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'When Brian Evenson’s first book,
Altmann’s Tongue, came out in 1994, it made barely a ripple in the centers of established literary might. It swiftly created a small and cultish buzz, but critics didn’t seem to know what to do with this bizarre collection of twenty-eight taut, almost relentlessly brutal short stories—here a boy finds his stepfather dead, his mouth stuffed with bees and sewn shut with carpet thread, there a cheerful skeleton named Bone Job rattles down the road in search of God—and a cerebral novella that seemed to borrow as much from the nouveau roman as the stories did from Hieronymus Bosch. When not ignored completely, Evenson was judged a slightly distasteful curiosity. In a capsule review, the Los Angeles Times nervously conceded that “there is a talent here,” albeit, “an eldritch one.”
'In faraway Utah, though,
Altmann’s Tongue was taken quite seriously. For Brian Evenson is something of an odd bird, an eldritch one even. Not only the author of fictions whose emotionless violence mocks human flesh, Evenson was also a Mormon of no little piety. Raised in quiet, conservative, church-going Provo, he was at one point even a member of the high priesthood of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. To thicken the brew, Evenson is also a scholar with a Ph.D. in critical theory. He was one of the main players in the brief flap over Gordon Lish’s influence on Raymond Carver a few years back, and has just published a monograph on Robert Coover’s fiction.
'It was in Provo, where the then twenty-seven-year-old Evenson had just begun teaching in Brigham Young University’s English department, that Evenson would receive his harshest reviews. In the fall of 1994, a few months after its publication, a Brigham Young student wrote a letter to Mormon authorities labeling Altmann’s Tongue “a showcase of graphic, disgusting, pointless violence.” She only made it to page eighty four—the conclusion of the aforementioned death-by-bees-in-the-sewn-up-mouth story, called “Stung,” which ends with more than a suggestion of incest—before she had to quit, feeling “like someone who has eaten something poisonous and is desperate to get rid of it.” She was, she wrote, “terrified to think that a man who is capable of creating and perpetrating this kind of mental imagery on others was able to be hired as a professor at BYU.”
'By spring, shortly after Evenson won an NEA grant on the merits of one of the stories in
Altmann’s Tongue (“The Munich Window,” a wry tale narrated by a man who, having murdered his wife years ago, is grudgingly called back to murder his daughter as well), a university spokesman had told the Deseret News, “We don’t want this kind of stuff coming out of this institution. We are not talking about literature in general. We’re talking about extreme, brutal, sadistic, and violent depictions of violence.” University and church officials alike made it clear to Evenson that if he kept writing similar works he would not only lose his job, but might face excommunication from the church, a cataclysm for a devout believer.
'Evenson chose to leave Brigham Young. He has since published two novels and two more short story collections, each as uncompromisingly sanguineous as the first, with Contagion, the most recent collection, surpassing it by far in sophistication and complexity. “I don’t want to have to make a choice between the Mormon Church and my work,” he told the London Times in 1997, “but if I do I will be on the side of art, even though I still have my faith.” Even on a second or third read,
Altmann’s Tongue, which was reissued by the University of Nebraska Press last year with a new introduction by the philosopher Alfonso Lingis, is still a profoundly unsettling book, shocking as much for the rawness and vitality of its prose and for the mythic strangeness of the world it depicts as for any of the variety of corporeal indignities perpetrated therein. It is a world not only of violence, but of profound affectlessness, in which death and mutilation appear with all the banality of a dirty shoe. It is at times a world recognizably our own (Altmann, after all, is the name taken by Klaus Barbie, the onetime “Butcher of Lyons,” while in hiding in Bolivia), at times a nightmarescape of desert fortresses and walking dead, peopled with characters bearing names like Ivar the Boneless, Hébé, Bosephus.
'Some of the stories are bare and simply bleak. In “The Father, Unblinking,” a man finds his daughter dead of fever and secretly buries her in a corner of the barn. “You seen your little lullaby?” his wife asks. “I haen’t seen her,” he lies, and runs off searching for a shovel. Some are cruelly comic, like “Killing Cats,” about a chirpy couple who enlist the sublimely passive narrator’s help in disposing of their pets: When the husband “saw the cats climb up there to lick the plates, he wanted to ‘blow their furry bodies right off the table.’ He had wanted to ‘blast the cats away’ for quite some time, he said, Checkers most of all, he said, but Oreo and Champ were no exception.” Or “The Boly Stories”—three tales of murderous rural cretins, relayed in an almost slapstick vernacular (“Boly looked up and got a spatter of blood eyewise. He woped the eye clean and seed other blood red-spatter down on the leaves around him and on him too.”), like Cormac McCarthy’s Appalachian novels perversely bred with a Donald Barthelme yarn and fed raw to Gordon Lish.
'Some of the stories are simply creepy. “Having sewn Jarry’s eyelids shut, Hébé found himself at a loss as to how to proceed,” begins one, which doesn’t go much further than that. Others are creepily religious, like the title story, which begins, “After I had killed Altmann, I stood near Altmann’s corpse watching the steam of the mud rising around it, obscuring what had once been Altmann. Horst was whispering to me. ‘You must eat his tongue. If you eat his tongue, it will make you wise,’” and, its final sentence reveals, is narrated by a vulture, or an angel, or perhaps a winged demon. The starkly minimalist “After Omaha” depicts a scene from a war between men and angels (or maybe vultures, or winged demons): The protagonists hang bacon from the trees, cut the lights, and crouch in wait “for the dull flapping of heavy holy wings.” Three interconnected stories portray, in gore-stained Borgesian allegory, the inhabitants of a lone fortress who declare themselves under siege, and commence to devour one another. Another lightheartedly depicts the travails of Bone Job, a skeletal sort—“He ate rot and tree mold, shat grubs and maggots. He swabbed the insides of his ribs clean with handfuls of grass. Masticated mint leaves worked miracles for his breath”—as he wanders in search of God and a coveted Redline axe.
'In response to his accusers at Brigham Young, Evenson declared his work to be in fact “uncompromisingly moral.”
Altmann’s Tongue, he wrote at the time in a thirteen-page apologia, was an attempt “to paint violence in its true colors and to let it reveal for itself how terrible it is.” The stories offer, he wrote, “a violence that cannot be enjoyed—in response to the kind of glamorization of violence that television and movies provide.” It’s no surprise, really, that his attackers were unconvinced. If their analysis (bad literary images = bad man) lacked sophistication, Evenson’s seemed disingenuous. Certainly he does portray violence shorn of all context—ideological, religious, or even narrative that might render it meaningful, and in doing so bares its full horror. And while perhaps only a deeply moral individual could be capable of creating—or even recognizing—a world so fully stripped of moral content, there is far too much humor in these stories, too much aesthetic delight in the syntax of even the most gruesome episodes, for Evenson to pass himself off as a simple pedant.
'A few years later, in an interview with Story Quarterly, Evenson gave a more interesting account of his work. “My stories have little explicit reference to my belief system or to any belief system that might save the characters from the immediacy of their existence,” he said. “Religion and morality, if present at all, are present in the reader’s recognition of their absence.” This of course still leaves plenty of room for didacticism, but it wasn’t Sunday-school homiletics that Evenson was after. “The religion my fiction offers, which is a religion of the collapse of the ethical will, is hopeless from the start: It will convert nobody.” That, however, is the point, or a good part of it. “Good writing unsettles,” Evenson said. “It causes rifts and gaps in belief which make belief more complex and more textured, more real.”
'It is hard not to see Evenson’s work in part as rebellion, as an attempt to cleave some rifts in the unrelenting cheeriness of contemporary Mormonism, a culture of firm handshakes and toothy smiles stretched hopefully over a bloody and painful history. That history, of course, is no more or less violent (or beset by excesses of kitsch-induced optimism) than that of the American West, which provides the setting for much of Evenson’s fiction. The unending barrenness of the Western deserts—in which blood evaporates as quickly as water and corpses surrender themselves swiftly to sun, buzzards, and sand, in which the forces of nature are neither kind nor gentle and God, if deemed present at all, can be discovered only through the manifest evidence of his cruelty—provides a convenient metaphoric backdrop, the vicious sun chasing all comfort of shade from even the dark night of the soul.'
-- Ben Ehrenreich, The Believer_____
FurtherBrian Evenson WebsiteBE @ goodreads'The Bad Mormon'BE interviewed @ Bookslut'Brian Evenson: an introduction''CONFRONTING THE MURMUR IN BRIAN EVENSON’S LAST DAYS''Younger', by Brian EvensonBE interviewed @ Tin House'Brian Evenson ou la raison du plus fou'BE @ Granta'Laureate of Violence''Brian Evenson on Ed the Happy Clown''How Brian Evenson upends the Conventions of Fiction''Brian Evenson on Samuel Beckett’s Molloy''Doing Without'Podcast: BE on The Bat Segundo Show'What It Would Be Like to Fall''Insistence on Making Something New''Brian Evenson: Strange (But Never Gratuitous)''Brian Evenson on the Imperatives of the Modern Horror Film'Buy 'A Collapse of Horses'____
Extras&Now Conference: Brian Evenson, 10/16/09Brian Evenson Reading @ The Center for FictionBrian Evenson- UHV/ABR Reading SeriesReading Brian Evenson to my 4 year old______
Interviewfrom Bookforum![]()
Michael Miller: I had a hall-of-mirrors moment when I read the final story of your new book, because it replicates the book’s first story, but at a slant—both of them feature two characters, on horseback, seemingly on a postapocalyptic frontier. One of the characters is bleeding, and disappears, and then returns in a very menacing way. But the stories also contradict one another—the characters have different names, for starters. They overlap, but they also clash. It’s almost as if one story is a dream within the dream described in another story. It’s very different from, say, John Barth’s
Lost in the Funhouse, but there is a kind of baffling narrative circuitry there.
Brian Evenson: Yeah, that’s something I do a lot in my work, and as you say, in a very different way from Barth—if it’s metafiction, it’s a much gentler and less insistent kind of metafiction, although “gentle” is the wrong word because of the kind of stories they are. I feel that with the first and the last stories having those echoes, the effect is to make you feel that you have these two realities that seem like they may be meshed, or one may be a product of the other, and it’s impossible to really sort out which is more real. I hope it’s something that eats away at you as a reader.
MM: It does. There’s a sense that information becomes contaminated as it moves along. In “The Report,” a man in solitary confinement hears what he thinks is a message tapped out in the cell that he thinks is next to his. He taps it out himself, and hopes that the message will make its way through the entire prison and return to him. The funny thing is that he doesn’t know what the message is, or if it’s a message at all.
BE: It’s like a prison version of the game “telephone,” with the difference being that you don’t know if someone is actually whispering something to start it off. There’s a lot of uncertainty in that story. He’s obsessed with the report that he was required to submit to the authorities, and he’s obsessed with why and if that report led to his imprisonment. What did he do wrong? There is this sense, especially in that piece, that communication is a little bit incomprehensible, that you don’t know what exactly you’ve communicated to someone. But even in this confusion, whatever it is he’s communicated or miscommunicated still has serious consequences.
MM: There’s uncertainty throughout the book. In the title story, the narrator has three kids or four kids—it seems to depend on the day. His house seems to be constantly changing shape. He’s very confused about what’s real. Would you say that your stories rely on a dominant version of reality? Or is it more of a blending or coexistence of various realities?
BE: I think it’s more a coexistence, and it’s a very uncomfortable coexistence. I think, as humans, we like to feel like there are certain things that are stable, that we can hold on to, that are real. That story is about someone who has these basic things that he no longer can trust—his intense mistrust of his house, the fact that his children seem to be one day three and another day four. And so for him, there’s this kind of panic—he thinks that he has to do something to force reality to be what it needs to be, to hold still and behave. And of course that doesn’t work for him. I don’t really think that in these stories one version of reality is real and the others are not. I’m interested in the way in which one “reality” can compromise another. I go for intense ambiguity, where you just don’t know what the stable ground is.
MM: Like the story “Dust”—Orvar, the protagonist and the head of security on a space station, is trying, and failing, to figure out who is murdering everyone. All of which is complicated by the fact that they might be running out of oxygen, and they might be hallucinating. Also, there’s the mysterious dust that’s accumulating—maybe, they wonder, it’s controlling their minds...
BE: Are we running out of oxygen or are we not? Am I paranoid or is there something that’s in the air that’s doing something to me? He can’t really decide on these basic questions. And the reasoning he builds is so contingent that it’s hard to know exactly what the truth is. Orvar even thinks of one character as being another character for quite a while; he’s told he’s wrong, but even then he has to think of this character as the guy who isn’t the person he thought he was. So there are these moments where characters have to backtrack or sort things out again, but they still try, desperately, to make some sense of the world. What other choice is there?
MM: A lot of your stories are very isolated, set in jails, in space stations, on cult compounds. The confined settings feel very controlled, but then that sense slips away, and it’s hard to pinpoint just when things go awry. It feels like the transitions are evoked not just with direct statements and concrete description but also through tone.
BE: You, as a reader, don’t really know what’s happening until it’s quite a bit too late, which is the case for the characters as well. There are a lot of palpable details in the stories, so that you get the sense of solidity or stability. When that’s taken away there’s more of an impact. Even then, there are still things you can hold on to, there are a lot of details about bodies, some of them gruesome, there are a lot of details in terms of the physical space and the way the space is built, and there are a lot of claustrophobic details in the way that things are laid out.
MM: There’s a lot of bodily harm in these stories. One character says to another, “It’s just a story. A story can’t hurt.” But it’s pretty clear that stories can inflict pain in your work.
BE: Yeah, I think that’s true. [Laughs]
MM: The new book is coming out at the same time as new editions of three of your older novels, with introductions by Samuel R. Delany, Matt Bell, and Peter Straub. Did this give you an opportunity to see how your fiction has changed over the years?
BE: The oldest book is
Father of Lies, which was ’98, and I hadn't looked at it for probably ten years, maybe a little longer than that. There’s a funny thing that happens where if you’ve written something and enough time has gone by, you start to remember it in a different way. It was very strange to read back over that and to both know it and not know it at the same time.
Last Days is a little more recent, 2009, but you know that’s the book that has the most bodily harm, and it’s the most manic, a personal favorite.
The Open Curtain, which came in between, is a little more sober. I think that’s the book that really teaches people how to read my fiction.
MM: Why is that?
BE: Because for a good part of it, it feels like a realistic novel. I think it kind of brings you into a realistic world, and then takes that world apart. It spends its first section building up the world pretty solidly, and then in the second section you start to see cracks opening in it, but it’s really not until the final section that you’re suddenly in a very different space. It’s a little more slowly done than in some of my stories. Ultimately, I think it’s a pretty disturbing book, but I also think it’s a little bit like getting into a warm bath and then having the temperature gradually increased to boiling.
MM: Before
Last Days even starts, the main character, a detective named Kline, has had his hand cut off by an intruder. On the first page he’s invited, menacingly, to solve a murder at a Christian sect that valorizes amputations, based on a line from the New Testament. It really hits the ground running.
BE: I like
Last Days a lot, but it’s very madcap. It is a reflection on what it means to be human, I think, and to what degree we do or don’t lose our humanity according to our actions. But it’s a very weird way of going about talking about those things.
MM: In the afterword to
The Open Curtain, you talk about leaving the Mormon church, which you had been a part of all your life. Did leaving have an effect on your writing?
BE: You know, I think it has. All three of those novels have an interest in religion. Father of Lies is the most aggressive about it, and it is a fairly straightforward critique of religious authority—it was written when I was preparing to leave Mormonism.
The Open Curtain is about a murder committed by a Mormon, but it ends up being about something a lot broader than that: the relation of madness and culture, I guess. And
Last Days, the religion there is not really an identifiable religion—it ends up being more about community, and how communities come together. That book was strange to write because I became very sympathetic to the religious groups in it, to the Mutilates. These religions that really focus on one line from the Bible become very eccentric and very interesting.
MM: I heard that you’re teaching a class on horror fiction in Transylvania this summer. That’s interesting. Do you identify as a horror writer?
BE: I do and I don’t. I see why people position me that way. I guess I’m somewhere between literature and horror, happily straddling both.
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BookBrian Evenson
A Collapse of HorsesCoffee House Press'With minimalist literary horror, Brian Evenson’s stories work a nightmare axis of doubt, paranoia, and every day life.
'A stuffed bear’s heart beats with the rhythm of a dead baby, Reno keeps receding to the east no matter how far you drive, and in a mine on another planet, the dust won’t stop seeping in. In these stories, Evenson unsettles us with the everyday and the extraordinary—the terror of living with the knowledge of all we cannot know.'
-- Coffee House Press_____
Excerptfrom The American ReaderA Collapse of HorsesI am certain nobody in my family survived. I am certain they burned, that their faces blackened and bubbled, just as did my own. But in their case they did not recover, but perished. You are not one of them, you cannot be, for if you were you would be dead. Why you choose to pretend to be, and what you hope to gain from it: this is what interests me.
x
Now it is your turn to listen to me, to listen to my proofs, though I know you will not be convinced. Imagine this: walking through the countryside one day you come across a paddock. Lying there on their sides, in the dust, unnaturally still, are four horses. All four are prone, with no horses standing. They do not breathe and do not, as far as you can see, move. They are, to all appearances, dead. And yet, on the edge of the paddock, not twenty yards distant, a man fills their trough with water. Are the horses alive and appearances deceptive? Has the man simply not yet turned to see that the horses are dead? Or has he been so shaken by what he has seen that he doesn’t know what to do but proceed as if nothing has happened?
If you turn and walk hurriedly on, leaving before anything decisive happens, what do the horses become for you? They remain both alive and dead, which makes them not quite alive, nor quite dead.
And what, in turn, carrying that paradoxical knowledge in your head, does that make you?
x
I do not think of myself as special, as anything but ordinary. I completed a degree at a third-tier university housed in the town where I grew up. I graduated safely ensconced in the middle of my class. I found passable employment in the same town. I met a woman, married her, had children with her—three or perhaps four, there is some disagreement on that score—and then the two of us fell gradually and gently out of love.
Then came an incident at work, an accident, a so-called freak one. It left me with a broken skull and, for a short time, a certain amount of confusion. I awoke in an unfamiliar place to find myself strapped down. It seemed to me—I will admit this too—it seemed for some time, hours at least, perhaps even days, that I was not in a hospital at all, but in a mental facility.
But my wife, faithful and everpresent, slowly soothed me into a different understanding of my circumstances. My limbs, she insisted, were restrained simply because I had been delirious. Now that I no longer was, the straps could be loosened. Not quite yet, but soon. There was nothing to worry about. I just had to calm down. Soon, everything would return to normal.
x
In some ways, I suppose everything did. Or at least tried to. After the accident, I received some minor compensation from my employer, and was sent out to pasture. Such was the situation. Myself, my wife, my children, at the beginning of a hot and sweltering summer, crammed in the house together with nowhere to go.
I would awaken each day to find the house different from how it had been the day before. A door was in the wrong place, a window had stretched a few inches longer than it had been when I had gone to bed the night before, the light switch, I was certain, had been forced half an inch to the right. Always just a small thing, almost nothing at all, just enough for me to notice.
In the beginning, I tried to point these changes out to my wife. She seemed puzzled at first, and then she became somewhat evasive in her responses. For a time, part of me believed her responsible: perhaps she had developed some deft technique for quickly changing and modifying the house. But another part of me felt certain, or nearly so, that this was impossible. And as time went on, my wife’s evasiveness took on a certain wariness, even fear. This convinced me that not only was she not changing the house, but that daily her mind simply adjusted to the changed world and dubbed it the same. She literally could not see the differences I saw.
Just as she could not see that sometimes we had three children and sometimes four. No, she could only ever see three. Or perhaps four. To be honest, I don’t remember how many she saw. But the point was, as long as we were in the house there were sometimes three children and sometimes four. But that was due to the idiosyncrasies of the house as well. I would not know how many children there would be until I went from room to room. Sometimes the room at the end of the hall was narrow and had one bed in it, other times it had grown large in the night and had two. I would count the number of beds each morning when I woke up and sometimes there would be three, sometimes four. From there, I could extrapolate how many children I had, and I found this a more reliable method than trying to count the children themselves. I would never know how much of a father I was until I counted beds.
I could not discuss this with my wife. When I tried to lay out my proofs for her, she thought I was joking. Quickly, however, she decided it was an indication of a troubled mental state, and insisted I seek treatment—which under duress I did. To little avail. The only thing the treatment convinced me of was that there were certain things that one shouldn’t say even to one’s spouse, things that they are just not ready—and may never be ready—to hear.
My children were not ready for it either. The few times I tried to fulfill my duties as a father and sit them down to tell them the sobering truth, that sometimes one of them didn’t exist, unless it was that sometimes one of them existed twice, I got nowhere. Or less than nowhere: confusion, tears, panic. And, after they reported back to my wife, more threats of treatment.
x
What, then, was the truth of the situation? Why was I the only one who could see the house changing? What were my obligations to my family in terms of helping them see and understand? How was I to help them if they did not desire to be helped?
Being a sensible man, a part of me couldn’t help but wonder if what I was experiencing had any relation to reality at all. Perhaps there was something wrong with me. Perhaps, I tried to believe, the accident had changed me. I did try my level best, or nearly so, to see things their way. I tried to ignore the lurch reality took each morning, the way the house was not exactly the house it had been the night before, as if someone had moved us to a similar but not quite identical house as we slept. Perhaps they had. I tried to believe that I had three, not four, children. And when that did not work, that I had four, not three, children. And when that didn’t work, that there was no correlation between children and beds, to turn a blind eye to that room at the end of the hall and the way it kept expanding out or collapsing in like a lung. But nothing seemed to work. I could not believe.
x
Perhaps if we moved, things would be different. Perhaps the house was, in some manner or other, alive. Or haunted maybe. Or just wrong. But when I raised the idea of moving with my wife, she coughed out a strange barking laugh before enumerating all the reasons this was a bad idea. There was no money and little prospect of any coming in now that I’d had my accident and lost my job. We’d bought the house recently enough that we would take a substantial loss if we sold it. We simply could not afford to move. And besides, what was wrong with the house? It was a perfectly good house.
How could I argue with this? From her perspective of course she was right, there was no reason to leave. For her there was nothing wrong with the house—how could there be? Houses don’t change on their own, she told me indignantly: this was not something that reason could allow.
But for me that was exactly the problem. The house, for reasons I didn’t understand, wasn’t acting like a house.
x
I spent days thinking, mulling over what to do. To get away from the house, I wandered alone in the countryside. If I walked long enough, I could return home sufficiently exhausted to sleep rather than spending much of the night on watch, trying to capture the moment when parts of the house changed. For a long time I thought that might be enough. That if I spent as little time in the house as possible and returned only when exhausted, I could bring myself not to think about how unsound the house was. That I would wake up sufficiently hazy to no longer care what was where and how it differed from before.
That might have gone on for a long time—even forever or the equivalent. But then in my walks I stumbled upon, or perhaps was led to, something. It was a paddock. I saw horses lying in the dirt, seemingly dead. They couldn’t be dead, could they? I looked to see if I could tell if they were breathing and found I could not. I could not say honestly if they were dead or alive, and I still cannot say. I noticed a man on the far side of the paddock filling their trough with water, facing away from them, and wondered if he had seen the horses behind him, and if not, when he turned, whether he would be as unsettled as I. Would he approach them and determine they were dead, or would his approach startle them to life? Or had he seen them dead already and had his mind been unable to take it in?
For a moment I waited. But at the time, in the moment, there seemed something more terrible to me about the idea of knowing for certain that the horses were dead than there was about not knowing whether they were dead or alive. And so I hastily left, not realizing that to escape a moment of potential discomfort I was leaving them forever in my head as not quite dead but, in another sense, nearly alive. That to leave as I had was to assume the place of the man beside the trough, but without ever being able to turn and learn the truth.
x
In the days that followed, that image haunted me. I turned it over, scrutinized it, peered at every facet of it, trying to see if there was something I had missed, if there was a clue that would sway me toward believing the horses were alive or believing they were dead. If there was a clue to reveal to me that the man beside the trough knew more than I had believed. To no avail. The problem remained insolubly balanced. If I went back, I couldn’t help asking myself, would anything have changed? Would the horses still, even now, be lying there? If they were, would they have begun to decay in a way that would prove them dead? Or would they be exactly as I had last seen them, including the man still filling the trough? What a terrifying thought.
Since I’d stumbled upon the paddock, I didn’t know exactly where it was. Every walk I went on, even every step I took away from the house, I risked stumbling onto it again. I began walking slower, stopping frequently, scrutinizing my surroundings and shying away from any area that might remotely harbor a paddock. But after a while I deemed even that insufficiently safe, and I found myself hardly able to leave the house.
And yet with the house always changing, I couldn’t remain there either. There was, I gradually realized, a simple choice: either I would have to steel myself and return and confront the horses or I would have to confront the house.
Either horse or house, either house or horse—but what sort of choice was that really? The words were hardly different, pronounced more or less the same, with one letter only having accidentally been dialed up too high or too low in the alphabet. No, I came to feel, by going out to avoid the house and finding the horses I had, in a manner of speaking, simply found again the house. It was, it must be, that the prone horses were there for me, to teach a lesson to me, that they were meant to tell me something about their near namesake, the house.
The devastation of that scene, the collapse of the horses, gnawed on me. It was telling me something. Something I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear.
x
At first, part of me resisted the idea. No, I told myself, it was too extreme a step. Lives were at stake. The lives of my wife and of at least three children. The risks were too great.
But what was I to do? In my mind I kept seeing the collapsed horses and I felt my thoughts again churn over their state. Were they alive or were they dead? I kept imagining myself there at the trough, paralyzed, unable to turn and look, and it came to seem to me my perpetual condition. In my worst moments, it seemed the state not only of me but of the whole world, with all of us on the verge of turning around and finding the dead behind us. And from there, I slipped back to the house—which, like the horses, seemed in a sort of suspended state: I knew it was changing, that something strange was happening, I was sure of that at least, but I didn’t know how or what the changes meant, and I couldn’t make anyone else see them. When it came to the house, I tried to convince myself, I could see what others could not, but the rest of the world was like the man filling the horse trough, unable to see the fallen horses.
Thinking this naturally led me away from the idea of the house and back instead to the horses. What I should have done, I told myself, was to have thrown a rock. I should have stooped and scraped the dirt until my fingers closed around a stone, and then shied it at one of the horses, waiting either for the meaty thud of dead flesh or the shudder and annoyed whicker of a struck living horse. Not knowing is something you can only suspend yourself in for the briefest moment. No, even if what you have to face is horrible, is an inexplicably dead herd of horses, even an explicably dead family, it must be faced.
And so I turned away from the house and went back to look for the paddock, steeling myself for whatever I would find. I was ready, rock in hand. I would find out the truth about the horses, and I would accept it, no matter what it was.
Or at least I would have. But no matter how hard I looked, no matter how long I walked, I could not find the paddock. I walked for miles, days even. I took every road, known and unknown, but it simply wasn’t there.
Was something wrong with me? Had the paddock existed at all? I wondered.
Was it simply something my mind had invented to cope with the problem of the house?
House, horse—horse, house: almost the same word. For all intents and purposes, in this case, it was the same word. I would still throw a rock, so to speak, I told myself, but I would throw that so-called rock not at a horse, but at a house.
x
But still I hesitated, thinking, planning. Night after night I sat imagining coils of smoke writhing around me and then the rising of flames. In my head, I watched myself waiting patiently, calmly, until the flames were at just the right height, and then I began to call out to my family, awakening them, urging them to leave the house. In my head we unfurled sheets through windows and shimmied nimbly to safety. We reached safety every time. I saw our escape so many times in my head, rendered in just the same way, that I realized it would take the smallest effort on my part to jostle it out of the realm of imagination and into the real world. Then the house would be gone and could do me no more damage, and both myself and my family would be safe.
x
I am certain nobody in my family survived. I am certain they burned, that their I had had enough unpleasant interaction with those who desired to give me treatment since my accident, however, that I knew to take steps to protect myself. I would have to make the fire look like an accident. For this purpose, I took up smoking.
I planned carefully. I smoked for a few weeks, just long enough to accustom my wife and children to the idea. They didn’t care for it, but did not try to stop me. Since my accident, they had been shy of me, and rarely tried to stop me from doing anything.
Seemingly as a concession to my wife, I agreed not to smoke in the bedroom. I promised to smoke only outside the house. With the proviso that, if it was too cold to smoke outside I might do so downstairs, near an open window.
During the third, or perhaps fourth, week after I took up smoking, with my wife and children asleep, it was indeed too cold—or at least I judged that I could argue it to have been such if confronted after the fact. So I cracked open the window near the couch and prepared the images in my mind. I would, I told myself, allow my arm to droop, the tip of my cigarette to nudge against the fabric of the couch. And then I would allow first the couch and then the drapes to begin to smoke and catch fire. I would wait until the moment when, in my fantasies, I was myself standing and calling for my wife and children, and then I would do just that and all would be as I had envisioned. Soon my family and I would be safe, and the house would be destroyed.
Once that was done, I thought, perhaps I would find the paddock again as well, with the horses standing this time and clearly alive.
x
And yet, the fabric of the couch did not catch fire, instead only smoldering and stinking, and soon I pressed the cigarette in too deeply and it died. I found and lit another, and when the result was the same I gave up on both the couch and the cigarette.
I turned instead to matches and used them to ignite the drapes. As it turned out, these burned much better, going up all at once and lighting my hair and clothing along with them.
By the time I’d flailed about enough to extinguish my body, the whole room was aflame. Still, I continued with my plan. I tried to call to my wife and children but when I took a breath to do so, my lungs filled with smoke and, choking, I collapsed.
x
I do not know how I lived through the fire. Perhaps my wife dragged me out and then went back for the children and perished only then. When I awoke, I was here, unsure of how I had arrived. My face and body were badly burned, and the pain was excruciating. I asked about my family but the nurse dodged the question, shushed me and only told me I should sleep. This was how I knew my family was dead, that they had been lost in the fire, and that the nurse didn’t know how to tell me. My only consolation was that the house, too, the source of all our problems, had burnt to the ground.
For a time I was kept alone, drugged. How long, I cannot say. Perhaps days, perhaps weeks. Long enough in any case for my burns to slough and heal, for the skin grafts that I must surely have needed to take effect, for my hair to grow fully back. The doctors must have worked very hard on me, for I must admit that except to the most meticulous eye I look exactly as I had before the fire.
x
So, you see, I have the truth straight in my mind and it will not be easy to change. There is little point in you coming to me with these stories, little point in pretending once again that my house remains standing and was never touched by flame. Little point coming here pretending to be my wife, claiming that there was no fire, that you found me lying on the floor in the middle of our living room with my eyes staring fixedly into the air, seemingly unharmed.
No, I have accepted that I am the victim of a tragedy, one of my own design. I know that my family is gone, and though I do not yet understand why you would want to convince me that you are my wife, what you hope to gain, eventually I will. You will let something slip and the game will be over. At worst, you are deliberately trying to deceive me so as to gain something from me. But what? At best, someone has decided this might lessen the blow, that if I can be made to believe my family is not dead, or even just mostly dead and not quite alive, I might be convinced not to surrender to despair.
Trust me, whether you wish me good or ill, I do hope you succeed. I would like to be convinced, I truly would. I would love to open my eyes and suddenly see my family surrounding me, safe and sound. I would even tolerate the fact that the house is still standing, that unfinished business remains between it and myself, that somewhere horses still lie collapsed and waiting to be either alive or dead, that we will all in some senses remain like the man at the trough with our backs turned. I understand what I might have to gain from it, but you, I still do not understand.
x
But do your worst: disrupt my certainty, try to fool me, make me believe. Get me to believe there is nothing dead behind me. If you can make that happen, I think we both agree, then anything is possible.
*
p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Yeah, the Catholic group here is very determined and moneyed up, but they can't do all that much. The films they're going after can't be banned in France. 'Ban' is the wrong word. Basically, they challenge a film's rating. In France, even the more explicit films are rated for '16 and over'. What the group does is somehow convince a judge that a bunch of 16 year old Catholic boys are being traumatized by a film. The judge then invalidates the 'over 16' rating, forcing the film's distributor to change the rating to 'over 18', which takes weeks or a couple of months, tops, and then the film is 'back' with the new rating. And they basically only go after films that have long since had their theater runs like 'Antichrist' and 'Blue is the Warmest Color'. So, it's all very pointless and basically just a publicity move, and the films are never actually banned. Their crusade is just a ridiculous waste of time and money, ultimately. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi. Oh, yes, do check out Paris at some point. I'd be happy to meet and steer you towards interesting things, if you like. Thank you a lot about the gif piece. How's your writing and everything else going? Have a lovely Friday. ** Schlix, Hi, Uli! Good to see you, bud. Oh, wow, cool that my gif thing got soundtracked by Pan Sonic. I'm going to try that experiment myself. That's great you went to Strasbourg to see 'I Apologize'. It's the first time that piece has performed in a long time. It's weird 'cos that was our first work made when I had just met Gisele and didn't know her well at all. I think of it as being a really innocent piece in that sense. There's a new cast member in the piece who I haven't seen yet. Anyway, thank you going to the effort to see it. I would be curious to hear what you thought, if you feel like it. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. Well, me too. I've lived here for a decade, and I'm still really romantic about Paris, which is I guess why I'm curious to read about Paris in a non-romanticized way, to try to see it like 'actual' Parisians do. ** Sypha, I do remember your intended Warhol novel, yes, of course. Maybe that sketch you made is a work in and of itself? It sounds very interesting. ** S, Ah, new video!
Everyone, the maestro of things aka S. has made and made available a new short video called 'Train Kept A'Rollin', which I'm going to decide is named after the Yardbirds version of that song rather than the better known Aerosmith version, and go watch, it. Cool, thanks, about the post. Wow, you're even more romantic about Paris than I am. That's cool. I would say the Marais is a better place to stay. Access-wise. Lacan definitely seems really intense. Or his drastic effect on people I know who read him is. Kind of scary. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Yeah, right? They almost kind of turn typewriters into beat boxes or something. Good, cool, re: your love for Derek's book. Absolutely! Monday! Wow, that would be excellent! ** Pascal, Hi, P. Mm, Eric Rohmer. I love me some Eric Rohmer. Which film(s)? Really early Fassbinder ... like 'Chinese Roulette' and that era or even earlier? Thank you about the speeches. xx, me. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Thanks, man. The only other films I've seen lately were on my long plane flights. Let me see if I can remember. 'Fantastic Four', the second 'Avengers' film finally, 'Bridge of Spies', 'Mr. Holmes', 'Room' (how in the world is that rote, predictable, cinematically nothing movie nominated for best picture?!?!), one of the 'Transporter' films, 'Spectre', 'Irrational Man', the second 'Maze Runners' movie, ... I forget what else. I have tentative plans to finally, finally see the new Malick this evening, which I hope will work out. Oh, and I put together an upcoming Peter Kubelka post, so I was watching his films again. You seen anything really good lately? I'm seeing Kiddiepunk today, so I will ask him. ** Kieran, Hi, K. Thanks a lot. Yeah, I was definitely thinking morse code with the flashlight one, to the point where I even looked up how morse code works and tried to make the gifs send a message by morse code, and they did, in fact, but, even if one went to the effort to figure that out and decode the 'speech', it wasn't very coherent, ha ha. Nice about knowing a slither more now. What a great way to put it. Slither: nice word. Thanks a bunch for the gig report. Okay, that sounds pretty good. I doesn't like it was mindblowing? Good enough. Awesome about observing that hug. Wow. I don't think I know A
postille. I'll start with the video link and get on their case. Thanks a lot, man! Have a splendid Friday! ** Steevee, Hi, Steve. I haven't seen 'Mysterious Object at Noon'. Interesting. I'll look for it. Really nice title, obviously. ** Misanthrope, Hi, G. Yeah, I was wandering around in exactly that kind of rain yesterday, and I will now double-up on my disliking decree. How hard did you hit those dream guys? Did you fly to London to escape prosecution, I guess I'm asking? 8-pt type! Oh, your poor thing. Hugs. ** Postitbreakup, Hi, Josh. Aw, thanks, my friend. I think he does. Ha ha, well, Zac is one of those people who is kind of a walking-talking gift, so him giving gifts is pretty easy. Have a good day, buddy. ** Okay. There's a new Brian Evenson book just coming out now, and I thought that was exciting enough to use the blog to help usher the thing into our earthly realm, and so I did, obviously. See you tomorrow.
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