Americana

PART FOUR

12

I am falling silently through myself. The spirit contracts at the termination of every passion, whether the season belongs to pain or love, and as I prepare the final pages I feel I am drifting downward into coma, a sleep of no special terror and yet quite narrow and bottomless. Little of myself seems to be left.

1) Intense solitude becomes unbearable only when there's nothing one wishes to say to another.

2) Saints talk to birds but only lunatics get an answer.

I have reached the point where the coining of aphorisms seems a very worthy substitute for good company or madness. Surely this account falls short of either. Too much has been disfigured in the name of symmetry. Our lives were the shortest distance between two points, birth and chaos, but what appears on these pages represents, in its orderly proportions, almost a delivery from chaos. Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory. There is no mention of the scar on my right index finger, the white medicine I took as a child, the ether visions of my tonsillectomy. In my mind the resonance of these distant things is sheer thunder, outlasting immortal books, long and short wars, journeys to other planets. In short I have not been cu

I've been studying the footage of late, hour after hour. There is a crippled beauty in some of it-Sullivan on the swing, all shadow and menace, a long dark heron wading through one's empty sleep. The Fort Curtis episodes are only a small part of what eventually became a film in silence and darkness. The whole thing runs nearly a week, the uncut work of several years. Viewed in the sequence in which it was filmed, the movie becomes darker and more silent as it progresses. There are the Fort Curtis segments. There are demonstrations, speeches, parades, riots. There is a vacation I took in Vermont, and people entering my apartment, and selected parts of a love affair. Then there are long unedited scenes in which friends and strangers declaim their madness to the camera. At this point I dispensed with sound. There are houses, all kinds of houses, everywhere I went. There are newspaper stands, store windows, bus terminals and waiting rooms. There are nuns, hundreds of them, so very black and white, perfect subjects in their long procession, soundless as beads passing through a hand. I returned to individuals briefly- women and boys in hospital corridors, deaf-mutes playing chess, people in tu

The movie functions best as a sort of ultimate schizogram, an exercise in diametrics which attempts to unmake meaning. I like to touch the film. I like to watch it move through the projector. This is my success. Sullivan and Brand, in their surgical candor, taught me to fear and envy the artist. (Brand, of course, as it turned out, was a writer of blank pages. That's how I think of him, definitely a novelist, by all means a craftsman of high talent-but one who chose words of the same color as the paper on which they were written.) I wanted to become an artist, as I believed them to be, an individual willing to deal in the complexities of truth. I was most successful. I ended in silence and darkness, sitting still, a maker of objects that imitate my predilection.

From this window I can see the ocean, far out, rocking in that blank angry sheen which foul weather sets upon all waters. Later I'll walk on the beach for an hour or so. If the weather has cleared by then I'll be able to see the coast of Africa, the great brown curve of that equatorial loin. But right now it is a pleasure to anticipate slipping once again (a paragraph hence) into a much more filmworthy period of my life.

There will be no fireworks when the century turns. There will be no agonies in the garden. Now that night beckons, the first lamp to be lit will belong to that man who leaps from a cliff and learns how to fly, who soars to the tropics of the sun and uncurls his hand from his breast to spoon out fire. The sound of the ocean seems lost in its own exploding passion. I am wearing white fla

Clevenger's paleolithic lavender Cadillac was equipped with air conditioning, deep-pile carpeting, padded instrument panel, stereo tape system and a burglar alarm. Behind the wheel he seemed a veteran jockey not at all awed by the magnificence of his own colors. He was about fifty, a small man with a neck of Playa clay traversed by wide deep ridges. Clevenger was a Texan. He had picked me up somewhere in Missouri where he had been visiting his sister and her family. When I told him I was heading nowhere special he had gri

People fished, hunted, took their sons to visit the inevitable new military installation and talked about places like Phoenix and Vegas as if remembering some telescopically distant moment, some misty green leaflet of childhood on the planet Earth. All those days in fact were not far from one's idea of life on a lunar colony; everywhere we went Indians ranged across the landscape like workers thirsty for oxygen, men sent to move stones in a place which is nothing but stone. Ke