Dangerous Arrangements/ Aimless Estrangements
Walter Reed
Department of English. Emory University
I
arranged to meet myself at Grand Central Station, in the Oyster Bar. I knew this old, broken relationship
would have to be attended to eventually, and I decided to take the opportunity
of being in New York for a professional meeting to see if I could renew old
acquaintance. Over a dozen Long
Island Blue Points and a glass of beer, I told myself, it would be easier to
reestablish old ties.
In
a certain sense, we are always rearranging ourselves, shuffling through the
pages of yesterday’s bulletins, last week’s memoranda, e-mails from self to
soul that got put at the bottom of the pile of papers . . .—which one was
it? The one on the left side of
the desk or the one on the floor over by the filing cabinet?
To: Walt
From: Walt
Subject: Possible rearrangement of our schedule
for tomorrow
Cc: alter egos, alternate selves
Why
arrangements in particular? Why
not constructions, constellations, compositions (“Compose yourself now, son;
don’t get carried away.”) Soren
Kierkegaard: “and you would have
become, like the unhappy demoniac in the gospels, legion. You would have lost that inmost and
holiest thing of all in a man, the unifying power of personality.”
Creative
Improvisation, #3, Take 4. I guess
what I’m coming around to is the notion that the integral indivisible self is
arranged and arrayed, rearranged and displayed, from a set of possibilities
dealt from a finite set of cards (the human genome as a deck of cards? The unwritten diary of one’s days as 52
Pick-Up?). Is there some occult
connection, some Symboliste correspondence, between the number of weeks in a year and the number of cards in
a deck? The arrangements and
rearrangements of the hands one is dealt and the hands one plays—skillfully,
ineptly, with incredible luck (good or bad) depend on the game ones finds
oneself in—on the table on bellies up to.
Old
Maid, Go Fish, twenty versions of poker, with my brother Steve bluffing madly
but usually forcing the rest of us to fold. And Giant Canasta, where every deck of cards we could lay
our hands on was pressed into service for games that could last, off and on,
for days. (I’m still talking about
arrangements—runs, straights, flushes, pairs, three-of-a-kind’s, full
houses.) “As smug as a Christian
holding four aces,” says Mark Twain.
The endless bridge games in the buttroom at Exeter, the hapless poker
game above the off-license on Hemingford Road, the idle, time-killing games of
solitaire. Can I arrange these all
in some sort of hand? A winning
hand? “You have to know when to
hold them and when to fold them.” I
did get pretty good at shuffling the deck when it was my turn to deal. Your cut. Dealer’s choice:
seven-card stud, deuces and one-eyed Jacks wild. Ah, those wild cards, the deck within
the deck.
I’ve
just finished re-reading and teaching the peculiarly scrambled and reassembled
novel by Italo Calvino If on a winter’s night a traveler. Chapters of a frame tale in which “you”
are the protagonist alternate with fragments of a series of novels, repeatedly
cut short just when “you” were really getting interested. Other readers try to pursue the
text—the unified, continuous story that is promised by the two covers with a
single author and title—but they are readers with different agendas, different
arrangements, different competing and yet mysteriously complementary desires.
(This improvisation has settled into the professor’s professional rut. To the shoemaker, it’s all
leather. To the English teacher,
it’s all great books and good reads.
(Hey, that’s a pun on my name!
Where did that come from?)
I’m
still trying to arrange my thoughts on arrangement. Take 7.
Higgledy
Piggledy,
Douglas
R. Hofstadter
Lectured
at Emory,
Discourses
three.
Ended
his visit with
Epstein’s
experiment,
[single
word needed here— crab-compositional
last
line beats me] canon of glee?
This
last attempt to arrange the exciting intellectual exchanges of the last 24
hours into the lyric form known as the double dactyl (invented by Anthony Hecht
and improved by John Hollander) has fallen short, has fallen flat, even with
the variant of the last two lines.
Like all arrangements, perhaps, in the end. As Borges says, “ There is no exercise of the intellect
which is not, in the final analysis, useless.” But no exercise, either, which can’t serve some purpose in
the larger scheme (of arrangement) of things.
Emory Improvisations
Home Page