The discreet cognitive dissonance of the bourgeoisie
Paging Drew Zeiba...
What if I stopped?
What if I said, No I will not go to the party at Le Bain that allegedly I am hosting tonight? What if I said, No I will not go to see performance art because I know that, in this mood that I’m in, the reception after will lead to a hangover? What if I said, Let’s stop watching Suzhou River and The Sacrifice because we are bored? What if I said, No I will not interview someone I don’t even care about for literally one hundred US dollars? What if I said, I quit!?
I would not be able to write about experimental movement art. I would not be able to tell you about weird things gay guys said. I might have no “content” for this blog which is not the same as having no life. I am not a plot, or, I mean, I have tried and failed to fit my life into the shape of plot and found that, inevitably, something exceeds it: that however shaped by received narratives I am, however much I register as a caricature to myself, I am less solid than any character I could write, thus both more and less real.
Is this stopping? No, I’d have to do something instead, like build the plum blossom Lego kit my mother mailed me for my birthday in October, which I kept saying, I will build once I leave my job, and now I tell myself, I will build when I can figure out how to chill. No, this—this writing about not-doing—is working words around an absence, which is all that gives words meaning in the first place.
Another flourish, another performance, another endless doing, indeed a positive formulation: the negative space: to do and to enact but perhaps not to substack.
I stayed in Thursday.
I couldn’t bear going out. Or I could’ve borne it, it would’ve been perfectly bearable: glamorous hotel parties overlooking the Hudson, designer shoes, these are things people watch TV shows about, wishing their life were the same, but as one of the characters says in The Sacrifice, which, again, I did not finish, I can’t shake the sense that I am waiting for my life to happen.
Picture yourself as the smooth surface of an unmarked bottle in a melting bucket of ice. Picture yourself as a glass waiting to be filled with ice cubes by miniature metal tongs. Imagine the burn of your throat at the first gulp of vodka. Imagine the fun your friends are having without you. Imagine the endless, repetitive boredom, the boredom of waiting to feel differently. Imagine that West 13th Street is wet, you are the wet street surface, asphalt drenched and crumbling, pummeled underfoot, and imagine the shape of the container that is a bottle or a club or this island, twenty two point eight three square miles of land which you’ve pretended have one dimension, the dimension of a life you are waiting for, the same life that you’ve been deferring for nine years in anticipation that, finally, this event shall announce itself as a pivot, a swerve, an irreparable break in the fabric of your pretend reality, an unreality of third-person memories, of saying yes when you mean no or more likely saying nothing at all, and imagine, finally, you’re rended unable to pronounce words properly as the last ice cube from your glass melts in your mouth like a creamsicle pill which puts you straight to sleep. The next morning you will wake purified, cleansed of all your sullied type-A attachments, for the first time intact, an identity and being aligned, and you have to imagine this, because you did stay in, you said to yourself, If I don’t write tomorrow, it will be as if I’ll never write again, because Saturday there’s this to do, and Sunday that, and it does not occur to you that these things are your life, a sequence of events which do not mean nor signify, that exist only in a relation of coincidence, except that can’t be right, “coincidence,” surely you are up to something, have something to do with these occurrences—you are taking action, forces are taking action upon you, it’s awfully convenient and apolitical to chalk it up to coincidence.
I dreamt of my childhood home and DMT smoke, of group sex and floating pools that stretched beyond the horizon. I dreamt of peeling skin off a park bench to stitch onto someone’s back. I told my psychoanalyst this and said, I feel as if I’m performing at being in psychoanalysis, like, Oh I’m sitting in this room talking about my childhood and dreams or whatever. I felt embarrassed, in truth. That he, impassive, was judging me for doing psychoanalysis like I thought it was supposed to be done, rather than merely doing it.
He looked off to the corner, silent.
In Anna Kavan’s story “A Bright Green Field,” the narrator is haunted by a particular patch of grass. “It seems I simply can’t escape it.”
It’s luminous and always has a slant: sometimes it appears so even as to need an expert’s clinometer to prove to the narrator that the field’s not level, but it never is, and in this story, the field the narrator sees from a train is perpendicular, shooting up against a monochrome gorge, “all the more resplendent for its dismal setting.”
The field glows, and is still in view when the narrator arrives at the train station. From there they can see—as near-silhouettes against the vivid green—“prone half-naked human bodies, spreadeagled…bound to [the grass] by an arrangement of ropes and pulleys.” These figures cut the grass, their jerks reminding the narrator of flies caught in a spider’s web, and the narrator assumes this must be some perverse punishment.
A passerby notices the narrator’s observing the field and, reading their thoughts, tells them that it’s no punishment, but that the grass merely grows excessively fast, and although this job is dangerous to life and limb, it comes with a certain prestige, and besides, no other method to cut the fast-growing grass has been devised. Plus they’ve made it a bit safer since ancient times.
“I wanted to ask why the field had to be mown at all—why would it matter if the grass grew long? How had the decision to cut it been made in the first place all those years ago?”
But the narrator doesn’t ask, afraid of seeming “dense,” since, well, if the grass has been mowed in such a brutal manner for as long as anyone can remember, certainly there must be “some sound rational basis.”
The passerby departs and the narrator continues to watch the grass. “I realized I had refrained from asking my questions, not for fear of appearing stupid but because, in some part of me, I already seemed to know the answers.” The narrator does not relay the answers to the reader. Melancholy overtakes them.
As night advances the grass does not dim: “I began to see how enormously powerful the grass up there must be to interrupt night’s immemorial progress.” The grass is “turgid with life,” like a “great green grave, swollen by the corruption it had consumed,” the narrator thinks, so clearly this “bright green pall” must be cut down, it seems only reasonable that this “mad proliferation of glass blades” be stopped. It is monstrous, something that should never be, that the grass has usurped the power of nightfall. “…and yet…”
“One simply doesn’t know what to believe. If it is all just fantasy, why should I have seen, as in a vision, that grass, fed on the lives of bound victims, could become a threat to all life, death-swollen and horribly strong?”
From what I can gather online, this story and the book with which it shares a title are usually interpreted psychologically, as in, the narrator represents Kavan, and the field is some inescapable mental disturbance: insomnia, addiction, madness. An outsider with a clinometer might be saying, Girl, chill. This reading might be fair enough: Kavan (née Helen Woods) self-mythologized extensively and did write from life experiences. People have made much of her psychiatric internments, her dalliances with morphine and cocaine and amphetamines, and her twenty-five-years-long marriage to heroin.
But reading this story, I find it hard to ignore the racialized and classed dimensions; if I read it as about a kind of madness, the madness is bourgeois “common sense.” It is taken for granted that these workers—first noted at a distance as “curious dark shapes” against the grass’s brightness—must risk death, may even accept its likelihood, to keep the town “safe” from the growing grass. The mowing’s been done since ancient times, and must be continued. The narrator finds this amiss at first (“In the beginning, when the whole thing started, did the threat come before the victim or vice versa?”), but slowly begins to accept the necessity of cutting the grass so viciously, assuming there must be some good reason, or at least some appropriate moral relativism they should accept. Eventually, after coming to terms with the mowing’s necessity—that these blades will violently propagate and are a species that demands restriction—without evidence, they exhaust themselves. “Why should I be implicated at all?”
This desire to recuse one’s self from the violence of maintaining the social order (protecting the town below) seems to me part and parcel of the splitting and false ignorance capitalism encourages among its privileged subjects. How else do we go on with the subjugation that our lives demand without feeling we are subjugating anyone? I’ve got nothing to do with it, one might say of bar-backs restocking bottle service buckets or off-shore factory workers or Amazon delivery people or disenfranchised farmers. It can’t be helped, this is simply the way things are, one might say of their getting paid six-figures to make decks for brands whose seamstresses work in semi-slavery. A university education has prepared one to defend one’s paper-pushing and outsized consumption in the cloak of social-justice language anyway. Why should I be implicated at all?
If one is predisposed to a biographical reading, Kavan’s biography might allow my reading too: Born in Cannes in 1901 to British parents of dwindling fortunes, she grew up on an orange farm in California. When she first married at nineteen, she followed her railway administrator husband to colonial Burma. She’d journey to Singapore, South Africa, the Dutch East Indies, New Zealand. She’d also spend a stint in Swiss asylum, but her life of travel was one in which she witnessed the dregs of colonialism in action; she died in ’68.
The narrator’s self-victimization—feeling they are psychically haunted by this meadow—feels akin to the displacement of conscious awareness demanded to keep up a stratified social order.
I don’t think this politically oriented reading is the only possible one. But if Kavan went out of her way to depict a social order, to depict a fear of the other (the proliferating grass) and the mental process of accepting the immiseration of those who sisypheanly maintain it, why do most readings focus only on her biographic psychogeography? Or on her psychogeography as self-contained: are all of our mental states not in part shaped in relation to ideology? To the other?
The narrator can’t escape. “If not today or tomorrow, then the day after that, or the next, at the end of some journey one evening, I shall see the bright green field waiting for me again. As I always do.” The narrator cannot shake the terror and wonder, cannot unsee what has been seen. They might suppress it as best they can, but again it rears in their vision.
Is the bright green field fantasy or truth?