Albrecht
“You asked for it,” said the scribbled piece of paper pinned to his door.
Letting out a worried sigh, Jacob set out down the rutted and potholed asphalt that used to be a road. Once there, in a faded shiplap cabin within sight of the sea, on a plain wooden table worn to smoothness, was a stack of papers tied up with a decorative knot. Jacob recognized it as the one he used to close his robe, a double strand – one black, one white – a Kai-no-kuchi musubi, though he did not know the name. Undoing it, he sat down next to the table and began reading.
More than a dozen times I sat down to answer your question, until it was clear that to answer you is to tell a tale you do not want to hear, and I do not want to tell. For once I begin, I may not stop until everything, every worm and bug that crawls around inside me, every seething little mucoid misery and shame, comes out.
So horrid was that realization, that I avoided it as long as possible. There was always something more pressing, like laundry or cooking or sitting on the toilet. There was research – that most reputable of evasions. I read Augustine, Teresa, Gandhi, Merton, hoping for a model to imitate. In Newman I found this, ‘It may easily be conceived how great a trial it is to me to write the following history of myself; but I must not shrink from the task… Nor is it the least part of my trial, to anticipate that my friends may, upon first reading what I have written, consider much in it irrelevant to my purpose.’ I should be so lucky; you should be so lucky.
You may think I accomplished something, and maybe I did; but if so, only by accident. If we were truly honest with ourselves, brother, that’s what we all do, and maybe that’s what I am trying to do here. I could not wish for a better outcome is this heap of paper proves you and everyone else wrong. Therefore, Jacob, this is for you – you nagging, beloved, bastard. Do with it what you will.” Remember, though, Lasciate ogne, Speranza, voi ch’intrate”
A, September 1, 2021”
Jacob could feel the resentment coming off the page, as if what he asked for required writing in his own blood with the nib of a speedball pen as it scratched along his skin. “I pleaded for this,” thought Jacob, but what lay on the table now made him shudder. What lay within those pages? With a deliberate breath, and something like the hesitation of someone expecting a spider or snake under the next leaf, he turned the handwritten pages.
January 20, 2020
You would be right to expect I would start with my birth, which today is the 70th anniversary thereof. Then narrate my utterly unremarkable life in some tidy cause-and-effect sequence of moments and events that would explain how I became who you think I am.
You also know that I could never tell a straight story, so we might as well abandon that hope right now. Call it stream of consciousness if you like, but honestly this is just a brain dump, a pile of stories that I wrote down as they came to me, some in chronological order, sometimes not, sometimes important or just because they stuck in me like a fish bone in my throat. In short, pieces of my life, which is how I lived: in pieces.
Who doesn’t, really? If there is any value here it is to prove there is no straight line. Life is just an assortment of moments, jagged little bits that do not fit into a puzzle the turns out to be a picture of Lake Louise or Versailles. Sometimes life is shit, sometimes it’s Shinola. We make a life the way Rauschenberg made art – from the stuff in your life.
I chose to start today because I remember coming upon his aunt’s diary in a heap of papers at her house after she died. Great aunt Adelaide (back when maiden aunts were assigned that role from birth with names like Adelaide) noted on the first page that it was her 70th birthday and thought it a good time to start a diary. This being my seventieth birthday, remembering that seemed to me a sign that I should begin my response to you. Not that I am a believer in signs, but more like, “if she could, so can I.”
For your sake I will fill in the formal details of my beginning. Being on time (as you love to remind me) has always been a challenge for me and it started with my birth. Mother and Dad actually aimed for January 1, 1950, the bullseye of the century. That was the plan, and planning was as innate to my father, Walter Alfred Merryman, as breathing. Of course, dad wasn’t the one pregnant.
Three weeks late, and exactly two years from the end of the Truman administration, on January 20, 1950, my mother, Yvonne Daly Merryman, gave birth to me, her first born, at the Seventh Day Adventist Hospital in Takoma Park, Maryland. Do not infer any religiosity from that or her birth name. They were married in a Catholic church and then she swiftly asked Walter to “take her away from all this.” The hospital where I was born was simply the closest to their apartment, almost within eyesight. Mother was annoyed that she could neither smoke nor drink while lying in and managed to bring small packets of salt and pepper because those healthy Adventists used neither.
She named me Winslow Albrecht Merryman, for two of her favorite artists but also following family tradition which called for naming a first-born son with names that began with W and A. Dad is Walter Alfred, and to complete the preposterous joke, my grandfather was William Albert.
Mother did not die in the process of giving birth, as Dad’s did, for which my sister Eunice should be grateful. I often reminded her that had I been a difficult baby she might not have been conjured at all. Her gratitude was never profound. I really should tell you about my grandmother, the one that died. Something tells me part of who I am is because of what happened to her. But if I do, then I have to tell you about grandpa as well, and if him, then his folks. Can you see why doing this is hard? The umbilical cord may have been cut on that January day, but its fibers and filaments are still there, filling me with blood and life and even love, but also with all their slimy neuroses and sticky obsessions and their clotted hatreds. I should tell their stories if only to share the blame, as it were.
The real place to start, though, is with my death. What I mean is the moment when death became real to me. Long before I knew about the thrill of sex or that Santa Claus was a lie, I knew that I would die, that my life would end, that I would cease, and it would be as if I never were. If that sounds strange maybe telling the story will help.
My little brother Sebastian is sound asleep, being younger and more pure of heart. We share a room. The window is ajar and a breeze too cool makes me pull at the blanket as I wait for sleep. I’ve always been a touchy sleeper, which means that the time in bed before slipping away is a tossup. Sometimes it is a pleasant drift to reverie and other times it is a long restless wait. This is one of those latter nights, maybe because of the breeze and how it puckers my skin, or because I am trying to hear the TV downstairs where mother laughs. Either the moon is new or there are clouds, but there is little light in the darkened room; only the light from downstairs, coming through the door slightly ajar, and the distant laughter of whatever is entertaining mother.
Turning on my side, which is how best to hug a blanket, I thought of where we were that day and remember that somewhere along the way we passed a cemetery. This was certainly not the first cemetery I had ever seen, but it stands out because there were enormous headstones. Many years later I saw the place as an adult and realized they were part of the entry but talk about creepy back then! They loomed as we passed by. There in bed, waiting for sleep, remembering that cemetery and those immense headstones, sleep and death coalesced, and I saw myself entombed beneath those slabs, and my chest exploded as I felt the reality of death.
Trembling, I leaped from bed as if it were the grave, as if the bed were swallowing me and already my flesh was dissolving into the rot that someday I would be. I knew the bed was not my nemesis. Nor did I believe I was in some imminent danger. No, in that instant all I knew was that I would die someday. I saw the old man I would be, and the lifeless body I would become, the interior of the coffin, the satin darkness, the crumbling limbs and oozing eyes, the obliteration that however far away was as certain as tomorrow.
What could I do but seek the comfort of mother? Muffled sounds from the television and the dim light up the stairs promised some safety from the screaming between my ears and the throb of my young heart.
“I’m scared of death,” I said when she saw me huddled on the stairs. She invited me into her lap. I was probably seven and large for my age, but her arms came around me and I waited for her to tell me that death was not the end, that there was something she the adult knew, beyond the limits of my child mind, that made sense of it all. “Don’t worry,” she said, and I felt myself go limp with relief. “That’s a long, long way off.”
And the serpent around my heart was back. “Don’t tell me it is a long way away; I know that” I thought. “Tell me it is not the end; that I will not perish!” But she didn’t. As long as I sat with her the fear stayed small. The light, the sound of the TV, the smell of cigarettes and whiskey assured me, as these smells doubtless were in my nostrils with the swills of breast milk. I did not want to leave, but knew I could not stay; not then, nor ever.
For several nights the shrieking came back. I listened for the voices downstairs to keep from hearing the hissing voice of the serpent coiled up beneath my breastbone and taunted me for being alive by telling me it will all come to an end.
This is where to begin because you could say that I did not really exist until I knew I would not exist. That moment of terror made me pregnant with myself, as it were, which is why the place to begin is when I knew I would die.
That brings me to the shameful reason I decided to tell you the story. I said no for a long while, and thought I meant it, but vanity got the better of me. You will read this and tell the others, I thought, who will then read it and tell more, and so on; this being a story told with the depth of an Augustine and the flourish of a Thomas Wolfe. Like this fragment that I found years ago,
“… to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”
Doesn’t get much better than that, right? Carving my Kilroy on the decaying lintel of our time, English teachers will explain me to adolescents alongside Ivanhoe; doctoral students needing dissertations will go digging through this for contexts and subtexts and pretexts to pry loose some nugget of insight, holding it aloft in academic triumph. I will seem wise then, deep and unfathomably profound. I may well be a saint then. Pity I will miss it.
To thwart that temptation, I am making this as unliterary as possible. Not ungrammatical mind you; Mother and Dad dug that habit out of me long ago, like a wart under a fingernail and just as painful. There I was in the little lake the last day before we came home from vacation in New Germany State Park. The water was cold, and I hollered to mother, “Can I come out now?” “Yes you can, but no you may not.” Over and over I asked and over and over she replied, my nine year old brain mystified and confused.
Even so, this will not have the sweep and style that make people want to read it. And to make sure of that, I will spoil it here and now. If you want a meaningful life, the sort you believe I have lived, the sort that you want, the sort of life Emily asks of Wilder’s Stage Manager, it is easy to get, but it comes with a terrible price. Maybe Thomas Gray is not wrong, that where ignorance is bliss ‘tis folly to be wise, for once you realize you will die, and how short and small your life is, how much is just out of reach, you will never be more than five minutes from despair. Far from peace and serenity and other sorts of Big Sur ayurvedic inner serenity, every day an arrow pierces me. True, some come with the ecstasy Bernini carved so pornographically, some with the pathos of Kahlo’s deer, and some with the resignation of Mantegna’s Sebastian. But the price for this gift of truth is grief, endless grief that no mother’s lap can hold. As I felt last week when the mail brought news of an old friend who died. I wrote a note to his widow, reading it aloud to make sure it read well, and suddenly, as the words became sounds, my voice choked, and my eyes filled with the heartbreak of his death and the loss of every life I cross. This is my one truth – if you wish to be truly alive you have to die every day.
Somehow, though, I sense that is not enough for you, friend. And since we all love a story, and there is that shameful longing for fame and approval, my addiction as it were, I might as well get on with it.
“Yes, I did ask for this,” Jacob muttered to himself and looked around the room. The walls were hung with sheets of paper and canvas and cloth, each with some stage of drawing or writing, ink and paint and “God knows what that is.” Works in progress or regress, for Albrecht tore many of them into pieces even after long effort. His coffee pot sat upended on a drainer, drying. Clothing, what little he had, was folded into a cubby by his bed, a bunk built into the wall. The lumpen mattress was made from abandoned canvasses and worn-out socks and shirts.
He could return in a moment or never, such was the state of his hut, and as he was taught years ago by the abbot in Kentucky. “Yours is the world, but only for this moment,” the abbot said, prompting him even back then to comment on Andy Warhol’s prophecy about fame whenever he referred to the abbot. Jacob rolled his shoulders to loosen up and returned to the next entry in the manuscript.