Speaking of Work by Bernard Schwartz

Author:Bernard Schwartz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Absurdist fiction, Dark humor, Feminist lit, Hispanic woman, Humor memoir, Memoir 1980s, Office drama, Poetry at work, Suspense story, World literature
Publisher: Bernard Schwartz
Published: 2017-10-17T00:00:00+00:00

I don’t know how long the months after my divorce lasted. Months is a guess. One night I didn’t wake up until morning, and after that I never watched another documentary.

Have you ever come across the word “esquivalience?” It’s a made-up word—a “ghost word”—in the New Oxford American Dictionary, created to detect breaches of copyright. (There would be no other way to know if another dictionary-maker had simply stolen Oxford’s list of words; ghost words prove plagiarism.) For the same reason, encyclopedias of music often include a piece of nonexistent music, and mathematic tables often contain nonexistent equations, and, hauntingly, most atlases map at least one fictitious place. They’re known as “paper towns,” or “phantom settlements”.

There was a phantom settlement in upstate New York (in old Esso maps) called Agloe. But it lost its phantom status in the 1950s when someone, believing himself to be in Agloe, opened the Agloe General Store there, and it became a real place. The store closed, but the place persisted. It was included in other atlases, and continued to exist until the 1990s, at which point it disappeared again. But it didn’t disappear to the same non-existence. It’s more like a person—the death after life is different than the death before being born.

Esquivalience is defined as “the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities.”

It’s nice to imagine being esquivalient—maybe even living in one’s own phantom settlement, speaking only ghost words over nonexistent music—while at the same time utterly responsible and devoted to all of the things one loves. That would be something.

One day I’ll tell you the fullest version of this story, which ended up changing my life in some dramatic and concrete ways, but this will do for now: about two years ago, I went to Chicago—where I’m from—to visit the dying mother of my oldest friend. She used to carry me down the stairs of nursery school when I’d become panicked at the top. (Humans aren’t born with a fear of heights, by the way, they learn it.) Thirty years later, I was panicked about going to see her—being at the top of death’s stairs—but it was my turn to carry her. It wasn’t the proximity to death that I was afraid of, but that I might accidentally say too much, or too little. To protect against awkward silences, I brought a small stack of poems to read. That afternoon was one of the least awkward of my life, but I did end up reading her the poems, and rereading them.

At the bottom of this e-mail is one of the poems I read to her. It’s by the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky. That line—“I wish I knew no astronomy when stars appear”—is one way to summarize all that we’ve exchanged thus far.

Brodsky was put on trial when he was 24, and ultimately sent to a labor camp in Siberia. His case turned him into a symbol of artistic resistance, and a hero to poets everywhere. (He won the Nobel Prize in 1987.) Here are just a few lines from the transcript:

JUDGE: What is your specific occupation?

BRODSKY: Poet.

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