This post is the work of Jonathan Crimmins–TM
There’s a neighborhood in Seattle called Fremont that used to be an aging hippie enclave, complete with a statue of Lenin. After a spate of hyper development, Fremont is now the night-haunt of fraternity savoir-faire and mojitos. You can still find remnants of its mind-expanding roots in certain places. My current favorite remnant is a phrase written in a coffee shop bathroom. It’s on the wall next to a brochure reminding folks that There’s a Pharmacy in your Pantry and it reads:
as if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
But for a long while, I took the words “kill time” a little more literally, and kept thinking of how the hippie scrawler had hit upon a kind of koan, both true and untrue at the same time. If you think of eternity as the sum total of time in an everlasting simultaneity, then of course you cannot destroy time without jeopardizing eternity. But, if you think of time as the refusal of Being to remain identical to itself, then time is the force that prevents eternity. If it were killed, Being would not continuously pass into becoming and would plain old simply Be, which is the very definition of eternity.
So what does the riddle above have to do with anything? There are, in keeping with the koan, two answers. First, I promised an eternity ago one last post on Michael Ondaatje and only now am I delivering. Second, if you’ve got a little time to kill, you’ll see that, in a way, this post is about the problem of time. I promised I’d be specific about how, in Divisadero, Ondaatje pushes his technique into falsity, by cloaking the familiar domestic with ethereal lyricism. Here’s an example from page 123 where the character Coop watches his heroin-addicted girlfriend sing:
When she began to sing, what was surprising was not the power of her voice, or its range from rough to tender, but the confidence she had up there, as if a great actress were sculpting the air with her arms while drawling like Chrissie Hynde.
Listen to the strain the last clause puts on the sentence. There’s the unfortunate metaphorical stutter-step from acting to sculpting; as soon as we’re thinking actress he’s got us thinking sculptor. It’s bad enough to use one art, acting, as a metaphor for another art, singing, but two arts, in the same clause? On top of that, can you think of any great actress who sculpts the air with her arms? Is Ondaatje thinking of a silent-era film star? Was that melodramatic swooning great acting? There’s the small redundancy of “with her arms.” And then there’s the drawl of Chrissie Hynde that gets me thinking oddly about Ondaatje’s CD collection. How come he makes pop culture seem so antique? In previous books certain moments of lyricism stood out with such intense clarity that they had the unreal je ne sais qua of reality: the loggers in The Skin of the Lion, for instance, who play a game of nighttime tag on skates, chasing each other with flaming sheaves of cattails. In Divisadero reality is alluded to rather than evoked. On 161, Ondaatje writes
During the dinner, a five-year-old sat beside Coop at one of the decorated trestle tables. There was almost no conversation between them, because the boy was listening intently to a transistor radio. Finally he switched it off and turned to Coop and told him the Americans were bombing Baghdad.
There is something mysterious to me in all this. Is it only the contemporary setting that foregrounds the issue of believability, and gets me asking about the five-year-old listening intently to news on the radio? Intently, really? A five year-old? And then the child switched it off? My child would sooner make his own grilled cheese than decide that it was up to him to switch the radio off. And then the child said the Americans are bombing Baghdad? I can manufacture ways that all this would make sense. The child might be parroting, not American radio, which wouldn’t refer to “the Americans,” but might be listening instead to the BBC who are always referring to us as “the Americans.” But I don’t want to, partly because of the other bizarre details. Why “decorated trestle tables”? Why write “transistor radio” as if from a 1950’s Scientific American? The same is true of the card games. He describes Texas Hold ‘Em, the tedium of which is ubiquitous, as if it’s whist or faro or Pope Joan. I understand that there’s a kind of allegory here. Ondaatje aligns Coop’s first game with the first Gulf War, and in that game Coop gets away scot-free with unstoppable bravura. The second time, aligned with the second Gulf War, Coop is roughed up nearly to the point of death. No doubt someone in the future will chase down how his game with The Brethren relates to the 1980s emergence of the religious right. To me, too much of it feels like simply a vehicle to get him to the lines Ruth says accusingly to her boomer hippie husband, Dorn,
“Look at your friend, even he’s not innocent. No one here is. Not me. Not you. Not even you. We’re barbarians too. We keep letting this happen.” Dorn was not responding, until her hand ripped at his neck and a hundred small shells paused on his chest for a second, then clattered to the floor.
There’s a poignancy to these lines when read against Kip’s realization that “When you start bombing the brown races of the world, you’re an Englishman.” It’s poignant because we realize Ondaatje said it before, and that what he said was you do it again and again and each time you forget the last: Vietnam, Korea, WWII, all the way back through colonial history in Africa and India. He said, in 1992, precisely that the sun does not set on the atrocities of Empire. But the poignancy is not in Divisadero. If Ondaatje is bored with the message, what then? He’s still Ondaatje, capable of such lines like “Whenever there is thunder I think of Claire,” and a thousand other lines equally astonishing. Still, something has gone wrong. How can it be harder for me to believe that Anna’s father tries to kill Coop, than it is to believe that somehow he got to take home an orphan from the hospital to make up for his dead wife? And yet, the orphan bit seemed oddly natural and I still can’t square the father. The three stories in the book each have a different genre. There’s the western nature romance, the grifter has a scheme, and the Sebaldian novel of ideas. It’s as if he’s trying on hats. I like the idea of juxtaposing three books that don’t belong together; I like the idea of mellowing the experimentalism of such a move, rather than augmenting it; and I absolutely love the way here, like in his other books, he announces straightforwardly the problem of writing that he faced in making the novel. Once more it’s Ruth who gets the lines. Apropos of nothing she quotes, supposedly from memory, a radio interview with William Styron, who said,
“You know, I think I have already written the most intimate and profound book I will ever be able to write. I don’t think I can go as far as that again. From now on I should try comedy. Comedy is not easy, I know. But at least it is not the same road.”
I have said before that Ondaatje has taken it on himself to haunt us. To do so, he writes over and over about what haunts him, his apparitions recurring like double exposures. But in Divisadero Ondaatje is bored with his ghosts, and what is shifting is Ondaatje himself. Previously he gave us work with images that mimicked the ghostly stillness of eternity. But now there is only the restlessness of becoming. He’s moving towards something new. It is much too glib to say that with Divisadero he was killing time. Instead, we have to see this book as a transition, and look forward to what is next. We have to understand that the writer, like everyone, is ruled by ceaseless time, and, like everyone, wishes it weren’t so. Paradoxically, as a writer, you want to make your work both new and worthy of forever. And yet, if you ever see your own writing that way, like seeing heaven before your death, it’s sure to make you blind.