Night Soil Read online

  Of course, alternate futures are, in the Academy view, even more aberrant fantasies than precognitive pasts. The cat in the box is alive or the cat in the box is dead, and though we might never know which it is, we know it’s never both. The significance of these fantasies isn’t that they might exist on some other plane of being or in a parallel universe, it’s that they could have existed in ours. That the lives we lead today, and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, aren’t forged by us, but by the world, whose primacy we obscure when we substitute the words “chance” and “will.” Every other child in America learns that his life is his to shape, but Academy boys are taught they can only observe it; that the things other people consider life—love, career, social status—are mere symptoms and shadows. Real life is nothing more or less than a body in four dimensions, a semi-stable set of atoms in constant collision with other sets; everything else is byproduct, distraction, ultimately irrelevant. In January or February, 1981, my mother had sex with a man bearing the same genetic mutation Marcus Stammers had passed to her—a one-hundred-million-to-one possibility, or about 300 times worse than the odds of dying in a plane crash. But odds or no odds, it happened: I’m the evidence, and I bear witness every day of my life.

  But to claim that my birthmark or the chain of circumstances that produced it somehow makes me “more unique” than anyone else is to admit that human beings don’t actually believe in our much-espoused individuality. That, in fact, we fear we’re all the same, or, even more plaintively, wish we were the same. Follow this line of thinking to its logical terminus and you come to the inevitable conclusion that each person believes himself or herself to be the world: that space and time are nothing more than an extension of individual consciousness, a sight brought into existence by our eyes, a song unsung till our ears hear it, a lover whose flesh doesn’t exist until we stroke it into being. Hence animism and anthropomorphism, hence organized religion, hence metaphor itself, whose one true function is to measure the gap between reality and what we wish it were. Academy teaching on art starts and ends with the premise that art has no material form—is nothing but a perceptual mode superimposed on an object or experience, i.e., a shared illusion, given false reality by meretricious metaphor, which, far from illuminating the phenomenon to which it is applied, is in actuality a deliberate statement of notness that takes the specific form of a replacement of one thing by another. “X is like Y” is really just another way of saying “X is not X,” and since, qua nineteenth-century physics, X is—must be—X, then the assertion that X could ever be anything other than X must be false, and not useful in ascertaining what X is: namely, a system or collection of component parts whose delineation was the masters’ holy grail. And I mean yeah, sure, that’s pretty obvious to anyone who’s paying attention. But isn’t metaphor also an index of the human desire (human not as in weak but as in living) for something more than the material, the actual—something that’s been lost or might still be gained? My mother’s pots let people believe in the possibility of pure, perfect expression, a one-to-one correspondence between thought and deed, as if each pot wasn’t a copy of its predecessor, nor even a clone, but was in fact the same pot, just as the world Hephaestus forged on Achilles’s shield wasn’t a copy of the one in which the war between Achaeans and Trojans had dragged on for a decade, but was in fact the same world. To describe the gods’ acts of creation as Homer had described them was one thing; actually to manifest them was another, and for a mere mortal not just impossible but abominable. It was this impulse as much as the pots themselves that a second wave of critics came to denounce as inhuman, just as the first fans of my mother’s work celebrated it as superhuman. But the truth is all it was was human. Not imperfect. Just incomplete. The sameness of the pots’ emptiness manifested as difference by virtue of the thousand, the million, the billion different desires with which their viewers filled them, by which I mean that there was no way my mother’s pots could resist becoming symbols. Not once they’d gone out into the world. But disagreement over what they symbolized bitterly divided her audience. Did the pots in their identicality resemble human beings—not evolutionary Homo sapiens, but, rather, Adam shaped from clay by God’s hand—distinguished only by their individual contents, their inner desires, which some commentators went so far as to identify with the soul? Or was the thing these people called the soul really just a projection, no more real, no more relevant than shapes seen in clouds, and, more to the point, preventing us from seeing the real cloud—the real pot, the real world, the real self?

  To which my mother would only shrug and say, “All men are donkeys or men and donkeys are donkeys.” I.e., meaning is often a question of emphasis: where you place the commas and conjunctions, which books you read and bring to bear on the proposition in question. Which is to say, again, that my mother didn’t care what people thought her pots “did” in the world. But my mother’s sophistic dismissal of questions about her work made me realize that she didn’t care what I did either. That she cared only about the fact that she’d made me, and that I’d come out flawed. Years before the Gospel of Judas became available to a general audience, my mother was aware of the theologian Irenaeus’s denunciation, in his Adversus Haereses, of the Gnostic belief that Judas Iscariot “accomplished the mystery of the betrayal” not only with Jesus’s knowledge but at his direction. Enraptured by the idea of an act of treason that was actually a secret expression of loyalty, my mother christened her son Judas in the belief that his name would make clear that her apparent rejection of Academy doctrine was in fact the only way she could bring Grandpa Marcus’s ideas to their fullest expression. “You shall be cursed for generations,” Jesus tells the instrument of his apotheosis, “but you will exceed all of them, for you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.” What she (apparently) didn’t know was that even in the Gnostic version of things Judas is unable to bear the burden of his role, and dreams of being—longs to be—stoned to death by the other Apostles. More to the point, she also didn’t realize that pretty much no one in Marcuse would know this story, let alone care about it, and often reacted to my name far more violently than they did to my face.

  So, Judas Stammers, the flowering of: I was made in secret in the lowest parts of the earth. Plant poisoned seeds in cursed soil and its fruit shall bleed royal tears; yea, verily, you shall reap what you sow. Nasciturus pro iam nato habetur, quotiens de commodis eius agitur: the unborn is deemed to have been born to the extent that his own inheritance is concerned. Sola fide, ecce homo, noli me tangere. Vae, puto deus fio!

  So:

  My birthmark cups the left side of my face like a fat, flattened, four-fingered hand. One finger pressed down so tightly on the edge of my lips when I was born that I couldn’t open my mouth wide enough to feed and had to have surgery when I was three days old to slice it apart, although after it healed I refused to take the breast, or a bottle for that matter, and my mother had to force, first, an eye dropper and, later, a turkey baster between my clenched lips, until I was eighteen months old. (But you knew that already, didn’t you? Not the exact shape maybe, but just as a person in a darkened room can recognize a peach—by smell, by touch, by taste—you knew exactly what you’d see if the lights snapped on and my face emerged into view like an Easter egg laid sideways in purple dye.) The second finger presses on the bridge of my nose and across my left eyelid and, aside from a tendency to stiffen and droop that requires periodic laser treatments to soften it, has never given me much trouble, while the third finger covers most of my left ear, reaching deeply into the canal and coating the drum like a wax seal that gradually stiffened, causing me to lose a little more of my hearing each year until, by the time I was sixteen, I’d gone pretty much deaf on that side. (Does this help? Does knowing the specifics contain the situation like a wax seal, or does it in fact free your mind to go elsewhere, to abandon the actual for the emblematic, the real for the unreal, the unreal for the ur-real: not birthmark but “birthmark,” not Judas but “Jud
as”?) The fourth finger curves under the ear and extends into the hairline on the back of my head. The hair that grows there is—no one knows why—hypopigmented, i.e., as colorless as an albino’s (the rest of my hair is, vulgarly speaking, brown) and looks, more than one person has noted, exactly like Somalia, although people have also said Peru (reversed) and Vietnam (united), a flamingo’s beak, a sabretooth, an arrowhead, a Roman nose, and just about anything else if I let them stutter on long enough. But no one ever says that the birthmark itself looks like anything other than a hand, even though it only has four fingers, and even though it looks more like a wrinkled glove than a hand. No one ever says, simply, that it’s ugly—at least not to my face. (Still, I understand why it was necessary for me to say it straight: no matter how many clues I dropped, no matter how sure you were that you understood what I was saying, you’d have found a way to deny me if I hadn’t let you touch my flesh, to save yourself the pain of contemplating what it must be like to be me.) The wrist of the hand stretches down the left side of my neck and spills around my arm all the way to my knuckles. Its path down my torso is as torturous as the White Woman’s, curling in wide thick loops that island nine distinct patches of pale skin; it’s fairly solid on the outside of the ribs but as it approaches the midline it striates into darker and lighter patches like a brindle-coated thylacine. (And perhaps I shouldn’t be so hard on you. Thomas didn’t believe either, not till he’d put his finger in the holes in Jesus’s hands, and look where he ended up. Oh, that’s right: he ended up martyred in India, his Eastern-inflected gospel excluded from the canon, his name—which was Judas actually, “thomas” being an Aramaic word meaning “twin,” though who or what this particular Judas was twin to is a subject of much contention—forever associated with the refusal to accept the evidence of things not seen. Is it any wonder he was the de facto saint of the Academy?) In front it reaches to the base of my penis, and though only a few dribbles extend down the shaft these lines are particularly thick and, even today, prone to tearing at the most inopportune moments. It’s more aggressive in back, coiling around the bottom of my left buttock before slipping into the cleft and lidding my anus the same way it once gagged me. The blockage was so severe that I had to have three surgeries to correct it, the first when my mouth was fixed, and then again when I was three, and a final one when I was fourteen, about six months after we moved to the house my mother insisted on christening Potter’s Field. (“Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed”: that’s what Jesus said to Thomas Judas, and that’s why, now, I’ve given in, lowered the mirrored window between us and shown you your true reflection, “for there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed.”) Yes indeedy, every last gory detail’s coming out now. To wit: I was on stool softeners for most of my early childhood and then again for a good part of my adolescence; until I was six years old, I moved my bowels in one of my mother’s pots so she could check for unacceptable amounts of blood. At that point they had yet to become artifacts so sacred that even the idea of using one as a gazunder was a desecration (c.f. poor Mr. Ling), but still—why’d she make me shit in a pot? Why did my mother, who wouldn’t drink champagne out of anything but a flute and owned the same style of T-strap Birkenstocks (the Gizeh, if names are important to you) in no fewer than twelve different colors; who at the height of her fame thought nothing of smashing one of her pots with a hammer (well, no, not a hammer, that wouldn’t be Dixie Stammers’s style, but a bobble-capped length of lignum vitae that was said to have been a clapper in a bell in the second Coptic cathedral of St. Mark in Alexandria) and spreading the pieces on the bottom of a $40 cedar windowbox to ensure proper drainage for her geraniums; who during the filming of Three by Stammers tossed a hundred-thousand-dollar objet d’art like a basketball in order to show the director (who caught it, then started weeping hysterically) exactly what they were worth to her who could make a new one as easily as a mint makes money—why did this woman refuse to buy me a potty training seat or let me go directly into the toilet and check for blood there, instead of requiring me to squat on a nine-and-a-half-inch ceramic ball that, however well-balanced, wasn’t meant to accommodate a confused toddler (an ashamed preschooler, a mortified first-former who made the mistake of bringing a classmate over for a playdate) as he tried to center his anus over a hole less than four inches wide? Why, after I had fallen over for the eighth or ninth or twentieth time in the act of voiding my bowels and broken a jagged piece out of the top of the pot, did she replace it with another, unbroken one rather than let me take advantage of the larger opening? (“We’ll just give this one to the Browns, okay?”) The only mercy in the whole ordeal is the fact that my sphincter itself wasn’t damaged, and I don’t suffer from incontinence, which more than one doctor had predicted (although skinny-dicked men do have a tendency to bang against the sides of my rectum like a spoon stirring a pot of pudding, a ball clapper summoning the faithful in Egypt, or at least those who don’t respond to the azan). By which I mean that yes, I’m as guilty as you. I want my birthmark to acquire the meaning only narrative and exegesis can impart: not “a birthmark” but “The Birthmark,” not Judas Stammers but Nathaniel Hawthorne, not a kooky neo-Parmenidean Academy but the Sanborn School, where the children of Hawthorne, Emerson, Henry James Sr., and John Brown were educated in the spiritual democracy of American Transcendentalism. But like Thomas, I doubt, and cannot believe until I’ve poked holes in my own story. And though there are any number of reasons why I loathe my body, having an accommodating asshole isn’t one of them.

  2

  The last portrait of Marcus Stammers, painted two years before his death in 1896 at the age of ninety-eight, shows an ascetically thin man, a transparent fog of colorless hair combed back from a deeply rutted forehead, a wispy beard falling down his chest like a waterfall more mist than liquid. Open jacket, string tie, the affectation of an anthracite-capped copper stud in his third buttonhole. The painter dutifully recorded the stains the stud left on his starched dickey (black from the coal, green from the copper), but omitted what was generally considered Marcus’s most striking feature: the two gnarled ironwood staves (one was a staff, two were staves, and they were never, ever called canes) he’d been forced to use since a rearing horse fell back on him when he was forty-seven, crushing his pelvis. The fractures set poorly, which is another way of saying Marcus was lucky to survive—although he was quick to point out that the horse had had to be destroyed, whereas all he suffered was a lifetime of excruciating agony. At any rate he was never again able to stand unaided, and even with his pair of five-foot-tall sticks (sorry, Grandpa, “staves” just sounds corny in the twenty-first century, as I suspect it did in the nineteenth) he tipped precariously forward when he walked, back curled like a fishhook, hipbones splayed from his ruined pelvis like a nag’s withered croup. His grandson Chester’s fiancée made the mistake of comparing him to Rocinante, for which impiety the engagement was broken off.

  From the birth of his first great-grandchild in 1888, Elizabeth (not Chester’s child—he died of consumption before finding another suitable marriage candidate—but the daughter of Marcus’s oldest son, Henry’s, middle child, Viola), he was referred to by the family as Great Grandpa Marcus, the hyphen that would have delimited “Great”’s genealogical significance omitted because it was clear by then that Marcus Stammers’s magnificence was unbounded by any notion of ancestry, let alone mere gonadal accomplishment. Grandpa Marcus was great not because of the children he’d made but because of the world he’d built: the business, the town, and, later, the school, and school of thought. His was the kind of great usually preceded by a “the”: the Great Zambini, the Great Pretender, the Great Communicator; and the fact that all of these associations contravened the third and most lasting of his accomplishments was just one of many instances of exceptionalism in the Stammerses’ relationship to their own traditions (another example, one to which I am beholden and of which I’m also a victim, would seem to be the h
aving of children). Well: the greatest lawmen often turn out to be the most notorious criminals, political liberators are almost always flagrantly dictatorial, and the most venerated prophets often doubt their own message, if they don’t just make it up. Marcus Stammers was a bit of each of these things, and if his canvas was proportionally insignificant in comparison to those of J. Edgar Hoover, Mohandas Gandhi, and Joseph Smith, his dominance over his homeplace was that much more total. Although his own existence—and, through guilt by association, his family’s—flew in the face of virtually every principle he came to be associated with, neither his own nor his descendants’ actions were ever questioned by his subjects. Beyond the borders of Marcuse and Wye it’s a different story, but it’s also someone else’s story, to live and to tell—and to be fair to Marcus, he didn’t come up with the Academy until very late in a very, very long life.

  Families tend to characterize themselves as either “normal” or “exceptional,” the first term a euphemism not so much for poverty, be it mental or fiscal, as for a perceived sequestration, sometimes voluntary, sometimes forced, from the kinds of sociopolitical phenomena that schoolbooks like to designate “history”; whereas the second connotes a role, accidental or intentional, in those same events. Stammerers, obviously, place themselves in the latter category, but when I compare our dynastic drama to those of other families it seems to me that the majority of genealogical narratives are no less steeped in history than ours is—it’s just less apparent, because they don’t sync up with the national myth in the very visible ways the Stammerses’ did. To wit: in 1841 (c.f., the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Treaty of New Echota of 1835, the Cherokee departure for the Trail of Tears in 1838), a Scottish immigrant named Marcus Stammers, forty-three years old and flush with cash from his copper mine, negotiated a deal to purchase 32,000 acres of former Cherokee land at the ridiculously low price of $3.89 per, including the entirety of Mt. Inverna, the southernmost and second largest of a range of eight small mountains the Cherokee called “Tsistuyi,” a word I’ve seen translated as “antlers of the deer,” “spearheads of the war party,” “saliva-covered teeth of the bear,” and “glaucous.” Three hundred- and 400-foot-tall splinters of bare graywacke (which turns dark—very dark, almost Prussian—blue after it rains; hence its more common name of bluestone) alternated with tenacious stands of rock oak and longleaf and loblolly pine (as well as, presumably, Sonderegger pine, a naturally occurring cross between the two) and dozens of slivered cataracts that froze each winter into tubes of ice that looked to one European observer like “so many empty intestinal casings waiting to be stuffed with sausage.” The deal’s terms stipulated that Marcus had to remove the shantytown that had sprung up on Inverna’s north slope, a fairly simple feat, since the encampment was largely populated by miners who worked at Magic Mountain Copper, as well as their families and the sizable colony of tradesmen and whores who serviced them. The workers had originally settled at the western foot of the then-unnamed peak immediately south of the Magic Mountain (the one now known as the Viminal), but Marcus, who didn’t yet own that land, threatened to fire anyone who failed to relocate immediately, because he suspected (incorrectly, as it turned out) that the copper buried in the Magic Mountain was also present in its neighbors, and he wanted to make sure there were no claims against his eventual exploration and acquisition of the mineral rights. The workers were moved eight miles to the south, to the only large patch of unowned, unoccupied, and, it must be said, undesirable land in the vicinity, which sat on Inverna’s damp north-facing slope above a four-square-mile patch of bogland where the muddy waters of the White Woman Creek debouched across the flat terrain like a spilled cup of coffee spreading over a carpet. They’d lived there for just over three years, had built something like an actual town when Marcus chased them away a second time, but on this occasion he promised to give them nicer homes to return to. This he surely did, razing their shacks and regrading the entire north slope of the mountain and building upon its terraced surface the village of Marcuse—not the name he claimed to have chosen, which was variously given as Arcadia, Elysium, Novus Tsistuyi, and New Auchterarder, but the one his workers “insisted” upon “to honor him” (or perhaps just to save themselves the headache of learning to spell, or say for that matter, “Tsistuyi” or “Auchterarder”). The manufactured town’s gently sloped lanes angle off arrow-straight High Street like barbs from a feather’s rachis; Marcus, who claimed to have emigrated from Glasgow as an eight-year-old (although some accounts give his age as eleven, sixteen, twenty-two, cite his actual birthplace as Newcastle-upon-Tyne or Greenwich, Connecticut), referred to his (possibly) native city as a “Shite-Hole” and chose to model High Street after Edinburgh’s Royal Mile instead—modeled after in the sense that the Royal Mile is understood to be a route between Edinburgh Castle, the city’s ancient keep, and Holyroodhouse, the residence of the monarchs of Great Britain when they’re in town. Thus the bottom of High Street (before the Foundry was built anyway) was a plaza at the southern edge of the Lake, on the far side of which the Magic Mountains, which were in many ways Marcus’s castle, Marcus’s keep, stretched for more than ten miles, while at the other end of the hill, 5,294 feet due south and 916 feet further above sea level, sat Stammers Hall. The street is graded to guarantee that the top of the mountain is never occluded. Even the trees have to cooperate, so High Street is lined with more than three hundred ginkgos, whose crowns tend to grow up rather than out. Marcus considered Lombardy poplars and Mediterranean cypresses and English oaks, all more genuinely fastigiate trees, but opted for the ginkgos because of their fall foliage, which every October cloaks the path to Stammers Hall in a pair of lemon-yellow curtains seventy feet high and a mile long, behind which winter waits like the second installment of a Greek trilogy. Marcus knew about the ginkgos’ brilliant fall foliage but, like my mother, he also only knew what he knew, which is to say that he didn’t know that the fruit of the ginkgo is filled with butanoic acid, which smells pretty much exactly like shit. He knew that the seed of the ginkgo is edible, knew too that ginkgo seeds are associated with improved memory and sharpness of wit, and so ordered nine females for every male (on the assumption, I suppose, that a few male trees would help the females bear fruit in the same way that the presence of a rooster is supposed to encourage hens to lay), but he didn’t know you had to tear through the disgusting pulp to get to the seeds. My mother used to tell me to say that the fruit smells like rancid butter or rotten eggs rather than shit, but I told her that the idea of associating the ginkgos’ foul odor with something edible was even more disgusting than associating it with excrement, i.e., something that had been eaten, and she must have agreed because she stopped correcting me (although she did try to get me to say “poop” or “doo-doo” in the company of strangers; I suspect that by this point in our narrative you won’t be surprised to learn that I refused).