ONE SENTENCE
Donald Barthelme
Or a long sentence moving at a certain pace down the page aiming for the
bottom-if not the bottom of this page then some other page-where it can
rest, or stop for a moment to think out the questions raised by its own
(temporary) existence, which ends when the page is turned, or the
sentence falls out of the mind that holds it (temporarily) in some kind
of embrace, not necessarily an ardent one, but more perhaps the kind of
embrace enjoyed (or endured), by a wife who has just waked up and is on
her way to the bathroom in the morning to wash her hair, and is bumped
into by her husband, who has been lounging at the breakfast table
reading the newspaper, and doesn't see her coming out of the bedroom,
but, when he bumps into her, or is bumped into by her, raises his hands
to embrace her lightly, transiently, because he knows that if he gives
her a real embrace so early in the morning, before she has properly
shaken the dreams out of her head, and got her duds on, she won't
respond, and may even become slightly angry, and say something wounding,
and so the husband invests in this embrace not so much physical or
emotional pressure as he might, because he doesn't want to waste
anything-with this sort of feeling, then, the sentence passes through
the mind more or less, and there is another way of describing the
situation too, which is to say that the sentence crawls through the mind
like something someone says to you while you are listening very hard to
the FM radio, some rock group there, with its thrilling sound, and so,
with your attention or the major part of it at least already rewarded,
there is not much mind room you can give to the remark, especially
considering that you have probably just quarreled with that person, the
maker of the remark, over the radio being too loud, or something like
that, and the view you take, of the remark, is that you'd really rather
not hear it, but if you have to hear it, you want to listen to it for
the smallest possible length of time, and during a commercial, because
immediately after the commercial they're going to play a new rock song
by your favorite group, a cut that has never been aired before, and you
want to hear it and respond to it in a new way, a way that accords with
whatever you're feeling at the moment, or might feel, if the threat of
new experience could be (temporarily) overbalanced by the promise of
possible positive benefits, or what the mind construes as such,
remembering that these are often, really, disguised defeats (not that
such defeats are not, at times, good for your character, teaching you
that it is not by success alone that one surmounts life, but that
setbacks, too, contribute to that roughening of the personality that, by
providing a textured surface to place against that of life, enables you
to leave slight traces, or smudges, on the face of human history-your
mark) and after all, benefit-seeking always has something of the smell
of raw vanity about it, as if you wished to decorate your own brow with
laurel, or wear your medals to a cookout, when the invitation had said
nothing about them, and although the ego is always hungry (we are told)
it is well to remember that ongoing success is nearly as meaningless as
ongoing lack of success, which can make you sick, and that it is good to
leave a few crumbs on the table for the rest of your brethren, not to
sweep it all into the little beaded purse of your soul but to allow
others, too, part of the gratification, and if you share in this way you
will find the clouds smiling on you, and the postman bringing you
letters, and bicycles available when you want to rent them, and many
other signs, however guarded and limited, of the community's (temporary)
approval of you, or at least of it's willingness to let you believe
(temporarily) that it finds you not so lacking in commendable virtues as
it had previously allowed you to think, from its scorn of your merits,
as it might be put, or anyway its consistent refusal to recognize your
basic humanness and its secret blackball of the project of your
remaining alive, made in executive session by its ruling bodies, which,
as everyone knows, carry out concealed programs of reward and
punishment, under the rose, causing faint alterations of the status quo,
behind your back, at various points along the periphery of community
life, together with other enterprises not dissimilar in tone, such as
producing films that have special qualities, or attributes, such as a
film where the second half of it is a holy mystery, and girls and women
are not permitted to see it, or writing novels in which the final
chapter is a plastic bag filled with water, which you can touch, but not
drink: in this way, or ways, the underground mental life of the
collectivity is botched, or denied, or turned into something else never
imagined by the planners, who, returning from the latest seminar in
crisis management and being asked what they have learned, say they have
learned how to throw up their hands; the sentence meanwhile, although
not insensible of these considerations, has a festering conscience of
its own, which persuades it to follow its star, and to move with all
deliberate speed from one place to another, without losing any of the
"riders" it may have picked up just being there, on the page, and
turning this way and that, to see what is over there, under that
oddly-shaped tree, or over there, reflected in the rain barrel of the
imagination, even though it is true that in our young manhood we were
taught that short, punchy sentences were best (but what did he mean?
doesn't "punchy" mean punch-drunk? I think he probably intended to say
"short, punching sentences," meaning sentences that lashed out at you,
bloodying your brain if possible, and looking up the word just now I
came across the nearby "punkah," which is a large fan suspended from the
ceiling in India, operated by an attendant pulling a rope-that is what I
want for my sentence, to keep it cool!) we are mature enough now to
stand the shock of learning that much of what we were taught in our
youth was wrong, or improperly understood by those who were teaching it,
or perhaps shaded a bit, the shading resulting from the personal needs
of the teachers, who as human beings had a tendency to introduce some of
their heart's blood into their work, and sometimes this may not have
been of the first water, this heart's blood, and even if they thought
they were moving the "knowledge" out, as the Board of Education had
mandated, they could have noticed that their sentences weren't having
the knockdown power of the new weapons whose bullets tumble end-over-end
(but it is true that we didn't have these weapons at that time) and
they might have taken into account the fundamental dubiousness of their
project (but all the intelligently conceived projects have been eaten up
already, like the moon and the stars) leaving us, in our best clothes,
with only things to do like conducting vigorous wars of attrition
against our wives, who have now thoroughly come awake, and slipped into
their striped bells, and pulled sweaters over their torsi, and adamantly
refused to wear any bras under the sweaters, carefully explaining the
political significance of this refusal to anyone who will listen, or
look, but not touch, because that has nothing to do with it, so they
say; leaving us, as it were, with only things to do like floating sheets
of Reynolds Wrap around the room, trying to find out how many we can
keep in the air at the same time, which at least gives us a sense of
participation, as though we were Buddha, looking down at the mystery of
your smile, which needs to be investigated, and I think I'll do that
right now, while there's still enough light, if you'll sit down over
there, in the best chair, and take off all your clothes, and put your
feet in that electric toe caddy (which prevents pneumonia) and slip into
this permanent press hospital gown, to cover your nakedness-why, if you
do all that, we'll be ready to begin! after I wash my hands, because
you pick up an amazing amount of exuviae in this city, just by walking
around in the open air, and nodding to acquaintances, and speaking to
friends, and copulating with lovers, in the ordinary course (and death
to our enemies! by and by)-but I'm getting a little uptight, just about
washing my hands, because I can't find the soap, which somebody has used
and not put back in the soap dish, all of which is extremely
irritating, if you have a beautiful patient sitting in the examining
room, naked inside her gown, and peering at her moles in the mirror,
with her immense brown eyes following your every movement (when they are
not watching the moles, expecting them, as in a Disney nature film, to
exfoliate) and her immense brown head wondering what you're going to do
to her, the pierced places in the head letting that question leak out,
while the therapist decides just to wash his hands in plain water, and
hang the soap! and does so, and then looks around for a towel, but all
the towels have been collected by the towel service, and are not there,
so he wipes his hands on his pants, in the back (so as to avoid
suspicious stains on the front) thinking: what must she think of me?
and, all this is very unprofessional and at-sea looking! trying to
visualize the contretemps from her point of view, if she has one (but
how can she? she is not in the washroom) and then stopping, because it
is finally his own point of view that he cares about and not hers, and
with this firmly in mind, and a light, confident step, such as you might
find in the works of Bulwer-Lytton, he enters the space she occupies so
prettily and, taking her by the hand, proceeds to tear off the stiff
white hospital gown (but no, we cannot have that kind of pornographic
merde in this majestic and high-minded sentence, which will probably end
up in the Library of Congress) (that was just something that took place
inside his consciousness, as he looked at her, and since we know that
consciousness is always consciousness of something, she is not entirely
without responsibility in the matter) so, then, taking her by the hand,
he falls into the stupendous white puree of her abyss, no, I mean rather
that he asks her how long it has been since her last visit, and she
says a fortnight, and he shudders, and tells her that with a condition
like hers (she is an immensely popular soldier, and her troops win all
their battles by pretending to be forests, the enemy discovering, at the
last moment, that those trees they have eaten their lunch under have
eyes and swords) (which reminds me of the performance, in 1845, of
Robert-Houdin, called The Fantastic Orange Tree, wherein Robert-Houdin
borrowed a lady's handkerchief, rubbed it between his hands and passed
it into the center of an egg, after which he passed the egg into the
center of a lemon, after which he passed the lemon into the center of an
orange, then pressed the orange between his hands, making it smaller
and smaller, until only a powder remained, whereupon he asked for a
small potted orange tree and sprinkled the powder thereupon, upon which
the tree burst into blossom, the blossoms turning into oranges, the
oranges turning into butterflies, and the butterflies turning into
beautiful young ladies, who then married members of the audience), a
condition so damaging to real-time social intercourse of any kind, the
best thing she can do is give up, and lay down her arms, and he will lie
down in them, and together they will permit themselves a bit of the old
slap and tickle, she wearing only her Mr. Christopher medal, on its
silver chain, and he (for such is the latitude granted the professional
classes) worrying about the sentence, about its thin wires of dramatic
tension, which have been omitted, about whether we should write down
some natural events occurring in the sky (birds, lightning bolts), and
about a possible coup d'etat within the sentence, whereby its chief verb
would be-but at this moment a messenger rushes into the sentence,
bleeding from a hat of thorns he's wearing, and cries out: "You don't
know what you're doing! Stop making this sentence, and begin instead to
make Moholy-Nagy cocktails, for those are what we really need, on the
frontiers of bad behavior!" and then he falls to the floor, and a trap
door opens under him, and he falls through that, into a damp pit where a
blue narwhal waits, its horn poised (but maybe the weight of the
messenger, falling from such a height, will break off the horn)-thus,
considering everything very carefully, in the sweet light of the
ceremonial axes, in the run-mad skimble-skamble of information sickness,
we must make a decision as to whether we should proceed, or go back, in
the latter case enjoying the pathos of eradication, in which the former
case reading an erotic advertisement which begins, How to Make Your
Mouth a Blowtorch of Excitement (but wouldn't that overtax our
mouthwashes?) attempting, during the pause, while our burned mouths are
being smeared with fat, to imagine a better sentence, worthier, more
meaningful, like those in the Declaration of Independence, or a bank
statement showing that you have seven thousand kroner more than you
thought you had-a statement summing up the unreasonable demands that you
make on life, and one that also asks the question, if you can imagine
these demands, why are they not routinely met, tall fool? but of course
it is not that query that this infected sentence has set out to answer
(and hello! to our girl friend, Rosetta Stone, who has stuck by us
through thick and thin) but some other query that we shall some day
discover the nature of, and here comes Ludwig, the expert on sentence
construction we have borrowed from the Bauhaus, who will-"Guten Tag,
Ludwig!"-probably find a way to cure the sentence's sprawl, by using the
improved way of thinking developed in Weimer-"I am sorry to inform you
that the Bauhaus no longer exists, that all of the great masters who
formerly thought there are either dead or retired, and that I myself
have been reduced to constructing books on how to pass the examination
for police sergeant"-and Ludwig falls through the Tugendhat House into
the history of man-made objects; a disappointment, to be sure, but it
reminds us that the sentence itself is a man-made object, not the one we
wanted of course, but still a construction of man, a structure to be
treasured for its weakness, as opposed to the strength of stones.
*
UPDATE! My apologies, I didn't double-check the birthday - an old error, I've been using March 7 for years as Barthelme's birthday, I didn't check when I first posted his birthday years ago and haven't checked since, and wouldn't have known now if the tweet hadn't gone, by my standards of response, viral (easily the most retweeted and favorited of my tweets ever) and someone manning the tweet machine at the New York Review of Books hadn't sent me a personal message.
Two more of his short stories below the fold.
