#patrick close

[cyber-flaneur]

a fine pint, in good company...

[warrenreview]

Warren Sunday Review: David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress by Patrick Close

by Patrick Close “Haunted places are the only ones that people can live in.” - Michel De Certeau

I was nineteen and the world meant nothing to me. It’s true. Slumped in a splintery muskoka chair, with my pink Loose Moose baseball cap keeping my unkempt hair in check, I was just one fuming squalid lump, splayed out like a meal for a colony of vultures, in the middle of my parent’s grotesquely lush backyard.

For me, failing at all things in life, both large and small, had become a matter of routine. But I failed ever so fervently at reading. With gusto. Of all things, my inability to read seemed to bore down on me the most. The only thing closest to reading was perpetually failing to do so. Fail. Fail again. Fail forever. Right?

This time I had chosen a book that was very simple for me to comprehend: it was about a woman who believed she was the sole remaining human on earth. Yeah, I nodded my head furiously while reading the jacket cover blurb in my favourite bookstore; I assumed the owners were looking at me then, wondering, “gee, you think he’ll actually buy this one? He’s already fondled every goddamn book in this store twice over.” I bought it without speaking a word. I remember wondering as I left whether I had adequately contorted my face in such a way as to silently convey sincere gratitude and my true love for their store. Sometimes I only smile on the inside.

Back to me in the wilderness of my parent’s backyard. (The sole remaining me on earth, to be sure.) After cups and cups of ineffectual coffee, I had managed to slip through the armhole of the muskoka chair, and my head was now awkwardly supporting the remainder of my body that jutted out over the other side of the chair. At any point of the day or night, it was common for my family to walk into a room and find me breakdancing. But I wasn’t breakdancing. I would just find myself in these inexplicable, tangled poses--on the couch, on the floor--that I would hold for an hour or two until my breath got stale or gravity took me elsewhere. There was no explaining how I got into these poses and no conceiving how to get out of them.

In any case, there I was executing an almost pristine b-boy chair freeze, ensnared in my chair, with the right side of my head flat against the concrete, and, then, holy shit, I was reading.

I was 78 pages into David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, and it was then that I was struck with genuine, pant-shitting terror. Nothing much happens in the book. Our narrator, Kate, who believes she is the only human on earth, divides her time between leaving messages in the street (in hopes of being proved wrong about her situation) or otherwise musing about Rembrandt and Kierkegaard and the cats she once had.

On page 78, I realized how tenuous my connection to Kate was, even though I had come to very much like her. She off-handedly comments that she forgot to indicate that “this is another day of typing” and that she had left the sheet in her typewriter—containing the words that I was reading—and went for a walk along the beach.

What if Kate were to stand up and walk away from her typewriter, never to return, leaving me utterly and terribly alone, leaving me in the very world she believed herself to be in, amidst the relics of bygone human activity?

I was aware how irrational this was. For instance, there was still 228 pages to go; physical proof that she’d stay at least a little longer! But her admission left an unfathomable, vertigo-inducing gap after each full-stop, between every word and every letter: the possibility that she could be absent from the text in front of me, off on some beach, travelling for days, between the space of one word and the next. I feared she could abandon me in media res. The source of my terror was literally between the lines.

This destroyed me. I cried and cried. I cried so hard in my b-boy chair freeze stance. This was a good cry: although I felt broken, it was then that I knew I would be whole again. After all, I was reading again.

The philosopher Bertrand Russell once received a letter from a woman who expressed her surprise about how few other solipsist there were in the world; Markson dangles his reader over the horror of solipsism, while at the same time providing its most elegant refutation in the form of a letter by an effective solipsist. Even if Kate abandoned me in her world, I would not be alone. I would inherit a world. To have or be in a ‘world’ is to never be alone. We belong to a world as much as it belongs to us.

I was able to remember that this world—the real one—is abundant, inhabited by not just relics, but living breathing memories and ways of life. It’s true: haunted places are the only places we can live. We always live, at the very least, in the bountiful company of ghosts.