Ta Dah! Monsieur Simard
May 2016. I come upon Anne Carson and Isabel Bechdel about a week apart and like them both immediately. Carson is a classicist and writer/poet; Bechdel, a cartoonist/graphic novelist.
Carson is what I like to imagine myself having become. A scholar whose understanding of the languages and literature is exhaustive, she uses it to great effect in her own writing. Bechdel, I can imagine as a sort of friend whose interests and particular angsts are somewhat aligned with mine, reading many of the same authors and using dreams in her work.
These women’s personal stories become confused in my mind. I read Carson’s ‘Nox’ , an elegy for her brother and all the while visualize him as Bechdel’s brother. When Carson mentions her own mother, I substitute Bechdel’s and consequently carry the tension from that context into this one. Suddenly I am surprised by my complete misreading of the text. I have to go back to the beginning.
Carson says the the word ‘history’ comes from the greek verb ‘to ask’. I feel like an historian as Ta Dah! takes shape, asking the question: what is this? There is at least one fact. It begins with a dream in which I’m working on some murals during a kind of fashion show where people, mostly older women who are pleased with their bodies, happily oblige the viewers with glimpses.
Apparently Herodotos, an historian himself, believed the strangest thing humans do is history. Accounts are neither clear nor helpful even if factual, he said. There is an opacity, a muteness, an ‘overtakelessness’ about them. Still…he wrote them in order that deeds done by men not go extinct nor great astonishing works vanish.
I ask more questions, make decisions: how naked, how old, what kind of murals, whose the man with the cigar. This gets me closer to finishing the collage but not necessarily to the what. I ask my mother questions also. What did dad say the last day. Did he sing. Pray.
Bechdel’s ‘Are You My Mother?’ is a memoir/autobiography. Her mother doesn’t know why everyone has to write about themselves, be so confessional, so specific. She says the self has no place in good writing. And naturally she’s rather uncomfortable with her own self placed in this context. At one point she admits to feeling betrayed. At another she distances herself, suggesting her daughter’s perception is only that and certainly not the truth. Later she concedes that in the end, it’s all about the story.
Monsieur Simard comes to visit. He likes this particular collage. Identifies with the man in the corner. But make him smile, he urges.
There seems to be an ambivalence about the dead. On the one hand a concern with appropriating, overtaking them. Carson prowls through letters, photographs, memories. Bechdel collects past and present details of her mother’s life. On the other, and according to Carson, a kind of stinginess. There’s nothing more to be expended on the dead. They’re dead. Love cannot alter it, words cannot add to it.
When Herodotos ended a history, these were his closing words: I have to say what is said. I don’t have to believe it myself.