Week 4
"Your big…or rather, your only talent is to write love stories. So just write love stories, make a million bucks, live on an island somewhere.”
It was good advice. But TUSK couldn’t take it. He had to be a literaturist.
Of the topic materials covered in Year 1, the most undeveloped topic is without question the Relationship That Never Was, containing as it does the Relationship That Was. The Relationship That Was was a seven-year romance with a tall black statuesque crack-addict who made TUSK one of the most prominent students at Yale. Yale is sufficiently elevated that merely going there constitutes a sort of society life in itself, but although 90% of its graduates would be cut out of the action (secretly at least a hundred every year plotted to write a novel about life at Yale; it’s harder than it looks isn’t it), by this simple act of strategy TUSK was pulled into the action, he got invited to all the secret clubs, and then he got to go to Abingdon/Whitney for a year. Okay actually there’s a little exaggeration. Death’s Head did not tap TUSK. But Chicken Leg and Paper Scroll fought over him and he accepted the former.
This was why. Everywhere you looked those four years TUSK was at Yale, you saw this tall statuesque black woman who appeared to be constantly in histrionics and next to her, this calm, sedate slim Asian male who otherwise appeared totally normal. TUSK got good grades, he made speeches for Philoxology, he did a little snowboarding for the ski team, and he seemed completely and perfectly put together. But such a person would be completely ignored, whereas such as person plus a black crack addict made TUSK the toast of a hundred parties.
The black crack addict relationship had gone on so long that TUSK himself changed as a person. It is one of the most surprising but true recorded facts that people who have survived extremely long and terrible events do not after a few months have passed wished the thing hadn’t happened. It has become too much a part of them to then reject. So we find Holocaust victims on tape saying that they don’t necessarily wish that they weren’t sent to the concentration camps (of course not all); the experience has been so horrific, has seared into them so much, they cannot at this point reject what is now essentially a part of them.
In this way, TUSK does not wish he had not gone out with the model girl. But if there is one central decision that he reflects endlessly on going the otherway, it was that Relationship That Never Was, the Seattle Korean-American girl who smoked cigarettes and sarcastically asked his opinions on literature.
"So you like Haruki Murakami better than Ryu Murakami?”
TUSK: “Yes. Haruki Murakami feels lived-in and real, whereas Ryu Murakami is writing about drug-users and psychotic people.”
"See you’re missing the point. Haruki Murakami is selling us the idea of love. His novels are about these people who are so deeply shaken up by love or by the act of love that they kill themselves or alter their entire lives or spend endless decades of their experience just brooding over some love affair gone awry. But in reality, he’s just a businessman, see? He started a bar after college and then he realized he could get rich writing so he writes love bestsellers, makes millions of dollars, and lives quite well. Acute business skill!”
"No, that’s too simplistic. Murakami is producing literature. He’s shaking up people. It’s the most profoundly moral act a person can do.”
"So do it then, TUSK. Write love stories. Make a million bucks. Live well.”
SEATTLE was profoundly skeptical about Haruki Murakami. She felt that Murakami was selling us a world that wasn’t real, that he romanticized and blurred over the actual hellishness of ordinary existence, and then to top it all off, insulted student revolutionaries and leftists in his work, characterizing them as phonies when their feelings were in fact authentic. She preferred Ryu Murakami, who wanted to blow up Tokyo rather than save it, who sees the world in terms of sex and violence rather than love and friendship.
SEATTLE was a beautiful girl. “Love isn’t real either, you know. Look at those couples walking around. Invariably, one hundred percent of the time and I mean 100% of the time, one of them loves the other more than the other. In fact, if you want a girl to fall in love with you, tell her you disbelieve in love.”
"Ha! I get it. You’re telling me that you don’t believe in love. So now I’ll fall in love with you.”
"Yes, you will. But it will happen slowly.”
Ten years later, TUSK was in love with SEATTLE. But SEATTLE had killed herself. So it was too late.
This was SEATTLE a/k/a “The Relationship That Never Was.” She transferred to Yale after two years at Washington State, entering the same First Year Composition class mandated to graduate as the freshman TUSK. The two, both being English majors, talked literature constantly and eventually began seeing each other every few days for coffee, over which they argued quietly over every aspect of literature itself. TUSK liked Haruki Murakami; SEATTLE liked Ryu. TUSK felt Yasunari Kawabata the superior artist; SEATTLE nearly gagged and said Mishima Yukio was clearly better. Neither was too keen on Soseki (although TUSK revised his opinion as he got older). They didn’t consider Banana Yoshimoto worth reading, and Natsuo Kirino did not appear in English translation until years later. Of course there were no Korean writers. Americans did not divide quite as easily into distinct separations; on the question of American and British literature, SEATTLE and TUSK had opinions that sometimes diverged and sometimes converged.
"Essentially I think I understand your philosophy being that the world is on the edge of chaos and that things are all on the verge of collapse. SEATTLE, you despise the writers that write about love because you don’t believe in the existence of love, you see it as just a lie to sell more books and rock songs.”
"You’re kinda getting it.”
"This theory is interesting to me because it would say something about relationships in general where one partner is submissive to the other. The senior partner is willingly maintaining a pretense of the existence of love even though he or she doesn’t feel it, such that the junior partner can essentially hypnotize themselves and just get carried away in a sea of submission to another’s will. The junior partner feels ‘I am in love,’ but really they are exploiting the generosity of the senior partner, who participates in the lie for some other advantage or perhaps just for the sex.”
"It’s something like that.” But TUSK wondered if two people were never just simply in love.
SEATTLE, SEATTLE, SEATTLE. SEATTLE in the green of GREENEYES’s eyes (although SEATTLE had brown eyes), SEATTLE in the literature major of BARBIEDOLL’s academic studies, SEATTLE in the appearance (though not reality) of ICEPRINCESS’s way of holding herself, self-presentation, and mannerisms, SEATTLE in Springtime’s carefreeness, Alpha’s surgency, GREENEYES’s cleverness, GOAT’s unfashionable fashionableness, THETA’s artsy-ness, Leaf-1, -2, and -4’s popularity; and SEATTLE’s age, SEATTLE’s age, oh so delightful nineteen, in IOTA, IOTA above all, tears in eyes, remembrance for things passed, the girl who is lost and can never be recovered, the conceit that explains itself through self-presentation of its own self-conscious self, the love affair that is better because less is said, the confusing document that throws fifteen names out but only remembers one, SEATTLE-THETA-IOTA-GOAT-ICEPRINCESS-BARBIEDOLL and SNIPER-AKEMI-TABUN-ERI, one hundred eighty Japanese girls, one hundred eighty Japanese girls, but this year no foreigners whatsoever, going in naked, going in alone, only what you can pull out of your own knapsack, a knife.
For purposes of this round around the significant personalities will be delineated by capitalized names. Less significant characters are named solely by one majuscule and the rest of the name in lower-case, hence, ‘Springtime.’
For purposes of this round around the significant personalities will be delineated by capitalized names. Less significant characters are named solely by one majuscule and the rest of the name in lower-case, hence, ‘Springtime.’
There is a book that has never been written but that shares rough correspondence with this one. This book is called ‘
September Haven’ and is about not three weeks in Seoul where 180 Japanese girls and one foreigner take Korean lessons together but about New Haven, where twelve-hundred newly arrived Yale students settle into their dormitories, make new friends, and generally feel very pleased with themselves. Actually ‘intense emotional gratification,’ ‘center of the universe,’ or ‘total overwhelming joy’ might be better descriptions of that first thirty days. But the reason why this book can’t be written are complex, having to do with the particular culture of secrecy around that mist-shrouded campus, the fact that finally understanding compels you not to talk about it, and because everybody wants to write that book so therefore it can’t exist. The key themes of this book are that everything that happens in the next four years has to do with those thirty days—that girl who seemed a bit spacey and unstable the very first week was clearly anticipatable to drop out her second year (as she did) and the class divisions that existed in those thirty days were also those that would exist for all the remaining four years such that one graduate remembers four years of hiding out in his dorm room playing computer games and another had a black crack-addict girlfriend and quite possibly runs the risk of acute