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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781775580300 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Auckland University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 128 |
| File size: | 878 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Brief Lives
By Chris Price
Auckland University Press
Copyright © 2006 Chris PriceAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-86940-628-8
CHAPTER 1
AFTER THE PARTY
You call him redneck, but he may just have been embarrassed, or sunburned. All those cultured heads nodding, like flowers in a French field waiting for the scythe.
THE AGE
The only stories we could tell now were the ones we already had. — Jonathan Franzen
T had reached the age at which he knew more than younger people not by virtue of study and diligence but through mere longevity. He did not hesitate to take advantage of this, while constantly worrying that the young would find him out. It reassured him to have a more extensive catalogue of writers, popular songs, TV programmes and historical events to call on, since in T's mind being there still counted for more than textbook learning, even if, as he admitted, he had been a relatively disinterested bystander.
J had reached the age by which the orchards and horse-riding locations of her childhood had been replaced by industrial parks and new urban developments, and motorways had made travel to these places a good 40 per cent quicker than she remembered from the days when she made the trip in the back seat of her parents' car. Both J and T failed to understand the children of T's younger brother, who spent all their time interacting with screens of various sizes and capabilities.
J, who had never previously experienced weight problems, was finding the discipline of diet and exercise the age required of her almost beyond her reach, indicating (with the benefit of hindsight) the merits of adversity in early life. It was the stage by which as much of their lives had been lived in the past tense as remained to be lived in the future tense, possibly more. The stage by which they could both understand nostalgia as something more layered and nuanced than the type of music played by radio stations targeted at their parents' generation.
Their household, like their city, was a graveyard of good intentions. Adventures still theoretically possible, but none undertaken. Increasing silence in all mutual activities. Preoccupation with minor health defects in rehearsal for the major ones to come. Gardening.
The first of their friends died. R was a drummer and a drinker who had made and lost money at a variety of jobs, most recently computers, and who was struck down by a heart attack at 50. Some time earlier he had told T there was nothing else in life he particularly wanted to do. Not long after that he said he had planned his funeral, including music and a PowerPoint presentation. When he died, no one could find the plans, so he got the funeral the living thought he needed, with highlights of his selected drum solos (recorded) and guitar music (live) by greying friends.
It was the age of another Vietnam.
The age of science reality rendering science fiction irrelevant, and reality TV triumphing over drama, comedy and news.
T and J became aware that the young truly were different from them. This made them a little glad, but also alienated. The illusion that the world belonged to them was replaced by the illusion that it belonged to the young.
It was the age of being glad to stay at home.
Of being unable to drink more than two glasses of wine without consequences (J).
Of wishing one had been born a Frenchwoman (J); into a family possessing inherited wealth (T).
The age of incipient regret and heart failure (J and T, interchangeably).
It was the age.
ALTITUDE SICKNESS
In order to test the effects of altitude on human physiology, Doctor Sigmund Rescher arranged for a truck to be fitted out like the pressure cabin of a plane. Oxygen could be withdrawn from the cabin in progressive stages, and the effects upon the men shut inside observed and recorded via specially rigged cameras. The camp inmates soon dubbed this vehicle the Himmelfahrtswagen, the bus to heaven.
In the quest to establish how long human beings could survive at great altitudes, at least 70 inmates – mostly 'career criminals' and the 'simple-minded' – were used as experimental guinea pigs. The experiments, sanctioned by Himmler himself, were of particular interest to the Luftwaffe for information that might help their men survive crashes and forced parachute jumps when the planes were shot down.
A sequence of seven photographs shows one of Rescher's experimental subjects in the Himmelfahrtswagen. The man's striped prison garb, black cap and stubble give him the appearance of a bank robber from the silent movie era. At first the fellow sits upright and alert on the wooden bench. His expression, amiable and a little bemused, is that of a man ready to play along with whatever foolish business Herr Doktor has in store. In the next photo, his shoulders have slumped; in the following one he looks sleepy, then debilitated; and then he lies crumpled sideways on the thin wooden bench.
None of this is adequate preparation for the final photograph in the sequence, taken from one end of the operating trolley on which the subject now lies, so that we see only the top of his head. The skull has been trepanned, leaving the brain exposed like petfood in a can.
Rescher himself was dragged down into the misery of the camps after breaching the strict moral code of the SS by trading with prisoners. Sent first to Buchenwald, near Weimar, and then to Dachau, he was found shot when the camp was liberated by the Americans.
But there is another photograph, a studio portrait, that has survived. Dr Rescher is impeccably groomed, his hair slicked back, the buttons on his uniform gleaming. In his arms he holds an anxious-looking baby boy. A photo taken so that his son, too young to remember his dashing father's military career, might nonetheless be proud when he got older.
ANNE CARSON
Anne Carson is a writer who does not like to be seen; she does not permit author photos on her book jackets. Her biographical note reads: 'Anne Carson lives in Canada.' She rarely appears at writers' festivals, but she will read if she is shortlisted for a prize or has won it. In a reading at the Edinburgh Book Festival she invited audience participation. This appeared to be for her own entertainment. She has assembled an honest edition of Sappho, a book consisting mostly of blank space.
ANTHONY
Gianetta wanted to smoke crack with him. She kept on about it so he knew he'd have to try it or fail the test. He couldn't see the point, but Gianetta seemed to think it would prove something about them, something it was important to her to prove.
It was his family's custom to talk with one another at the dinner table, so the sound on the TV was turned down. The news was on, pictures of humvees, dry desert towns and highways, khaki and guns and the angry faces of men with black hair and dark eyes. Anthony watched the president's lips move. With the sound turned down he looked like a good man, a simple man who wanted the best for his country.
Anthony's mother was asking him about rehearsals. He heard himself answering. His father talked about his job, about the difficulty of treating the people who most needed it. He said again how he'd love to work for a community clinic, but if you weren't in the system how could you change it? Anthony felt as if he was in an aquarium, the type you walk through in a plastic tunnel with the fish swimming over and around you. His father and the president, the angelfish and the hammerhead, mouths opening and closing. The angelfish wouldn't last long in the tank, Anthony thought.
Out with the leaf blower Saturday morning. Then rehearsals. Rehearsals used to be fun, but lately they made Anthony sullen and wild, like a rodeo steer waiting to enter the ring. The orchestra was working on a difficult and unattractive piece by Messiaen. Anthony played the dots, but it was like correctly pronouncing the words of a foreign language without knowing their meaning. What was the point? The conductor, Henry, acted as if this were great, passionate music. All Anthony could hear was noise, the orchestra like a badly tuned engine. Afterwards he took Gianetta to the local bookstore-café, where she complained about the staff, who weren't interested in books, about the coffee, which was neither hot nor strong enough, about the stupid dean, who had refused to meet with the student council, about her mother's new boyfriend, who had an NRA bumper sticker and a gundog, and about her new haircut, which made her look like a '50s housewife. After he dropped her at the library to finish her poetry assignment, Anthony went home, opened a beer, sat in front of the TV, opened another beer. His mother found him sitting there when she got home and told him he could help her get the groceries in from the Jeep Cherokee.
On Sunday Anthony stayed in his bedroom. He told his mother he was researching Messiaen on the net so he could understand the music better. Actually he lay on his bed most of the day like a basking shark, staring at his clean white trainers, which lived on his feet at the other end of his body.
On Monday Anthony enlisted.
BIOGRAPHICAL FALLACIES
A psychologist recently did some research into choice, and whether it makes us happier to have more of it. The researcher identified and described two personality types: the 'maximiser', who researches every option thoroughly before making a decision but afterwards suffers from persistent anxiety that they have made the 'wrong' choice, and the 'satisficer', for whom whatever they have chosen may not be perfect, but is nonetheless good enough. Maximisers characteristically spend a great deal of time imagining living a lifestyle that bears very little resemblance to the one they actually live.
Perhaps they are also biography fans, foraging among the leaves of other people's lives for a vicarious existence more colourful, decisive and adventurous than their own. Looking for a tool that will allow them to gain some purchase on their own life, which constantly slides from their grasp in a blur of the everyday. These readers love what they lack the courage to be. They are searching for the key to unlock the trunk in the attic where a perfectly formed homunculus is sleeping, with his wild eye and dashing costume, his unerring sense of destiny and his sure path towards it.
A path and a destiny are never so apparent in the life-in-progress. Not until the vantage point of old age, death or biography is reached can the outline of a narrative be discerned. Modelling one's life on a biography is like imitating a painting: the pose and the costume may be gorgeous, but the image is static, incapable of growth because it has no roots, is not fed from within. Use another's life as a rosary and your prayers will go unanswered.
A biography is not a user's manual. No, it is like the Louise Bourgeois sculpture of the cage in which are imprisoned a mirror and a pair of marble feet, eternally running away.
CALM
She would be calm if the woman in the shop implied with subtle facial expressions and unsubtle remarks that she was too old for that dress.
She would be calm if at a crowded party a dancer stood hard on her foot, putting a hole in one of her new red boots.
She would be calm if she came home to find her house broken into and the burglar in plain view from the open door as he jumped over the back fence.
She would be calm if she failed the exam that would have admitted her to the profession of her dreams.
She would be calm if he failed to show after 15 minutes, after 30 minutes, after an hour.
She would be calm if the dog ...
She would be calm if she burned the baked salmon stuffed with herbs she had prepared for his colleagues and their wives when he was due for tenure.
She would be calm if Jenny threw her favourite glass vase on the terracotta tiles of the kitchen floor then stood there screaming in her bare feet until all the tiniest shards were swept up.
She would be calm if he said he could not join her, Jenny and Reuben on their summer holiday because he had to finish the last two chapters of his book, and when she called from the house they had rented at the beach he was never at home, and when she called his office at the university he was not there either.
She would be calm if her mother said ...
She would be calm if she came home early and found something so unexpected that he could not live in the same house as her and Jenny and Reuben any more.
Everyone said Teresa was very calm.
She would be calm, so her best friend Jane said, if her hair was on fire.
COLLECTOR
Goethe collected rocks and fossils, so many that he had to build cabinets for them, and then a whole new building in his back garden. Even his mistress (platonic) was called Charlotte von Stein. He also collected antiquities, or copies of antiquities. It did not bother Goethe that he did not own the original object, his interest was in studying the evolution of the form. He discovered a facial bone that helped prove the theory that man evolved from apes. He wrote long monologues in his plays, and Franz Liszt came to his house to practise on the piano. When finally Goethe tired of the fact that he could not have stony-hearted and platonic Charlotte, he installed the blonde-haired, blue-eyed, sweet-tempered Christiane Vulpius in his household. Weimar society snubbed Christiane, who was uneducated, but this did not concern Goethe. When a man is considered a god in his own time, he need not trouble himself with village gossip, nor indeed with superficial respectability: it did not occur to him to marry Christiane until they had been together for 18 years.
Christiane, however, suffered much from being ignored by Goethe's friends and neighbours alike. He reputedly wrote his famous poem about the bifurcated gingko leaf for her: I am both one and doubled ... But the image of the Asiatic tree in a European setting was also intended to signify the unity in duality of East and West. Today in Weimar you can purchase any number of souvenirs featuring the leaves of the gingko: mugs, ashtrays, notepaper, brooches, teaspoons. Of Christiane, far less remains to be collected.
ON COMPOSITION
The philosopher with terminal cancer was ambivalent when he found himself cured by the injection of stem cells. 'I had composed myself,' he said. He had written four books, the ones he needed to write. It was as if, he said, the curtain had gone down at the end of the play and then the producer had come up and said, hold on a minute, you've got three acts to go.
CREATION STORIES
We all have stories that we use to account for ourselves – our peculiarities and misfortunes, talents and inclinations. The other day a photographer I know was saying how being scared of the deaf and dumb kids in the institution he walked past on his way to school had led to him photographing a psychiatric asylum in Kosovo. Or take my husband. His stories include the one about the flagpole falling on his head at Wolf Cubs, and waking up in the arms of Akela – a moment he counts, incidentally, as his first sexual experience. He offers this experience as a possible explanation for many quirks of character, from his reluctance to talk on the phone to his belief that the world should beat a path to his door, rather than him going out said door to make a success of himself. Then there is the story of the first day of the school year, every year, when the teacher called out the full names on the class roll, and every time the teacher said his middle name, Algernon, the whole class snickered. And the one about pretending to be able to read music, when all along he was playing the violin purely by ear, and giving up music lessons when he had to perform a piece he had never heard before from sheet music, and breaking a string on his violin to get out of it, and never playing violin again. Or breaking his 12-year-old opponent's arm in a karate tournament, and then a second boy's arm on the same day, and never doing karate again.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Brief Lives by Chris Price. Copyright © 2006 Chris Price. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Dedication,
Epigraph,
BRIEF LIVES,
After the Party,
The Age,
Altitude Sickness,
Anne Carson,
Anthony,
Biographical Fallacies,
Calm,
Collector,
On Composition,
Creation Stories,
Dionysian,
Disposable,
Dream Life,
Eve's Daughter,
The Fallen,
Family Wisdom,
Fire and Water,
Harry Partch,
Hildegard of Bingen,
Horologist,
Jesus of Montparnasse,
Lott's Mother,
Max,
The Next Day,
Notebook,
Other Dictionaries,
Pathological Anatomy,
Petrarch's Bones,
Prayer Wheel,
Rehabilitation,
The Serpent Lectures,
Singapore,
Specimen Jar,
The Unhappiness of Holidays,
[Untitled],
V,
Xylothèque,
Zoopraxiscope,
VARIABLE STARS,
Acknowledgements,
Sources,
Quotes,
Copyright,