Guggenheim

A museum of mysteries.

Spiral Jetty Robert Smithson

I was at the Guggenheim Museum, standing against the wall of a high rung on the spiral. Anyone can easily slip over the edge of that wall and fall to their death on the rotunda. To my knowledge, this has never happened. A man moves toward me from the far wall, where the paintings are hung. He’s tall with a warm face, and he’s wearing a tweed overcoat, and he says my name, and there he is in front of me, and I have no idea who he is.

It’s a moment from a dream where you fall over a railing and don’t land. Dreams are video games where you don’t actually die, right? You pop up again. In the Guggenheim, I’m not that old. Things like this will happen in the years to come, they will pick up momentum, but this is before the years to come.

I knew a woman who said she couldn’t recognize faces. She had a neurological thing with a Latin name. She was a writer, and we were booked at the same reading, and she gave me a head’s up about her inability to recognize faces, and I wondered how this would apply to a person she hadn’t met yet. Wouldn’t you need a memory to forget? I wondered how her life went day to day, bumping into people who said her name and she would draw a blank. Was it like Groundhog Day, where the same day repeats until a piece of important knowledge clicks into place? Except she would never learn it. It would be like falling over a railing each time. Maybe you got used to it.

The man asked me about my life, and I could tell him some things. I was in my fifties, and maybe I was working on what I thought would be a novel and would never become a novel. I didn’t know in those days I had no interest in the novel as a form and no talent for writing one. In those days, I’m guessing, I thought everyone who said they were a writer had to write a novel. I had written a novel that was published, but that was a fluke, not to be repeated. I have a sense of myself speaking to this man with a feeling of anxiety about my life. The anxiety that felt like it was swallowing me whole, I mean I felt like I was being eaten by an anaconda. It had its jaws around my head. The anxiety was because I was lost in my life. That was the large anxiety. The small, local anxiety was that I’d forgotten my life.

The man knew who I was, obviously. Did he live in my building? Did he go to my summer camp? Do I ask how things are going in his life? If I had, I might have picked up a clue. I wanted to get away, even though I knew there was no getting away from losing a life function. I have to tell you how the mind works in such a moment. I lose capacities all the time these days. The other day, a photographer wrote to say he was photographing women writers or women artists he admired, and could he photograph me? I wrote back in as polite a way as I could manage to say, not on your life, are you kidding me, there is only one place in the world where I look even remotely like myself, and that is in the mirror of the upstairs bathroom, where I take pictures of myself with my phone.   

When you are losing a capacity, you tell yourself the thing will return, like a ring that slipped off your finger as you were gardening. Some day, you’ll see it in a flowerbed before the spring plants come up. You tell yourself you are intact. You count your body parts and decide you still have the ones an animal needs for the basics.

The anxiety I felt with the man at the Guggenheim had the sweaty, fainty feeling of needing to steady yourself. It felt like the beginning of the end, although this is a feeling I have all the time, and if you have a feeling like this all the time, you know it’s you and not the way the world works. I mean, if you think a small bad thing is a symptom the whole system is unspooling, and you always think this way, you might think you would get used to this aspect of yourself, but it’s not the case. Each time it happens, you think it actually is the beginning of the end. In that sense, your life is Groundhog Day.

I don’t remember a word the man said. I was just now trying to see if I could, in the calm state I’m in at the moment. Could I capture something of it? I know you can’t really capture anything of the past. The past is not what happened. But sometimes, if I squeeze my attention into a tight knot, I think I can feel the sense memory of the past. In this case, I couldn’t catch anything. I don’t even know if he was wearing an overcoat. And the thing is, once I figured out who he was, I didn’t understand why he was happy to see me. Had he, too, forgotten our connection, smoothing it over with frosting? Or does the sudden appearance of a face you recognize just turn into pleasure, a kind of lifesaver in the sea of loneliness we are all floating in?

I said it was nice to see him and wished him well, some pathetic, generic parting remark, and I made my way down the spiral walkway. The art was a blur. The visitors moving in my direction and toward me were blurs, or they were distinct and I was a blur. Yes, I was the blur because I was losing the outline of myself.

What even is that? Never mind. That question will rob this conversation of the will to continue, the way thinking about a war while you are trying to think about an aspect of life that is enjoyable will break your heart and freeze you to the spot.

Somewhere along the ramp, it came to me. The tall, warm-faced man had been a writer and an editor at the Village Voice. He’d left the paper a few years before I had. His name came back. It felt like a light bulb coming on. It was amazing. The name sent blood into my arms and legs that had gone to sleep. Then I remembered we’d gone to dinner one night and afterward had sex at his place. Did I remember the sex as I was walking down the ramp? Not the sex itself, I don’t think, or maybe I did. Sometimes, you can have sex with a person one time and remember what happened, or think you remember because you like the person and want to preserve the night you spent together as a happy memory.

I see the tall, warm-faced man and me on the bed. I see the sheets and duvet in a jumble. He lives near the river downtown. Not many people live in apartments there. It’s strictly industrial in those days. The building has one of those freight elevators. Maybe the place isn’t zoned for living in? Does he tell me he has a girlfriend after we have sex? Does he think I already know? I do not already know. Is that why the ending is messy? Would that make a messy ending for me? Yes, it would. Because I have fantasies of continuing with this man? Maybe. I’m capable of having fantasies about anyone I sleep with. In any case, this is not a happy memory. Is that why I don’t recognize the man in the museum? Is my unconscious that petty and precise? The way people cut out the faces from photographs of people they wish they’d never known? Do people do this in real life, or only in movies about women who stalk men they met once in a bar?  

By the time I’m on the street, I’m laughing. Maybe not then. I’m laughing now. Maybe it was the beginning of the end of remembering all the people I have known. It was not the end of beginnings. And by the way—I’m now speaking to the tall, warm-faced man—if you are reading this, and I have no reason to think you are, if you are reading this, I feel no lingering resentment toward you at all. It’s washed out of me, not because you aren’t important in the scheme of things, whatever that is, but for the opposite reason, because you are a stone with a stripe and smooth skin I picked up on a rocky French beach and placed on a windowsill.

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Prompty People

A quick, intense attraction to a person you purposely did not learn more about.

The dream had a taste.

A neon sign with flamingo pink letters someone decides to shape a life around.

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