Chapter 48
October 27
The Lonely Housewife’s Friend
Our imagination, and our dreams, are forever invading our memories; and since we are all apt to believe in the reality of our fantasies, we end up transforming our lies into truths.
Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh
OTTO AND ESTHER — parents of Louise, son and daughter-in-law of Artie the Demolition Man and his wife Nancy — returned to the island after nineteen days away and found themselves surrounded by a bunch of zombies walking around in a hangover haze. (I will confess to you, reader, since we are nearing the end of this memoir and the time for confessions is hard upon us, that, as a rule, a hangover makes me horny. This one was no exception. I began nuzzling Albertine before she was even awake, and I pestered her all day long, sometimes, I think, embarrassing her in the presence of her relatives, who are generally circumspect about their affections.)
Mark and I were standing at the bar, waiting for Lou to fix us a Bloody Mary, when Otto and Esther appeared in the doorway of the lounge. “Look at those two,” said Mark, nodding in their direction. “They will be interesting to watch. Notice the way they are standing in the doorway exhibiting diffidence. They are deliberately staying on the edge of the group, because they recognize that the group shares a definition of itself that does not include them. Once I have my hangover tonic in hand, I think I’m going to find it quite interesting to see how they manage to enter the group — assuming, of course, that they try to enter the group and that they succeed at the effort, but looking at them I suspect that they will — because to insinuate themselves into the group at this late stage in its development they will in effect have to learn the language of the group, and at the vernacular, not merely the formal level. I mean that in the sense that language rests on shared experience, the shared experience of a culture — whether it is experience gained at first hand or at second hand, through the mediation of language itself — because it is those shared definitions — in this case a definition of last night as ‘the night before’ and this morning as ‘the morning after’ — that define a culture, which leads me to a point I wanted to make the other night after you finished reading ‘Funny Peculiar,’ but refrained from making because I sensed that direct commentary on the readings is generally not the practice among your listeners, possibly because people think of themselves as on vacation when they are out here, isolated as they are from the hurly-burly, the ‘incumbering hurry of the world.’ Isn’t that how it goes? I think so. I think it’s: ‘Till we are persuaded to stop, and step a little aside, out of the noisy crowd and incumbering hurry of the world, and calmly take a prospect of things, it will be impossible we should be able to make a right judgment of our selves or know our own misery. But after we have made the just reckonings which retirement will help us to, we shall begin to think the world in great measure mad, and that we have been in a sort of bedlam all this while.’ William Penn, unless my memory fails me, in ‘Some Fruits of Solitude,’ and I think that just that sort of thing must happen to people here, at the very moment when they arrive here, I would think. In stepping off the launch and onto the island they probably have a fully conscious awareness of stepping out of ‘the noisy crowd and incumbering hurry of the world,’ I expect, and yet, can they ever leave that ‘bedlam’ entirely behind? Or do they always carry something of it with them in their hearts and minds? Isn’t it, in fact, one of the shared definitions of the mad world they have left behind that allows them to recognize this island as a refuge from it, just as — and you see I’m coming back around to the comment I meant to make about ‘Funny Peculiar’ — the idea of the ideal picnic spot was one of the shared ideas that defined the culture in which you and I grew up. However — and this strikes me as perhaps marking a pivotal redefinition for our culture, one that, judging from your reading last night and the claims that you made within it for the deceptive power of your camouflage on the surface of the cave, you may have been responsible for initiating — the original definition of the ideal picnic spot was essentially a miniature Arcadia, in the sense that it was presumed to have existed ‘forever,’ to be the creation solely of nature, to be, in fact and in essence, pastoral, not merely to lie outside the bedlam that mankind had made but to be utterly unrelated to it and wholly unaffected by it, to be a place where the lucky people who happened upon it might pass the hour or so required for the eating of their lunch in blissful Edenic innocence, isolated from civilization and its discontents by virtue of having stumbled on a little patch of anachronism, a pre-existing paradise, but at some time, and perhaps it was at about the time when you and I were coming to the end of our childhood, just coming to understand the definitions common to the noisy crowd in adult bedlam, our culture began to give up looking for the ideal picnic spot, that little Arcadia, and began instead to try make the ideal picnic spot, a little Utopia rather than a little Arcadia, but while Arcadia comes to us already defined by nature, Utopia must be defined by those who mean to make it, and if it is going to be a place where the whole culture can picnic, where the whole culture will want to picnic, where the whole culture will be willing to pay to picnic, then it must be a place that the entire culture recognizes as the perfect spot, and that kind of mass acceptance requires a culture stable enough to have a definition of the perfect spot that is stable enough to become the common coin of cultural exchange, whether we’re considering a culture that is no larger than the three housewives who sat on the hillock you had constructed on the roof of your cave or our little band of crapulous imbibers here, in which case the group is small enough to allow the exchange of cultural commonplaces directly, in conversation over coffee, for example, or over a Bloody Mary, or a culture that is much larger, as large as a town, or a hemisphere, in which case the common coin must be exchanged through other media, which introduces a greater likelihood of garbling.”
He paused to pay some attention to his Bloody Mary, and in the pause I said, “Hangovers always make me horny.”
“Me, too,” said Mark, after a moment’s reflection.
“Why is that?”
“I don’t know the physiological basis for the phenomenon, but I think that psychologically it is due at least in part to the fact that the abstraction or separation that we feel from the world is as great during the hangover phase of a binge as it is during the drunken phase. We have been irresponsible and know that we have been irresponsible and feel the full force and effect of having been irresponsible throughout our being and — which is the saving grace, the liberating factor — we are paying for it. Our coin is the pain of the hangover, so we feel not only a lingering license to set aside the rules of practical life, but the physical necessity to do so, and into the bargain we feel that the bargain has already been struck, that since we are paying for this time off, and paying plenty, we want every pleasure we can get, because, goddamn it, we’ve earned it!”
[to be continued]
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