The Name of the World - Denis Johnson [26]
Just before the end of the academic year I took a trip to upstate New York to attend the Conference on Emerging Democracies. I flew by jet to New York City, and from there I rode a train. I had no preparations to make, no real role to play at the Conference, a gathering sponsored by the Giddings Policy Studies Foundation and an annual tradition since the days when “democracy” had meant “socialism,” a roundup of intellectuals currently undertaking a project of cool-headed, not to say bald-faced, retrenchment. I spent a very long three-day weekend among a lot of people who, I was sort of glad to see, had no intention of abandoning their earliest and most hopeful assumptions. Sixteen weeks before, the Berlin Wall had come down. Nobody mentioned this. The term “Marxist” flew all around the place, but none of the speakers ever referred to The Left or The Revolution or The People. On panels, behind podiums—so tiny in nearly empty auditoriums—they displayed the vivid, liberated staunchness of spinsters in old novels. What they’d mistaken for a political philosophy had always amounted, they were seeing now, to an aesthetic, and the divorce it was undergoing from its previous claim to relevance could only serve to purify it. They were no-nonsense about being all nonsense. This didn’t preclude a certain shift in personal style. The men no longer smoked pipes of tobacco, and the women no longer drank sherry or wore bright lipstick inexpertly applied. I don’t know why I went. I think I wanted something to happen to me there but nothing did.
Except that I spent a couple of days in the city and was struck as always with how dirty and beautiful New York is. The gray light is a song. And the grafitti alongside the Amtrak: The rails head north out of Penn Station under the streets, almost as through a tunnel, alongside the passing logos of gangs and solitary hit-artists who use the patches of sunshine that fall into the brief spaces between overpasses, their fat names ballooning into the foreground of their strange works, switched on and off in alternating zones of light and dark. They make the letters of our own alphabet look like foreign ideograms, ignorant, rudely dismissive, also happy: magical bursting stars, spirals, lightning. And I realized that what I first require of a work of art is that its agenda—is that the word I want?—not include me. I don’t want its aims put in doubt by an attempt to appeal to me, by any awareness of me at all.
What brought Flower Cannon to mind right then I don’t know, but I have to say the passing parade put my recent experiences with her into a kind of persective. The experiences were mostly about seeing her, laying eyes on her—not about hearing her words, certainly not about touching her. And now I think this narrative might cohere, if I ask you to fix it with this vision: luminous images, summoned and dismissed in a flowing vagueness. The difference being that I didn’t take Flower for a message, but a ghost, the ghost of my daughter—yes, and for a while she came and went in the flow of events like my Elsie in the silent cataract of memory.
The picture I’ve been giving here is that of the most circumscribed and uneventful period of my life. In the last few weeks, more had happened to me than I’d experienced in years—developing a small but impossible crush on a student, getting socked in the head, losing my job a year earlier than I’d expected, taking a pointless journey. I needed one more aberration in the round I’d been following, one more liberating aberration, before I broke gently free and continued on a new path. I’d say I was almost conscious of needing it. Almost consciously looking for trouble.
The final event on my calendar would be the expiration of my lease at the end of June. I should get out of town before then. I had no summer classes, no business here, no people keeping me—my time was up. But when classes ended in the