Notes On Another New Life #25

The Everlasting Now

Cy Twombly

There are two ways of looking at the past, I find. There is a past I remember with delight in the present. And there’s a past I’m like oy, that sucked and boy am I glad to be somewhere else.

Here is an example of the first way of looking back. I remember when I could not tell the difference between good ice cream and bad ice cream. I could not tell the difference between a good movie and a bad movie. I was a child. All ice cream was cool and creamy and sweet. All movies were color and motion and suspension in the dark.

Here is an example of the other kind of looking back. In the early 1970s, I was writing a dissertation at Columbia University. Steven Marcus, a famous and highly respected Victorian scholar, was my advisor. This seemed an honor to me. I was writing about Charlotte Brontë, and on the first chapter I handed to Marcus he wrote: "Your writing lacks a center, a focus, a thesis, and many particular details are either imprecise or wrong.” He said, "Your writing . . . obscures the clarity of the ideas, etc. I don't ever want to see anything like this again."

As I consider his comments now, I’m struck by the freedom of the man to tell me my work is worthless. It conjures up a world of men speaking to women and speaking about women with a kind of freedom that in part woke us up to the fact we didn’t have it.

In the same notebook where I copied down what Marcus wrote, I described going to hear A. Alvarez give a talk about Sylvia Plath in 1971. He had been friends with Plath in London. At the talk, he referred to her as “a poor bitch.” I wrote the phrase in my notebook because I was a feminist, and being a feminist I felt move through my body the arrogance of the man talking about the woman. Even in praising her and her work, he was there to evaluate her as “a poor bitch.”

When Spalding Gray, the great solo performer, was building his early monologues, he used his memories as prompts for little stories he would tell—in no particular order. In A History of the American Theater (1980), for example, he sits on stage at his customary wooden desk with a box of index cards. Each card has the name of a play he’s acted in, and the play summons a story. Before the performances, he’s shuffled the cards, so he doesn’t know the order of the stories he will tell, and because of their unanticipated positions, he invents new details and gestures in the moment of telling them—again and for the first time.

Spalding Gray in Swimming to Cambodia. Photo by Robert R. McElroy/Getty Images.

On a personal level, I’m happier now than I was in the past. This is a thought experiment. In the past that I remember, even in times of oh dear I’m losing my balance and need to sit down on the curb, even in those times I’m pretty interested in what will happen next, and so, in a sense, I carry around a glass that is half a small child.

I'm happier now, maybe, because when you are younger you feel the tension of what will happen. What if I don’t? Or what if I do? Or what if I never? I have lived the future. I know that Steven Marcus was right about me, and that luckily I wasn't able to write another way. I know the answers to more of the what ifs, and this ushers in a wave of relaxation, relatively speaking, a small wave that laps the shore when a speedboat passes.

I'm happier being with Richard than I was without him. We met when I was sixty, so you can see what I mean. What I mean is I carry around the question of what if we’d never crossed paths. The thing about you get less happy as you get older and feel more restricted by this piece of bullshit you are told or that piece of bullshit is maybe not true.

I find myself wanting the freedom of the child who could not tell the difference between good ice cream and bad ice cream or between a good movie and a bad movie. I’m less and less interested in the subjectivity of evaluation. It wearies me to receive it, and it wearies me to offer it. I don’t fucking care what you think of me becomes the core of your creativity. Having a core of creativity forms ballast in life. You’re less shaken and less shakable. Personal liberation has social implications.

In Anne Carson's brilliant and startling essay, "Beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind." (London Review of Books, 6 March 2025), she considers ways to go forward toward the feeling state of the child, prompted by the fact that her handwriting is going to shit, sort of like a child’s. Her handwriting is going to shit because she has Parkinson’s disease, and she is thinking about the attractions and discontents of disintegrating, disappearing, and resurfacing in new forms.

Anne Carson. Photo by Annette Hornischer.

She writes: “Let’s start with life, your life. There it is before you—possibly a road, a ribbon, a dotted line, a map—let’s say you’re 25, then you make some decisions, do things, have setbacks, have triumphs, become someone, a bus driver, a professor, a pirate, years pass, maybe in a family maybe not, maybe happy maybe not, then one day you wake up and you’re seventy. Looking ahead you see a black doorway. You begin to notice the black doorway is always there, at the edge, whether you look at it or not. Most moments contain it, most moments have a sort of sediment of black doorway at the bottom of the glass. You wonder if other people are seeing it too. You ask them. They say no. You ask why. No one can tell you.”

Black door or no black door, she wants to remain in love with the way her mind casts around from moment to moment, attracted by forms of delight and producing delight for us with her associations. She knows her job as a writer is to entertain us and not make the subject herself. Parkinson’s is one thing on her mind, as democratically of interest to her—at least on the page she offers us to read—as, say, Ancient Greek. She’s a classicist. For her, there’s no more capacious garden of forking paths than Ancient Greek, a language she has said that’s not only expressive in its own right but is a system that invents what language can be for human beings.

For Carson, especially now, the consoling element of moving forward is there’s no moral or teleological or narrative meaning in it. There can’t be since there is only one ending for all of us, and she prefers to look at origins—at Ancient Greek, for example or at learning to box as a form of physical therapy—than at the time she must get off the train. She offers examples of this yearning and freedom in the work of the minimalist composer John Cage and the visual artist Cy Twombly. She writes, “As Cage put it, something has to be done to get us free of our memories and choices. What Cage did was to introduce chance operations into his work. [Spalding Gray, too.] What Twombly did was to find his way to a handwriting that has no person in it.”

The structure of Carson’s piece is a model of what Steven Marcus warned against. In interviews, Carson has said she doesn’t prethink what she will write before she sits down to go. She doesn't need to know why an image has floated through the window into her head. A switch in her mind will grab it, and in that sense it will be impossible for the writing to be memory. It has never happened before.

The other day, Richard wrote in his notebook, “I think about the philosophy of thinking to keep myself alert, operating my mental capacities. I do this because of my fear of developing dementia. It’s like Laurie’s fear of cancer. It’s a place she goes to whenever she feels a twinge in her body or is sleepy during the day. It’s a byproduct of aging, that is, the shadow of approaching death all people our age feel, but in personally idiosyncratic ways.

I read the reasoning of philosophers, go for walks in Hudson, do exercises with Laurie, and eat yogurt each morning that contains extra protein. I’m following the advice of the dietitian who visited me when I was in hospital last year with norovirus. This has been an extremely long winter, both meteorologically and socio-politically. I wonder if we shouldn’t move to England.”

I like the prance of a poodle with a poodle smile. I like my sister’s voicemails that are still on my phone. I like Mariachi music played softly on a radio. Did I do a reasonable job in my life? I’m not sure. Would you trust a person who eagerly said yes?

Wikimedia commons.

Yesterday, in an experiment to add more happiness to the world, Richard and I handed out chocolate chip cookies to strangers on Warren Street. When I say “Richard and I,” I mean I held the plate of cookies and talked to the strangers, while Richard stood far enough away so people weren’t sure if we were together. Did we make people happy? They said they were happy. They smiled. We chatted about spontaneous moments of whatever. The sun came out. I was sorry I didn’t have my sunglasses. People we knew left their shops to take a cookie and shoot the breeze. We stirred up the molecules of the street.

This morning Richard said, "If a person in sleep says, 'I'm dreaming', they can't be dreaming. That statement is false. If you can say you are asleep, you can't be asleep."

He was on one of his things that was about to argue against the possibility there is no such thing as dreams. He wasn't saying that in this conversation, thank god. When, in another conversation, he said the thing about maybe there is no such thing as dreaming, I said, "That's like saying Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays." He said, "No, it's not."

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Read the whole ‘Notes On Another New LIfe’ series. Laurie Stone writes Everything is Personal, which LitHub recently named one of the seven best literary publications on Substack.

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