddly precise, as if an approaching mummy’s trying hard not to trip over its unraveling feet.”27
Potential corpses, a family in Hell sits together eating “Devil on horseback.”28 Eating and its outcome are the incontournable evidence of mortality. In the words of Nöelle Châtelet, “The kitchen is the belly of the house.29. . The exquisite afternoon teacakes, served on a porcelain dish along with Chinese tea, are already well on their way to becoming excrement.”30