What Lies Beneath
On self control, rosacea, beautiful television, and underwater civilizations.
It can feel like most of my time is spent attempting to impose order on the disorder that is daily life. Trying to break my bad procrastinating habits, to optimize, to fit more and better things into the day. It doesn’t seem like it should be so difficult to refrain from letting hours wash down the drain as I scroll through Instagram or refresh Twitter. I have a “phone pot,” a lidded ceramic vessel that Dan got me one Christmas in an effort to aid that year’s resolution to spend less time looking at a tiny screen. I have seen “phone beds” for sale on the internet, for those who’d like to tuck theirs in overnight; I prefer dumping mine, at all hours, into a thing that could double as an urn for cremains.
It’s a busy season, work-wise: I’m doing pre-publication things for my first book and trying to finish a draft of a new one; on the horizon at VF I have a series of interviews with brilliant people with whom I’m very much looking forward to speaking. The days seem to disappear more quickly than usual. Blink and you miss February. But despite the deadlines and maybe because the sky is so gray and the remnants of snow in our neighborhood have reached peak dingy, I’ve found myself seeking out distractions in the form of pure aesthetic pleasure: half-watching the most recent season of The Crown for its sumptuous settings and 80s jeans and Barbour jackets and Natascha McElhone wearing literally anything. Wong Kar Wai’s In The Mood For Love, an old DVD set of Brideshead Revisited. In college during finals I used to spend hours watching beauty bloggers’ makeup tutorials as though in rebellion against my intellectual duties; now, whenever I have lots of things to do that require creativity and brain power, I again find myself fixating on physical flaws and methods by which to eradicate them. This season it’s my rosacea which, in the freezing wind outside and dry air inside, is happily thriving. I’ve ordered and implemented a balaclava and skin barrier repair creams, I think often about how much water I’ve consumed since waking. It’s easier to obsess over the red blooms on my cheeks and the angry rash on my forehead than the more slippery frustrations of spending an early morning writing a scene that has been glowing vibrantly in my head for the past year only to find it suddenly flat and drab on the screen.
Maybe it’s just natural to seek comfortives in the winter. I’ve been rereading old favorites, too, mostly novels and short stories. (I haven’t completely given up on my prior commitment to poetry, but fiction sure is hard to shake.) I reread Paul’s The Night Ocean, which I love more every time. And Nabokov, because Nabokov always seems able to shake me out of a slump.
“Symbols and Signs,” published in the New Yorker in 1948, concerns an elderly couple trying to fix far more substantial concerns than my current ones. The story takes place over a single day in New York, during which the pair prepares to visit their adult son at a sanatorium. “That Friday, their son’s birthday, everything went wrong.” Together, they attempt to bring beauty (a set of jarred fruit jellies) and order (intricate plans to move their son home) to a life in which horror is constantly waiting in the wings.
The disorder from which their son suffers is given a made-up name for real life symptoms. “‘Referential mania,’ the article had called it. In these very rare cases, the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence,” Nabokov writes.
Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to each other, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His in- most thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees….others, again (running water, storms), are hysterical to the point of insanity, have a distorted opinion of him, and grotesquely misinterpret his actions.
This syndrome—“Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme”—plagues, in various permutations, several of Nabokov’s characters: Aqua in Ada hears voices in the faucets; Pale Fire’s solipsistic Kinbote sees himself in a poet’s own autobiographical work; titular Pnin, as a child bedridden with a mysterious chill, attempts to discern the systematic logic to the patterns in his wallpaper: “It stood to reason that if the evil designer—the destroyer of minds, the friend of fever—had concealed the key of the pattern with such monstrous care, that key must be as precious as life itself and, when found, would regain for Timofey Pnin his everyday health, his everyday world…”
I wonder if most of us don’t have some degree of referential mania; if this isn’t just another name for what we call coincidence or fate or superstition. A spate of happy luck (a ten dollar bill found on the sidewalk; a stranger’s smile on the subway) reads as a good omen, while a chain of nasty events seems to indicate more darkness on the horizon. What is astrology if not mass referential mania, the movement of the planets apparently signaling whether that night’s Tinder date will go well? When are we not trying to read the tea leaves?
“Symbols and Signs”—like all of Nabokov’s work—turns its reader into a victim of the syndrome, asking her to pull out clues in the story that point to how it might end. As it happens, this one ends with something of a cliff-hanger. Having returned home from the sanatorium without seeing their son, as the nurse informs them that he has attempted suicide and a visit might further upset him, the couple is up late in the night together drinking tea and formulating a plan to bring him home. They receive an unusual late-night call; the woman answers and, happily, it is only a wrong number. (“It frightened me,” the woman says to her husband; the reader was frightened too.) They receive a second call, the same wrong number, and the woman patiently explains what the caller’s doing wrong, so that they might not repeat their mistake. She hangs up. The husband drinks his tea and admires the pretty jelly jars they’d hoped to give to their son. They receive a third call, and the story ends. Perhaps it was the same caller, messing up over and over again. But how might one read that piling up of cues from our couple’s very bad day—a fledgling bird twitching in a puddle, plans gone awry—and discern anything but doom in its final inconclusive sentence?
I can’t help but do this in my own life, find meaning in threads of coincidence. The same weekend I reread The Night Ocean, and noticed for the first time a quiet recurring image of lost underwater civilizations in Paul’s work, I visited Flagstaff Lake, a large manmade impoundment created in 1949 when the Central Maine Power Company dammed the Dead River. At the bottom of the lake lies the remnants of the communities that were cleared in the lead up to its creation. Most of the occupants of Flagstaff Village and Dead River Village were bought out and relocated, their homes demolished; those that refused to sell had to leave anyway once the flood waters came. “Maine Village About To Die Has Farewell Celebration,” read one Boston Globe headline.
The legend goes that Flagstaff got its name from Benedict Arnold camping in the area as he led the march to Quebec, with aims to capture the then British-occupied city, in the Revolutionary War. He stuck a flagpole at his campsite. His effort failed. The discerning reader might say that the village, with its less than auspicious name, was doomed from the start.
Before white people occupied the land it had been home to various mammals and insects and birds. The Wabanaki, who have lived in Maine for more than 11,000 years, frequented the area. Now, I imagine the remnants of the towns down there under the water like a life size version of the fish tank I had when I was a kid, filled, as it was, with ceramic “ruins” for the fish to swim through. The abandoned houses are now occupied by landlocked salmon, blacknose dace, yellow perch, and my personal favorite, the slimy sculpin. I stood at the edge of the lake, frozen over and flanked by snow drifts, and looking back now the experience felt a bit like reading my favorite kind of book: cool beauty on the surface, muck and mystery beneath.
READ…
…about demon dolls courtesy of Sadie Stein, filling in for Molly Young at Read Like The Wind.
…a few of the V.F. staff’s recent favorite books.
TAKE…
…a bath.