http://www.albany.edu/offcourse
http://offcourse.org
ISSN 1556-4975
http://www.albany.edu/offcourse
http://offcourse.org
ISSN 1556-4975
ANAXIMANDER’S SYMMETRY, a story by Ricardo Nirenberg.
A self-image appears often in his mind, especially when he lies face up, looking at the ceiling. In that image he is an old, rusted, useless ship come to anchor at this peaceful studio apartment at The Windsor Arms, overlooking Lake Champlain. Two active chimneys, one fore, another aft, a freighter of vague register and reluctant flag, he slowly heaves and sets on the slack water of a narrow, shallow harbor; yet, and this is something he has learned from recurrent dreams, he is endowed, at bottom, with a monstrously capacious bilge, wide and deep. He is unable to say when that self-image as a scuttled ship with a huge, dark bottom, presented itself to his mind for the first time, although it was definitely after his coming to live in the USA, twenty-five years ago. It might have something to do with the real ship on which his parents and he, not yet two years old, sailed away from Odessa, just in time to be saved from the fate of Europe’s Jews. But he does not remember anything from that first trip.
The freighter “Punta Arenas” is the first distinct boat in his memory. On it, in 1950, his mother and he left Cuba, the only country which, ten years earlier, had been willing to let them in. They glided south, along the big belly of South America, toward the city of Buenos Aires, the trip paid by a wealthy cousin of his mother who resided there. Ernesto “Che” Guevara was to make the reverse trip only a few years later. Once and for all, together with the palm-lined, gleaming coast, receded from his view his father’s grave in the Colón cemetery, with the stone bearing the inscription: “Emil Schreiber. Peace over Israel.” And receded, too, his own tropical childhood. The second vivid boat, with a blue and red chimney, is the passenger ship “Ville de Marseille”, on which he left Argentina in 1960, after his mother’s death. At twenty he sailed back to Europe, to attend the University of Paris. His Spanish name, Santiago, the name by which he had been called up in school to salute the Cuban and the Argentine flag, the name under which he had made love to a girl for the first time, receded too, soon to be replaced by Jacques. No one calls him either Santiago or Jacques any more: here in the USA he is known as Jack, but, especially at moments like this, when he lies face up on his bed and pictures himself as an old boat until he snoozes off and then all kinds of things happen—he finds himself gliding up and down poles like those found in fire houses, or giddily going up and down steep and snowy stairs, or else involved in philosophic arguments, too complex for wakefulness, with officers and crew—at moments like this he still likes to style himself Yankl, the Yiddish name his mother used to call him. This mental music, “Yankl,” makes him feel as if rocked by gentle tides, and calms the anxiety surrounding the feelings of bilge and the thoughts of darkness.
Yankl feels he is about to doze off again. He makes an effort, buttresses his head up with another pillow, and picks up the papers he has left by his side. About to start reading again, he suddenly changes his mind, gets up and goes to the kitchen for a cup of tea with a bit of rum, then lays himself back down, the sheets of paper on one hand and the cup in the other. Sipping rhythmically, he rereads the first couple of pages. Jim’s memoir. This manuscript requires not professional skill but friendly love, which is to say a sacred duty, for the author happens to be his best friend, James X. Brown. Jim Brown shows Jack all he writes—scholarly articles on Gustave Flaubert or Albert Camus; poems with or without line breaks, never published but always dedicated to someone either living or dead; ideas for improving America; letters to The New York Times. Jim is always insecure, always fretful and impatient for Yankl’s approval, and so Yankl tries to get back to Jim within forty-eight hours, usually by phone. But anything critical beyond the pointing out of a typo is not welcomed. For Jim believes that writing, even at its most impersonal, is a baring of the soul, so any negative remark about Jim’s writing is a slander of his soul.
Jim gave Yankl the present manuscript this afternoon, saying in a voice where an attentive ear could have detected high expectation, “I’m inflicting on you the first draft of my memoir.” To Jack’s question, to which publishers did he mean to send it out, Jim had said, “Oh no. I mean to have just fifty copies printed. For friends and relatives. And of course, for my grandchildren.”
“Inflict” is the verb Jim has always used when giving Jack something of his to read. But “memoir,” ah, that is something entirely new, something which should hold more than a passing interest for Yankl. For doesn’t ‘memoir’ mean a distillate of a whole life? Not just any life, but one which has been intertwined in friendship with his own, ever since Yankl moved from Freiburg im Brisgau to Lake Champlain, Vermont. And such intertwining, Jack feels, serves exactly the same purpose, the same function, as the intertwining of threads to make a rope—or, to stay with his self image as a ship, not a rope, rather a line. The purpose, briefly put, is to get a tremendous gain in tensile strength. For without such friendships (which are so rare), what sense would life here have for him? Why not live somewhere else, in Brazil, or in India, or even in Europe, for example? Whenever, as often happens, Europeans express astonishment that he has chosen to live permanently in the USA, a country where (so they are convinced) all human relationships are business oriented or professionally generated, or simply lacking, Jacques replies that, on the contrary, nowhere has he known friendships as deep and as warm as those which unite him to his close American friends. But he’d be in trouble if those same Europeans were to ask him the name of those American friends. Fortunately they never do, because the only such friend Jacques is able to come up with is James X. Brown.
While he looks at the ceiling, the idea comes to Yankl that it is that line, formed of the intertwined lives of two friends, that holds the anchor which moors him to this shallow harbor; that if it weren’t for that line, if it weren’t for the intertwining of his life with Jim Brown’s, he would have to start the rusted engines, disentangle the weeds from the propeller, free the rudder from crust, and sail off, leave for good. The idea seems so threatening, so much in need of further, careful development, that he lays the cup of tea and the sheaf of paper on the night table, turns off the light and closes his eyes. Setting off to sea alone again at sixty-five? When he crossed the ocean at twenty, his feelings weighed on the side of hope and he looked about with joy, just a tiny bit scared at his own freedom; but as he grew older, with each change of habitation the balance beam in his heart tended more and more to the tired but secure horizontal. And now, where would he go? The image of himself, an old boat, floating in the immensity with no determined direction, no prearranged destination, frightens him. Anaximander, one of the earliest and greatest of Greek philosophers, taught that the earth is round, a cylinder actually, supported by nothing, suspended in the void. Vulgar opinion would sneer at this and object that such a thing was impossible, for if unsupported the earth, just like anything else, would fall into God knows what abysses. But Anaximander, whose mind stood far above the vulgar, observed that the void, if it is a true void, must be symmetrical, and that given such perfect symmetry, there is no reason why the earth should move, or “fall,” as the saying goes, in one direction rather than in any other. Therefore, it doesn’t move at all, it stays forever put. “Fearful,” Yankl whispers, “a fearful symmetry.” And he falls asleep. He dreams that he is living in a country which is neither the USA nor Cuba nor Argentina, and definitely not in Europe. A country which is suspended somewhere far above the earth.
The next morning he tells his students about Anaximander’s symmetry. It is a large class of undergraduates, “Philosophy 101, Critical Thinking,” favored by those daunted by the alternative requirement of one semester of Calculus. He solicits comments, but since it is nine in the morning, and most kids are not fully awake from the torpor after a night’s light beer, heavy metal and who knows what else and of what avoirdupois, it takes some gentle prompting from the instructor. “Think about it: around you everything is totally, perfectly symmetrical. How would you react to such situation?”
At long last a student, the earnest one who usually answers questions from the first row, volunteers, “I don’t see what symmetry has to do with staying put.”
Some giggle. Jack lets the ripple pass and then takes a slightly, only slightly different tack: he explains the old problem of Buridan’s ass which is unable to choose between two symmetrically placed bales of hay and consequently starves. Immediately he realizes he has made a bad move, he should have spoken instead of a horse, a dog, or a cat, or even a donkey, for now everyone is giggling as if he had cut a loud fart. Too late now. There was a time, earlier in his career, when he would have rescued the situation by dint of wit, authority and savoir faire; now he has only the energy left to stand there, in front of the class, while his heart fills to the brim with misanthropic contempt, and to lower his eyes so as not to show it. “Well, any further comments?” he asks after a minute, raising his head.
A loud and protracted yawn is heard from somewhere in the back rows, and this effrontery provokes more excited laughter. Jack exclaims, “Precisely! Bravo, very well! Before anything else, perfect symmetry is likely to result in perfect boredom. And make us yawn. Who came up with this excellent answer?” Pause—Jack looks intently ahead of him, like a sailor looking for a landfall. “What, too modest, or too shy? Well, whoever you are, you certainly deserve an A for a final grade.”
Outside, the campus gardens are in bloom. A marvelously beautiful morning in May, made especially beautiful by the imminence of the end of this endless spring semester. A group of students are sitting on the lawn, like big frogs forming a circle at one of whose otherwise undistinguishable points sits the instructor, this symmetry and lack of distinction between the positions of educator and educands being of the greatest importance in contemporary educational practice. Also and by the way, one shouldn’t say “to teach,” but rather the more symmetrical, “to share one’s knowledge with.” Using the word “share” and its derivatives wherever possible (pretty much everywhere) is a good way of not straying from the correct path. Even, “All I wanted was to share my H.I.V. with you” will sound benign. Yankl sits on a bench and lights a cigarette. He took up smoking again only a year ago. He had started smoking in Buenos Aires, at age thirteen; much later, in 1980, when he moved to the USA, he yielded to social pressure and stopped, only to start again in 03. Many look at his smoking with disapproval or disgust, but the need to escape his solitude proved stronger than the threat of ostracism: a lighted cigarette is an amiable companion. Often Jack talks to it, mostly in short interrogative phrases, such as, “Who knows?”, “So, what are we gonna do about it?” or, not having any particular person in mind, “How could anyone be so damn stupid?”, then he avidly sucks from his ephemeral, red-headed bud. Naturally no one expects answers from a cigarette, but that doesn’t detract from the companionship, rather the contrary.
On the way to his office on the second floor of the Humanities building, he is called by the Chair. “Good morning, Jack. Come on in and take a seat.” He sits and looks at the woman across the desk; she does not look at him, however, being busy examining the contents of a file folder she has just opened. For a long time this has been happening to Jack: when he looks at Traudl he is ready to conclude that there is no continuity between his self of twenty years back and his present one. How could there be? He finds it impossible to elicit any feelings of sexual interest for the woman, even though he acknowledges (the way one acknowledges that right now George W. Bush is President of the USA) that once he did desire her, so madly as to completely ruin his own life, and that for a couple of years they made love together on a regular basis. The Jack Schreiber of back then seems to have little in common with the Jack Schreiber of today; in fact the former tends to appear as a totally indiscriminate beast, something like a drug-poisoned sex maniac.
“That student of yours in Philosophy 101. The kid has contacted the campus Gay and Lesbian Alliance,” Traudl the Chair declares presently, “and they are demanding a formal apology from you.”
“What am I supposed to apologize for?” he says in a serious voice, but secretly amused at the thought that maybe he should apologize for having fucked his present Chair long and long ago.
“For making irrelevant comments in class on someone’s sexual preference,” says Traudl, reading from her papers.
Yankl makes a mental effort to recover the particulars of the case. “My comments were not irrelevant, Traudl. It was a lecture on computers and artificial intelligence; that so-called someone happens to be a genius, Alan Turing, and I was trying to suggest a reason for his choice to define intelligence the remarkable way he did. You may remember, he defined intelligent thinking as the ability to fool an interrogator who is trying to decide, by questions and answers, whether an invisible subject is a man or a woman. I suggested that, since Turing was gay, that particular ability might have had some special importance for him.”
“There’s just the rub,” says the Chair, “suggestions. You should be aware of it by now: suggestions tend to raise misperception and innuendo.”
Jack cannot repress a smile, hearing those words from Traudl Hildebrandt, of all people; Traudl, who first came to the Department as a lowly lecturer with a one-year contract, and has been able to stay on thanks only to his unstinting and far from disinterested support: their love affair used to be much talked about, sneered and snorted at on campus. All that, fortunately, belongs to the past, and Traudl has had a brilliant academic career on her own and almost, almost without his help. One night, in bed after sex, they had been commenting on the recent spat of academic feminist indictments of Newton as a rapist and of Newtonian science as a manual for rape, and Jack had joked that perhaps one should generalize and extend this indictment to other patriarchs of Reason and, more pointedly, to other, ever more heinous crimes. Taking a clue from his off-hand remark, Traudl proceeded to publish a series of groundbreaking articles in which the founding fathers of the Enlightenment—figures as disparate as Hume, Burke, Rousseau, d’Holbach, Lessing, Kant—are shown to have been child molesters one and all. As Traudl Hildebrandt takes pains to remind us in the foreword of her subsequent, seminal book (in which, incidentally, she nowhere acknowledges Jack’s help), we should not take those words, “child molester,” too literally; yet on the other hand we should be careful not to take them too figuratively either. Whatever the right interpretation and the just degree of figuration may be, the fact is that from that point Traudl’s standing in American philosophy didn’t stop going up, just as has been the case, mutatis paucis mutandis, in American musicology, with the feminist scholar who compared Beethoven’s Ninth to a rape manual. However, no one seems to have taken up the intriguing question, Among manuals of rape, which is the more effective, Newtonian science or Beethoven’s Ninth? Anyway, a time-lapse photo of Jack’s and Traudl’s academic careers would have shown something like an X: while his own influence, citation indices and number of invitations to speak in other campuses kept going steadily down, Traudl’s didn’t stop growing; it was right at the point of intersection of their professional trajectories that their love affair, and most of their personal contact, came to a stop. Traudl is now an academic star of the first magnitude: for the past two years she has been Chair of the philosophy department; this coming year she will be on leave, however, having been granted the much coveted Macarthur “genius” fellowship.
“So you suggest that I abstain from all suggestions in the future?” he asks, still smiling.
“This is serious, Jack. I don’t want this to become a scandal such as the English Department keeps undergoing all the time. And I don’t want to leave this issue unresolved to my temporary replacement.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Apologize, as they demand.”
“You write the apology, I’ll sign it.”
“I have other things to do. And this should come from you, personally. I don’t want it to be said that you signed it under pressure.”
Jack shrugs. “Okay, just give me some suggestions.”
Sitting in his office a little later, alone, the thought of retirement now naturally alights on his mind and demands attention. Sixty-five seems like just the right age to retire. But in the financial advisor’s estimation, he needs five more years of service to start getting anything like a sufficient pension. And besides, he, Yankl, fears the blank prospect of whole unformatted years, not divided into teaching segments, which by now seem more natural to him than the solar seasons. The shadow of increased loneliness is even more frightening. He understands that this fear is unreasonable, for nothing short of serious illness would prevent him from seeing friends after retirement. Loneliness in retirement need not be an issue. He would go on meeting Jim regularly as he does now, for instance. The thought is soothing, but it also reminds him of the task he has been postponing. Reading Jim Brown’s memoir is much more important than writing a letter of apology to the campus gays and lesbians. Infinitely more important, and, he dares say, a lot more pleasant. And so, retrieving the manuscript from his briefcase, he sits down to do his duty as amateur literary critic and bosom friend.
Jim Brown is a native of Boston: his parents moved there in the 1920s from their ancestral Ireland. Jim doesn’t think much of being able to visit the streets of his childhood whenever he wants to, and that may be because Forest Hill is no Havana, nor Buenos Aires; it is, in fact, a rather ugly, unfriendly neighborhood abounding in Catholic churches and Catholic cemeteries: Mt. Hope, Calvary, New Calvary, St. Michaels, and the eponymous Forest Hill, the largest one, on which borders the backyard of Jim’s childhood house. That Jim’s father worked as a foreman at a local brewery and had a drinking problem, that his mother was saintly, sang prettily and went to Mass every day, that he himself was a choir boy, and that well into adolescence he thought he was destined for the priesthood: such is, more or less, the extent of Jack’s knowledge of his friend’s early years. Jim will willingly tell childhood anecdotes over a cup of coffee, but those anecdotes are strictly typical—brawls between groups of boys from different streets, for instance—and since in such telling there is hardly any effort on Jim’s part to recover old feelings or old emotions—one might say there is even a resistance, or at least an American manly reticence—, the result is that the image which has shaped itself in Jack’s mind during the course of twenty years of friendship and conversation is not so much one of Jim’s boyhood as of a vague, stereotyped “Boston-Irish boyhood.” This is one of the reasons he looks forward to reading his friend’s memoir: simply put, Jack would like to learn more about Jim. About Jim’s soul, the substance of which is intertwined to his own.
To Yankl’s annoyance, however, there is practically nothing about Jim’s boyhood in this memoir. As the text starts, Jim is already in college, with only a brief, intercalated and grateful account of some of his high-school teachers who encouraged him to go to college. By the second chapter, he is already in graduate school, with loving references to his college teachers who encouraged him to attend graduate school. Further chapters deal, one by one, with each of the university campuses where he has served as faculty—instructor, assistant professor, associate professor, full professor. Rather than a memoir, it looks like a nightmarishly overgrown academic curriculum. Jack leafs through the manuscript: no, not an evocative word about Jim’s early years—why? Maybe Jim does not follow a strict chronological order? But no, there’s no evocative word about any year, early or late. Here and there Jack picks up a turn of phrase which causes a feeling of dismay sink deep down into his stomach—“Little did he know, back then…” or, “Unbeknownst to him…”
One theme gradually emerges: Jim is enormously proud of his doctoral degree, which has allowed him to ascend from blue-collar Forest Hill to the relatively leisurely, tenured groves of academe. Regardless of the modesty of its contents—Jim never mistook himself for an intellectual mover and shaker—his doctoral dissertation enabled him to escape, as he puts it, a future as a brewery foreman like his father, or at best a bank clerk. This seems to Jim nothing short of a miracle, and having been a pious Catholic in his youth, he cannot fail to ask in wonder and trembling, “Why me, Lord, why me?”
That’s when the other major theme comes in. This second theme has to do with justice, or in other words, with symmetry. Jim has always felt it is not fair that so many people are stuck in the working class because they do not have, like him, a PhD. Page after page has Jim filled with “incontrovertible,” “beyond dispute,” and “so-manifestly-good-as-to-lie-beyond-debate” socio-economic ideas destined to make a PhD available to everyone who desires one. Naturally, it has not escaped Jim’s notice that a PhD by itself is not sufficient; in his opinion, every PhD is entitled to a job, and not just any job (part-time jobs are sheer exploitation), but one within a good shot at tenure. However, as Jim points out, faculty in the Humanities are not promoted unless they publish a book, and given the present situation, the publishing industry will require massive subsidies from government if all the deserving scholarship is to receive the imprimatur, as it should. Regarding the obvious question, Who’s going to need so many tenured Humanities professors?, Jim has thought about it and reached the following conclusion. The USA will continue being the brutal, know-nothing bully, hated and despised by the whole world, until it becomes a bilingual country like Canada, or even better, a trilingual country like the Duchy of Luxemburg. Whatever language(s) is (are) chosen alongside English, whether Spanish or French, or perhaps Italian, the USA are going to find themselves in need of a lot of PhDs in the Romance Languages.
Jack leafs through and lands, at the end of the manuscript, on a paragraph headed, “My Final Comments and Recommendations.” Who Jim’s making those recommendations to, he doesn’t say. To friends and relatives, and to his grandchildren—who else? The final comments and recommendations end thus: “Adequate protection of minorities, lasting remedies for past injustices, will result only from massive governmental intervention across the board, from pre-school through housing to jobs.”
Yankl lays Jim’s memoir on the desk, sits back to stretch his shoulders and looks at the ceiling. “Massive,” he says. Massive symmetry. Massive shame. Is it the vicarious sort of shame one feels when a friend is making a fool of himself? Well, yes, to some extent, perhaps. But mostly, it is shame and disgust of his own massive weakness. His is a vulgar heart, Yankl feels, unable to stay put and content without anchor or support. Yes, damn it, his is a cowardly heart terrified by the horror of the void and by Anaximander’s symmetry.
The phone rings. It is Traudl the Chair. She has forgotten to tell him: his written apology must be ready today by five PM.