All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found by Philip Connors
Author:Philip Connors [Connors, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Nonfiction, Personal Memoirs, Retail
ISBN: 9780393246483
Google: Y-s_BAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2015-02-16T05:00:00+00:00
Rachel came to visit during her winter break. She was working on a long paper and wanted someplace quiet to hole up and write. My apartment served nicely, as I was gone each day for ten hours. I’d come home from work to find her in bed, exactly where I’d left her, surrounded by a scattering of papers. Wound up from copyediting against deadline, I’d pour myself a glass of bourbon and put some Miles Davis on the stereo, cook us dinner. The music didn’t bother her. She stayed in the bedroom, naked, unshowered, writing intently. I made it my duty to see that she ate, since she claimed to be uninterested in food, only words, ideas. I brought her cold drinks. When she panicked at the prospect of running out of paper, I went to the stationery store and bought a stack of legal pads. I was doing my best to be the handmaiden to creativity. That’s what I would have wanted from her.
I took her at her word that she was on to something, a new theory, a work of genius. I could hardly tell her to stop; that would have been heresy to both of us. If you’re working and it’s flowing, you run with it. The muse didn’t visit very often, so you had to give yourself over like a love slave when she did.
I assumed at first that her claims to genius were at least tinged with irony. On the third evening she began to frighten me. She’d hardly slept. She talked in great strings of sentences, making metaphors one after another. I sat on the edge of the bed and listened as her pronouncements became ever more grandiose. She claimed she was channeling James Joyce. She said she was rewriting the Book of Genesis. She was drawing a map for the politics of a new era. She was going to touch off a peaceful revolution, achieve what Marx had only dreamed of.
She was going mad in my bedroom.
It’s the year one, she said. It’s a politics for an age of information overload. The only difference between words and worlds is a typographical error. The only difference between immodality and immorality is a typographical error. I’m writing a bible for our times. It’s going to change everything. George Bush won’t bring peace to the Middle East. I will. I’m going to show the way. I’m going to have enemies, and they’re going to want to put me away in an institution. I’m going to tell them I’m already in an institution. The University of Virginia is my institution. I’m going to make geniuses of everyone in the world. I’m going to succeed where Jesus failed.
How? I asked.
Because Jesus was not a woman. Because women weren’t allowed to paint and act and study philosophy and math and they weren’t allowed to write. I’m the first. I’m the female Jesus.
I told her that she was scaring me, that she sounded delusional, but she only laughed at me with pity.
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