I understand what you say when you say that truth and reality have nothing to do with it. Truth and reality have nothing to do with it. I imagine a long pipe. I hold my mouth to pipe and say the things I have longed to say. Far away, at the other end, you hold the pipe to your ear and listen. Then you say what you say, and I listen. We take turns saying and listening. And between us is this pipe.
him: just tried something dumb
him: tried to do this w/ my eyes closed
her: and?
him: wanted to think that way
him: it makes me feel closer
him: to you
him: in my thoughts
her: but?
him: but of course I couldn’t see what you were writing/saying
her: lol
him: dumb
her: the only thing that will calm me now
her: is to touch you
him: yes, I know
him: I mean
him: I feel that too
him: that way
him: can I tell you a story?
her: yes
him: I have these friends at MIT
him: genius types
him: whatever
him: but really really smart
him: one guy does quantum computers
him: right now these computers can only add 1 + 1
him: it’s funny
him: he has a giant magnet
him: that costs $50,000
him: it’s by his desk
him: anyway this isn’t the story yet
her: …
him: right
him: the story is
him: about a different friend
him: he showed me around the media lab
him: ever hear of it?
her: i’ve been there
him: cool. when?
her: i was the actress
her: for a project
her: they were doing
her: but the guy made a pass
her: so i quit before it was done
him: gross
him: whatever could have motivated him?
her: yeah yeah
her: did you see the birds?
her: at the media lab?
him: no. tell.
her: the film of the birds?
him: no. tell.
her: projected on either side of a hallway
her: and when you walked through the hallway,
her: the birds, pigeons
her: would fly away suddenly
her: like you had disturbed them
him: ah, brilliant
her: it was
him: this other thing was too
him: they had a prototype of it
him: you put your hand over these tiny wheels
him: and another person puts their hand over another set of tiny wheels
him: the two sets could be anywhere in the world
him: and when you move your hand
him: the other person can feel it
him: it was kinda like touching hands
her: can we buy one
her: ?
her: now
her: ?
him: we’re doing the wheels in our heads
her: no. not good enough.
her: i want the wheels.
him: what about the wheels in our hearts?
her: i want the hand wheels.
him: fine I’ll call him tomorrow
her: you do that
her: you realize they could make a whole person like that?
her: made of little wheels
her: two people, actually
him: not people. machines.
her: machines
her: i imagine lying on this person
her: i mean machine
her: shaped like you
her: while you do the same
her: under, over, whatever
her: a machine shaped like me
her: etc.
him: etc?
her: the doing of things
her: the making and breaking
him: it was my first thought
her: of the world
him: sounds bumpy tho
her: true
her: anyway i have a better idea
her: it’s for when you go to sleep
her: it’s something i want you to do
her: will you do it?
him: sigh
him: yes
her: on your back
her: with both hands
her: touch your
him: sigh
her: eyelids
her: lips
her: and then the place on your neck by your earlobes
her: gently
her: that is where i will kiss you
him: smiling out loud
him: sol
her: will you do that?
him: yes, I will
him: for you
him: yes
her: don’t just say you will
him: I so fucking will
her: i will do it, too
him: ah
him: I love that
him: which ear?
him: both?
her: both hands
her: both sides
her: both eyes
him: but how are you going to handle this?
her: ?
him: when it comes to kissing
him: actual kissing
him: gotta be one then the other
her: one eye
her: the other eye
her: and so on
him: back and forth, like reading
him: ?
her: yes
her: with your eyes closed
him: yes
her: like you tried to do
him: yes
her: before
Track down my childhood friend David Helnick (my sister will help you) and have him show you where the fort was. If David doesn’t remember, say it was the fort that the park guard had his horse pull down with a rope. This is where I want my ashes to go, where the fort was.
Sell what few things I have and use the money to pay for the cremation and such. If anything is left over, give it to my mom.
Write a brief piece about what happened to me and put it in place of the Oblivio index page (index.html). You can upload using my Fetch bookmark for “Oblivio.”
After a month or two, take down the entire site, including the archives. Replace the index page with a plain white page with the Proust quote I love so: The lion of love trembled before the python of forgetfulness.
On second thought, make it the Wittgenstein quote I love so: I can well understand why children love sand.
Remind everyone how much I loved them. Exaggerate if necessary, but make it seem plausible.
I have a collection of pornography on my hard drive in a folder called “reference.” Delete it.
My web projects are in folder called “web.” Make a copy of this and save it for when my former clients need master files.
Remember: “reference” = delete, “web” = save.
Tell R, S, and A how sorry I am for having hurt them. M will be inconsolable, so gently suggest that she seek perspective by speaking with R, S, and A.
If you have a memorial for me, everyone who talks has to mention at least one thing they couldn’t stand about me. Make this clear up front: no one gets to speak without mentioning at least one negative. And it can’t be a bullshit negative like, He was too fucking funny. I’m not kidding about this. It’s my last request.
Here’s what L read in a book about baseball card collecting: “Remember, baseball cards have no intrinsic value; they’re only worth what people will pay for them.”
So what has intrinsic value?
Saw a therapist for a time in 1995. She was a lousy therapist but did tell a good story once. She told it to illustrate a point, a point about me, I believe, something she felt I needed to see or to work on, but unfortunately I’ve forgotten what the point was. All that remains is the story.
One of her clients couldn’t throw anything away. His apartment was packed from floor to ceiling with junk. So one day she asked him to bring in some things he was sure he could do without. The guy showed up with a cigar box full of ridiculous stuff: ancient ticket stubs, orphaned pens caps, used pull tabs. The therapist had him put the things into three piles: things he could definitely throw away, things he could probably throw away, and things he could possibly throw away. Then they talked about why different things were in different piles, and in the process he moved a few things from one pile to another. Once he felt certain that each thing was in the right pile, the therapist had him to throw the “definite” pile into the waste basket. It was a cathartic experience for the guy, and he cried.
Then on his way out, he turned to the therapist and said, “Uh, do you mind if I take that stuff out of the trash now?”
Some things make me happy.
Many years ago I tripped on mushrooms with a friend in the low hills outside Santa Fe. We wandered through a maze of prickly bushes and speculated about the people who had lived there once. Had any walked where we now walked? Had any seen what we now saw? What thoughts had they had, thoughts unthinkable to us, two men from a world which bore little relation to theirs, though it occupied the same space.
While pondering these things we came upon an empty Doritos bag. Evidently those barren hills had been visited more recently than we had imagined.
There was a commercial on television at this time in which a woman dressed in Native American garb held up a stalk of corn and said, “The Indians called it maize.” It was a commercial for corn oil.
One of us, I forget which, wrote a few words on the Doritos bag and attached it, flag-like, to the branch of a bush.
Whenever I remember that day, I wonder if the Doritos bag is still in place, waiting to be discovered by others. If so, and if its future discoverers understand English, this is what they will read:
THE INDIANS CALLED IT GARBAGE
I have resolved to write garbage. This is the only way out. Every day until the end of the year I will write some likely piece of garbage, and I will not miss any days.
My friend Terry, who probably owes me a phone call (Terry, pick up the goddamn phone), once wrote a hundred poems in twenty-four hours. I read them all but remember only one:
Now everything I think is a poem
This isn’t why I’m going to write garbage. I’m going to write garbage so that I can get over my phobia of writing garbage.
Actually, there’s another, bigger reason I’m going to write garbage, but I can’t talk about that. Nor can I talk about why I can’t talk about it.
This is what I mean by garbage.
Except that this at least is mildly entertaining: a vow to write garbage. The garbage itself will be, I expect, another thing entirely.
When you’re a kid you think that the way things are is the only way they can be. Not that that way is necessarily good, but still you never think, or certainly I never thought, that anything could ever be any way but the way it was. So for example, and this is what prompted this thought, my grandfather loved me and took me to baseball games, each of which we, meaning our team, lost. The team we loved was terrible and on Tuesdays we sometimes went to Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips where there was a two-for-one special and then my grandfather died and I sat in the first row with my mother holding in my lap the Collected Poems of e.e. cummings, the one with the black and white photo on the cover of cummings taken by his wife—his second wife, Marion Morehouse—and cried. Sometimes I say I miss him and that I would give anything to talk to him, but then I wonder what I would say. I don’t think he would understand anything. Nor do I think I could tell him anything. Instead it would be like it is with other people. Maybe you like the person, maybe you want to reach out to the person, but what do you have to reach with? He would be very old now. Ninety-four. His sister-in-law, my great-aunt, is the last one left in his generation. She weighs seventy pounds and sleeps all the time. Would I sit by his bed as I sit by hers and hold his hand as I hold hers and smile when he opens his eyes and say nothing, as I do with my great-aunt, those eyes like my eyes, the same shape as mine but older?
It occurs to me (this really just occurred to me) that if I were someone else and were talking with me about my problems… that is, if I came and told myself my problems, my response would be something like, This is who you are, big guy, so get used to it. I would be tough with myself, because that’s how I am with people I care about.
Like recently I told Eva she should stop trying to be a different person so that someone will fall in love with her, because at best someone will fall in love with who she’s pretending to be, not her, which can only mean trouble once this person, the one Eva fools into falling in love with her, realizes he loves a performance, not a person.
I also told Will to stop claiming he wants a quote unquote serious relationship when what he really wants is pussy, preferably youngish pussy, let us say in its late-twenties and belonging to a woman of a certain look, why lie about it?
The best way to escape a problem is to solve it. This is a quote from a famous person. I like to use quotes like this when discussing my friends’ problems with them. Sometimes I invent the quotes on the spot and attribute them to the sort of people my friends respect but have never read, people like Pascal and Voltaire—neither of whom have I read, by the way, which is fortunate in the sense that I don’t feel encumbered by their actual writings.
The main thing is, I wouldn’t let myself off the hook. No pretending to want to change or to be capable of change when I obviously have no intention of changing, not now or ever.
We don’t change, wrote someone, I haven’t decided who just yet, we just change our delusions.
When I start to do it, I don’t think of it as a thing to do or not do; I just see the chance and start. There’s not much thought then. That’s key. In a world with no thought, I would do it each time and not stop. It is the thought that stops me. I mean, when I stop. For there are times I think it and still go on. First, though, I have this talk in my head. Should I go on? No, I should not. But what if I want to, what then? No, I should not, it is dumb. But so what if it is dumb; I want to. And so on. Then I do it.
I’m beginning to think that if I wrote the whole truth, it wouldn’t be half as interesting as I’ve been imagining. Part of what makes it interesting is the fact that no one knows it, that for reasons which themselves must be concealed, it is concealed.
What is withheld grows. It’s like that book I loved as a kid, the one where a boy feeds his goldfish too much and the fish grows to enormous proportions. Bigger than a fishbowl, a room, a house.
Now I remember. The fish had to remain in water or would die. That’s what the police and firemen were for: they were trying to keep it submerged, which is to say, alive.
A piece I wrote, Bookmark, is making the rounds of sex sites. A lot of people read sex sites. As a result my hits have doubled and all kinds of weird shit is showing up in my site statistics. For example, here are the 15 most popular Oblivio search strings since October 1. I think of it as a poem.
fuck my wife
fuck stories
fuck her
fuck wife
fuck woman
wife fuck
wife fuck stories
ex wife pics
first fuck
fuck my wife story
fuck story
fuck the world
fuck fuck
business card design
I wrote the word “private” on my notepad and circled it so that I would be sure to see it later, because it indicated something I need to do. What was that thing? I have forgotten and it is upsetting me.
The Greyhound security guy who checks my bag asks if I have a knife in it and I stupidly say, “Well, yes, a pocketknife,” so he tells me I have to leave it behind. I ask if there’s anywhere I can leave it, and he suggests I try the Greyhound office upstairs. Well, I have no intention of doing this because I know what the people in the Greyhound office upstairs are going to say, they’re going to say, “Company policy prohibits…” or perhaps, “What if we held everyone’s knife?” Instead I head towards the office (I’m careful to get exact directions; I even ask several times for additional details) and stop at a pay phone in a corner, where I switch the knife to a different compartment in my bag, a secret one, the one where I keep condoms and a wee bit of dope. I had first thought of stashing the knife in my shoes but couldn’t find a private enough place to do the stashing. When I return, the Security guy feels all over the bag for lumps. I’m convinced he’s going to find the knife this way, in part because he knows the exact shape he’s searching for and in part because of how big the knife is: I think it’s the biggest one they make, with tons of attachments. At one point he starts squeezing something around where the knife is—I’m sure it’s the knife!—but then starts squeezing other things. I maintain a stream of banter this whole time about how the person in the office said she would “try” to hold on to my knife. “She said she’d try,” I say. “Whatever that means: ‘try’.”
One card I burned, the other I ate. This was in a place called World’s End. I had come with two friends and we were sitting by the water. The burned card came first. I orginally thought of doing it the other way around, but then decided I should finish with the thing that’s more positive, the taking-in thing.
It had been three years since I’d changed my name. I had kept it a secret at work, though, because… Well, I claimed it was because my name was on thousands of posters around the country promoting the program I ran, but really it was because I was dealing with business people all the time, corporate executives, and I knew they’d think me a freak for changing my name, which would make my job that much harder. So I stuck with my old name at work and became Michael Barrish everywhere else. Weirdly I never once made a mistake about what my name was. My old name became my “work name,” the name of the person I was at work, and my new name became the person I was elsewhere, the “default” me. So when I met people at conferences and such, I always knew which name to tell them, because that’s who I felt like at conferences; I felt like Michael Rosenblum, Scholarship Director.
That’s my old name: Michael Rosenblum.
(A funny thing. I’m writing this in Microsoft Word, which among its fifty million unnecessary functions has this little yellow box that appears whenever you type the beginning to a word or phrase it “recognizes.” An example would be the word Wednesday. As soon as you get to the “n” in Wednesday, a little yellow box appears that says, “Wednesday.” Doubtless this is supposed to save you from having to type all the letters in words like Wednesday, but all it does is annoy you and make you feel that idiots made this program and that you yourself are an idiot for using it. Anyway when I typed Michael Rosenblum a minute ago, the program guessed wrong after a few letters and flashed “Michael Barrish.”)
On the day I stopped being Scholarship Director, it struck me that Michael Rosenblum was now defunct. Not dead; defunct. Michael Rosenblum was still alive in some sense, only he no longer mattered. His spirit had been taken over, swallowed, by another. It had happened little by little, like the eating of the card. Very much like the eating of the card, in fact, which is how I got that idea.
I don’t remember how I got the idea to burn the other one. I regret it now. A card gets destroyed in the process of being eaten, so I didn’t need to complicate things by burning a second one. This is a problem with making up your own rituals: you run the risk of overdoing it.
Three years before all this, I realized what my name is. I was in a bank at the time, opening a new account. The bank representative was having me sign my name in various places and I was complaining about this to a friend who was with me, because for as long as I could remember I’d always hated signing my name. This has to do with my father of course, with my name being my father’s name, but it was about the Jewishness of the name, which I’d always resented. That is, I resented the fact that when people heard my name, they immediately thought “Jew.” Had I been given a choice in the matter, I would have preferred a name that made people think of things I considered more central to my identity, like “artist” or “intellectual” or “outrageously good in bed.” But Rosenblum is like a flashing neon sign that screams LOOK AT THE JEW.
For over a decade I tried to find a new last name, without success. The problem was a problem of meaning. My new name had to do what Rosenblum never could: it had to feel like me to me, and it had to represent me, as I thought of myself, to others. My biggest fear was that I would change my name to something like Michael Sunshine, then decide it was stupid. So I was determined not to change my name to something with any chance of ever seeming stupid.
The only serious candidate in all those years was Estlin. Estlin was e.e. cummings’ middle name, and e.e. cummings was my first love. Estlin, however, is awkward to pronounce—you get stuck between the syllables—and also rather Brahmin-sounding. So as much I liked the reference, I couldn’t go through with it.
Then in the bank, during my name-signing ordeal, my friend said, “What about Barrish?”
Barrish is my mother’s name. It’s also my grandfather’s name, the grandfather I was close to, the grandfather I loved.
I’ve probably said this elsewhere, but this moment was like the moment in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy discovers that she’s been carrying her ticket back home to Kansas the whole time; she just hadn’t realized it. And so not realizing it, she endured this convoluted Technicolor adventure replete with singing and dancing and almost getting herself and her companions killed.
Back in the bank I turned to my friend Liz and said, “Yes, that’s my name: Barrish.” In that moment I was back in my childhood, both in it and outside it, and I could see that the boy, the boy I had been, belonged not to his father’s family, which he hardly knew, but to his mother’s family, and in particular to his maternal grandfather. He was of his grandfather.
I told the bank person that I’d return after doing whatever one has to do to change one’s name, and then Liz and I walked along Mass. Ave., discussing what my middle name should be. The middle name I was born with is Jay, which according to my mother was chosen because it sounded nice. Michael Jay Barrish didn’t sound so nice to me, and anyway I didn’t want a name that sounded nice; I wanted a name that meant something. Liz tried to help me figure this out, but it was hopeless. Finding meaning is as difficult as finding love. And anyway meaning isn’t found; it gets made.
For me it got made on the southwest corner of Mass. Ave. and Prospect Street, which if you know Cambridge, you know is a busy corner. Liz and I were waiting to cross Prospect and I was telling her something about my grandfather and for some reason said his name, which I don’t often do, for in my head he is the name I called him as a child, which was “Pop-Pop,” or sometimes, to differentiate him from my other grandfather, “Pop-Pop Abbie.” Anyway I said his name, which was Abraham, and then I saw everything and started to cry. It was an immediate thing, I just completely broke down on this street corner with hordes of people hurrying past. When I finally managed to compose myself long enough to tell Liz what had made me cry, she began crying, which of course got me started all over again. It was like what I expect it be like if I ever have a child, I mean if my future wife, if I ever have a future wife, ever gives birth to our child, and I’m there with the two of them in the moments right after the child is born, and me and my future wife are crying because… well, for obvious reasons.
That’s what it was like.
My middle name, I told Liz, is Abraham.
“My name is Michael Abraham Barrish,” I said. “He’s inside me.”
A man signs a shovel and so he digs.
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