[sic]: A Memoir by Cody Joshua

Author:Cody, Joshua [Cody, Joshua]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Norton
Published: 2011-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

VI

WAS PICASSO SMART?

Golaud: Je dis une chose très simple. Je n’ai pas d’arrière-pensée; Si j’avais une arrière-pensée, pourquoi ne la dirais-je pas?

I’m saying something very simple. There’s no subtext. If I had a subtext why wouldn’t I just say it?

—Maurice Maeterlinck, the libretto

for Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande

How I’d wanted to go step by step through the story, chapter by chapter, block by block, regimented, writing a draft and polishing a block until lo and woe and behold there it stands: the simple story in the sunlight, a line of polished blocks. So much for that.

You’ve probably forgotten, for example, that when I was talking about Don Giovanni and the Rolling Stones’ Some Girls I also brought up Paul Klee—how he was enamored of the Mozart opera, how he once inscribed a painting with a list of his sexual conquests. One of my major “security blankets” during the hospitalization was an old art book on Klee that I’d inherited from my parents. Why was it such a comfort?

First of all, obviously, because I, along with so many others, admire his art. It’s pleasurable to look at, and finding sources of pleasure is an important aspect of dealing with high levels of pain.

But along with my love for his art is my love for what I imagine he was as a person. Isn’t that odd? I don’t just like his art, I like him, as an imaginary friend. When I realized this, I found this was very odd, for I normally see myself as an early twenty-first-century, darkly brooding, edgy, raw post-postmodernist, not a seventeenth-century, teleologically minded, moral sentimentalist like the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, or Holden Caulfield. But then I realized that my favorite artists are those I imagine would be nice people to know. And that’s fucked up. David Foster Wallace wrote that “watching his scenes I again felt that I admired [David] Lynch as an artist and from a distance but would have no wish to hang out in his trailer or be his friend.”9 On the other hand, when I met Lynch I found him to be extremely nice; I got a really good feeling from him. Unlike DFW, I would like to be his friend. Some of Lynch’s subject matter is pretty disturbing, but some of the things I’ve been writing about are pretty disturbing too. And I wouldn’t like it if someone read my book and said, I admire him as a writer, but I would have no wish to meet someone who wrote things like that, or to be friends with someone who would write things like that. When I was writing this, I gave a draft of part of this book to a friend in publishing, and she said she thought the writing was good but warned me that if it’s published “you won’t be able to have regular relationships anymore.” What the hell did she mean by that? Maybe the stuff about girls? And then—as a matter of fact—she never talked to me again.

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