Dear Saul Bellow,
A clear, sweet day (I’ve been massively impressed by these days, these hours, and marvel even at simple descriptions), bright, hazy, a little unreal. Thick wet snow collected in drifts and dirtied in the streets. The cars stuck on sides of roads, like a symptom of something. I find myself writing to you, an erstwhile editor, my old statesman. Our city has fallen ill.
I’ve been sick; sure, ill; but also unusual. Not myself. A stranger using Rene’s clothing and voice (when he can muster the courage to speak at all). But now when I try to do something, anything, after those first hard dull moments, suddenly all colour bursts outward and I want to take the thing as far as it can go, like a starving person at a feast who has to eat slowly at first to reintroduce nourishment into his system, then gets a taste for meat and, overwhelmed by his appetite, begins gorging himself with both hands, guzzling from a chalice of wine, calling for seconds between mouthfuls of veal cutlets and seaweed and potatoes prepared in a variety of ways (you know, Saul, that old potato love). He exhales, like a lover (his tatters, unknown to him, snagged on the plush red char, shoes worn through at the hells, a malodorous bit of string tied around his waist). He consumes as he releases; he releases as he consumes. This is what I feel when I speak to people whom I’ve known for years (but not my whole life) when there’s a hard wind driving into our faces, each uneasily studying the lines newly etched around our mouths and eyes (death, the artist, applying his first touches), thrilled and stunned at this: the familiar; our voices; a new year.
(And I must admit, scribbling a few lines between chapters of Herzog, I feel good.)
But what is it now? All the windows of my home have been shattered by a noise outside the range of human hearing. Escape is now possible. All that’s left is to climb through a jagged pane, look down, and let go. Release your grip on the rotted, sweet-smelling sill and discover tremendous pain. And devour it, greedily. Yet I continue dangling like The Falling Man, crystallized high in the air, a stranger alienated from his own humanity, turned into an image, gawked at, not-alive.
Still, sometimes, dangling in my formless void, I think: maybe I’ll just stay here. There’s usually an element of pleasure in illness. Besides, I have a pair of frogs I keep, African Dwarf frogs. Did you know that? Did I tell you any of this before you left so abruptly? These frogs sing to each other in the night. I can hear them from my bedroom, falling asleep, between blasts from the cars on 2nd St. Sometimes they appear in my dreams, oversized humanoid frogs singing tunelessly with glassy eyes, staring, passively, like the rabbit from Donnie Darko. My first impulse is usually to run at them. On some level I know that they are alien, something from another world burst into my dream (the angry traffic from 2nd St. also inserts itself). But when I reach them and touch the oily-looking scales, they’re actually dry as dirt and both collapse into a heap of dust. When I awake, it’s with shock that I lost another night to this fraudulent kind of rest that leaves me more exhausted than before I slept, trembling a little at the thought of the hours ahead: normal hours, in a way, a day endured and understood on its own terms: the 24-hour clock; the layered infrastructure of a first-world, developed nation; existing on a personal continuum with a certain beginning and an even more certain ending; believing in the expiration of all things; and all the while the dazzling contents of life, of life lived: giving directions to a stranger on a crowded street (what made them choose me?), the growing length of the day, memories even I forgot I had, decisions that other people make, all of it like dry dust that collapses if I get too close, and my frogs continue to scream at each other into the small hours of the morning. At which time I’ll get up to relieve myself and catch a glimpse of a framed face troubled by sleep and guilt but also all this dust, so much dust, and the incredible talent it has to organize itself into myriad forms and act out the invisible script.
And people ask me why I keep frogs.
I wish I could be of more use. You complained of this. Why wouldn’t you – you really were useless. You told me yourself. And now, fifty years later, I’m rummaging through the contents of my mind like they’re the ingredients for a cake I’m making. Like they can be prepared and mixed in such a way that a definite thing will spring into existence and – Yes! – all of this will have been worth while: the long sleepy afternoons and cartoons at dusk, incurable isolation, beautiful, unreal winter months, the Montreal Canadiens’ cup drought, plants weighed with dust on low window sills, the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. and then the day I was born. Presto! God pulls his heavy hand out of the top hat, gripping something… the audience leans forward…
It sometimes occurs to me that from here, on Earth, there can be no questions. There is a (dusty) layer of logic spread over the nature of things, a glossy veneer that not only looks pretty but even protects. It occurs to me that the movement of planets around stars in solar systems resemble the movements of electrons around a nucleus, and that they might be the same thing, even without using the leverage of metaphor. From here on our small orb it occurs to me that my mind is not equipped to apprehend its own thoughts. It occurs to me that death is a weigh station, a method of self-measurement, and not a whole lot more than that. Then I spark a small joint under the white moon and try to get my head out of the goddamn clouds, make a mental note to do laundry in the morning.
