Cumbersome, Load-bearing, Baroque
This time, everything went bad.
In “Acquaint Yourself With Death,” I referred to a paratrooper killed during a routine jump two weekends back. The point wasn’t that soldiers die; the point was that usually we don’t have to think about it. I received the news of Staff Sgt. Jamal Clay’s death only because my friend is in the 82 Airborne Division’s 1st Brigade—not because I regularly pay attention to the press out of Fort Bragg. In the service of context, which I perpetually lack in this forest, Jeremy sent me the link to The Huffington Post’s sensational coverage of the total event. A voluptuous and disorienting quote at the bottom of the story pivots its sobering base towards the loud and astounding, with Maj. Phil Sounia saying, “We move at the speed of truth.” Paul Virilio said as much in the mid-’80s while meaning the exact opposite.
In the interest of crafting literary artifacts—and Jeremy’s general support of facilitating my life’s experiences to agglutinate into hyper-conscious literary forms— I can’t but be thankful for the conspiracy he’s abetted by plugging the war effort into my phone. I was reflecting on the precedents of this strategy, and remembered similar episodes from college, especially my senior year when I was seriously considering dropping out. I was working on an A&E piece on Heath Ledger’s death for the student newspaper and called Jeremy up to ask him to summarize the circumstances of the car-bombing that killed Benazir Bhutto, its outlying political significance, and perhaps two more astonishing examples of deaths in the world that potentially mattered more than Heath Ledger’s, by way of blood sopped constitutions or sanctions starving a hapless population. I don’t have a head for politics. Or economics. And I don’t synthesize meaning from world-historical processes the way he does, or the way my brothers do; I think it’s clear my style gets in the way of my substance.
And here’s an example of that; as a bonus I’ll write it in the third person: During a tender passage late in Evan’s junior year, when he tried to talk to Jeremy as little as possible (Jeremy’s allegiances to a Southern fraternity really grossed him out), Evan was also absorbed in several paperback biographies of Josef Stalin, to inform a one-act play he was writing about Koba the Bear’s son, Yakov. This was a highly self-conscious effort in that other student’s one acts involved Beckettian niceties like claustrophobic repetitions and sparse scenery, that Evan abjured on the basis of nearly throwing up with boredom during a university performance of Endgame. (This extinguishing despair despite, curiously, the guy playing Clov tenting through his soiled thermal underwear with definition most of the play. While moving a ladder around, bowing before Hamm, lifting yapping Nagg’s dust-bin lid: a not-small bell seemed to wag from one thigh to another under the waffled material. Clov’s semi and the number of taxidermy animals on-stage pretty much destroyed Beckett for Evan.)
Ahem. I meant to make a list for the purpose of concision, but I lost its points remembering Clov’s boner: “This was a highly self-conscious effort in that…” he wanted to accomplish something baroque; he was tired of workshopping dormcest insipidity, crime procedurals, and situation “comedies”—his peers pointed to their jokes as he missed them, “No, no. Read it like a joke. Give it a sort of beat. This is the joke; it’s like, funny. That’s where it’s funny.” He didn’t want anything he wrote mistaken for comedy, or charm, or warmth, so he took as his province historical fiction, where the consoling imaginarium of the writer’s task becomes a cumbersome, load-bearing vehicle requiring research and diligence and even greater critical wariness than he heaved upon his peers’ romances, in order to machinate along.
The circumstances surrounding Yakov Stalin’s death are about as well know as the circumstances of his life, which is to say riddled with fabulous speculation but very little in the way of historical truth. His father’s life and death has been exhaustively documented—but his father was Josef Stalin, and the great Russian dictator managed a fair business in his life to leave a scrupulously articulated biography (even if these initial biographies were in the service of Soviet propaganda). We should not forget, also, that Yakov and Josef did not like one another, and Josef immodestly regulated what history would record of his son.
Evan thought, I am attempting to solve the mystery of this homophobic, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, spat-upon child of god, poor Yakov!
Mired in shame his entire life, and living in improbably high-profile disgrace, it is not difficult to believe Milan Kundera’s explanation of Yakov Stalin’s suicide in a British P.O.W. camp in Sacksenhausen, Germany. In Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the author describes Yakov’s death as “the sole metaphysical death” of the entire war, after the 36-year-old man lays his life on electrified barbwire-fence. Kundera submits that, tired of English soldiers blaming him for the disgusting condition of the latrine, Yakov suffered a crippling vertigo of existential “lightness”—being the son of a demi-god and accused of shitting on the toilet seat. Yakov ends this. Other sources, such as recently released archival documents, claim Yakov was shot by prison guards, or he committed suicide after learning of his father’s massacres on the Polish front. No account is definitive though some are more sublime than others.
But then again, Evan had other things to write, other topics to research. He needed to look at Vonnegut and PTSD, and catch up on most of the Old Testament, and also all of the New. Didn’t James Merrill contrive W. H. Auden to speak in The Changing Light at Sandover with the help of a Ouija board? Evan wasn’t getting the sources he needed to invigorate lazy, depressed Yakov Iosifovich Dzhugashvili. The events of the October Revolution, the depth of mass graves at Katyn, Ekaterina touching silks on her typhus death bed, and the artillery of World War II—their mute shapes sat in Evan’s chest, pilloried somewhere beneath one lung or the other in a gigantic, muddy pit, one that incidentally took on the psychic proportions of an actually massive and sopping pit that backhoes were excavating in the campus quad outside Evan’s window (the university was building a new student union). In the morning, construction workers did calisthenics beside the gaping cataract, and Evan waved to them as he booted it, sweating under the low orange sun, on his way to a painting class.
It happened that at the nadir of this collapse in his belief in the one act, for whatever reason, late one night, Jeremy chatted him up on-line, and feeling frustrated by the unreasonable demands society places upon the budding playwright, Evan caved in to supply Jeremy a few cryptic comments about the general goings-on. Then he pulled back. Vehemently. “Must go now. Yakov will visit me in my sleep and I will know how he died and I will know my play.” He shut off his computer—he shut off Jeremy—and went to bed.
That night Evan did dream of Yakov. It was a bland miracle for which he forever blames Jeremy. The Georgian man was sprawled on the lawn of a large, unhappy looking house, his feet tangled in Christmas lights. He was dead. Evan asked him what was wrong and he said he had accidentally electrocuted himself. He got up then, and wandered around the dilapidated property, into sunken bedrooms and mildewing bathrooms, the two searching for something together. Evan had the same anxiety for fostering proper discourse, creating mutual enthusiasms, he had when going on dates with a young man he knew he didn’t find interesting or attractive—which amounts to a kind of pity. When they left the house, Yakov tripped on a strand of Christmas lights; he sprawled on the lawn’s wet grass in electrocuted convulsions. The dream started over again but Evan woke up because it had been lonely and awkward to walk around such an ugly large house. Evan began his play the next morning and its opening lines read (go ahead and use your most Vodka-soaked Ruski growl): “Ladies and gentleman, thank you for watching me die. I know you do not come to the theatre to watch horrible deaths, but.”
Anyway, I finished Freedom early last week and I’ve moved on to The Corrections. So for everyone with whom I’ve ever talked shit about Franzen, I take it all back, and apologize for pretending to have read any of his writing. The work is a revelation and, well, eat a dick for telling me otherwise all these wasted years. In 2001 I could have really used Chip; hell, I could have used Enid! This is unforgivable.
