Asparagus Maximus’
Letter to Jonathan Safran Foer
Dear Mr. J. S. Foer,
I hope this letter finds you in good health and that the Western climate, social and otherwise, is not too shocking for your Eastern sensibility. Allow me to reiterate that if the accommodations I have provided are insufficient, or if there is anything you lack in the few remaining days before we meet, do not hesitate to contact my servant Ryohei Nanashi, or myself if the case is dire. This Easter Sunday at eleven a.m. sharp, Nanashi will be waiting in the hotel lobby to carry you down to the dock by rickshaw. You will know him by his bamboo hat and paper kimono, and he will know you by the invitation bearing my stamp.
In preparation for the maritime tea party, I should like to give background to several individuals you will doubtlessly encounter. You might find them hoarding the chocolate pralines or sipping too noisily on chokecherry tea, but do not laugh at their indecencies and bloviations. I should tell you why it isn’t funny, why they remain the unhung prisoners of vigilante speech organs, tongues cocked and gums blazing.
The following are English selections from my most recently published book, one poem translated into sixteen languages, entitled In Praise of Seven Silences. Certain acquired characters I regularly invite to join me at sea, besides my own family members, feature prominently in this long poetic piece. They have been resurrected from the prosaisms of street, occupational, voluntary life; given and taken continuity. From this you may choose which subjects might keep you conversationally afloat, and which will get you shouldered off into the cold, silent waters below.
How I began:
This is a fill-in-the-phrase
book. To be brought out in desperate times when you feel
regret for all those you’ve given away.
With as little design as possible, desperate to re-appropriate all the closed-lip conclusions lost from one moment to the next. Make of my words a moisture, adsorbate on the page.
Mid-stride, I convinced myself by reverse psychology that one should write with a clear purpose in hand, taking time for integrity and stiff-chinned chuckles. Then buck all you like and call the reader weak-kneed when he’s thrown into the margins and refuses to mount semantics again. If you wield no purpose: indulge aesthetic. In this, Mr. Foer, you show considerable promise. Your novel has left an impression on my mind that will not soon be washed away. The whimsical march of characters – endearing, pitiful, and terrifying – sweeps through a lithe and glowing landscape. It is organic and exothermic like a compost heap. But I warn you, Mr. Foer, it is here that you risk permitting natural talent and an early success to run you ashore; marooned, pacified, and static.
To continue, if neither purpose nor aesthetic is within reach, develop contempt. It can be for anything. Outside yourself, inside, or both. A parent or a tape worm in the gut; an article of punctuation, an appetite for disaster; power and prescription, a propensity for hokum, lies, abandonment; the paper you make ever attempt to bruise or the bones swearing in your fist, etc. Now, now. If you were afforded a naturally peaceful disposition, content with the inner and outer, avoid premeditation and write sensation. Misplace angles. Cradle language without qualification in the lung, expanding and contracting with the demands of narrative body. Submerge yourself in sensation, act and intention, beyond the tyranny of value.
Of course, both you and your work might be decried by Moralists, sneered at by Contempters, and set aside with self-congratulatory delicacy by Aesthetes. Do not be surprised if the Purposed also pass you over with indifference. To be Purposed, a writer must ignore what does not directly promote or oppose that motivating manifesto. But pay no attention to me. I have never written a worthwhile line in all my life. Take the following for example:
…spit glittered on the road like a silver dollar…
A vague dive for accuracy through metaphor. “Vague” meaning quarter-hearted, a stone slow stretch of the fingers before the real works out.
Consider this:
I learned one thing recently : I sleep
on the sea so that I will never be locked out of my house.
Could it as easily be the streets? Drilling my body so full of holes
I would be tapped plotless.
Sugar in the tank – epiphany’s clog of the fuel pipe, speculation gumming up the lines – causing the engine to heave and this truck to scrawl until stopped.
As I am sure you have come to realize, my true weakness is not for writing but for collecting, benefacting. I learned to walk so that I might no longer squat on my legs; grew rich to support my habit of supporting other people’s habits, cultivating an eye for perishable ideas. It has been seven years since I beat a speedy retreat to my houseboat on the Pacific, purple by day and by night. A long time since I have entertained any concern but that of heartfelt symmetry for my semi-circle of artistic compatriots. We are children together, remaking the world according to the needs of our alter egos. And I want you to become a part of it, give us a new voice on the struggles between this and that. But always remember while passing teatime with my fellows: When the body dies, both the fool and the wise alike are cut off and perish. Submit to fruitless practice, then you have begun.
To complete In Praise of…, I began again, looping perspective around the neck with a short leash and making sure “I” couldn’t be seen yanking that string :
Softly and squirming, like virgin romantics, three gentle people make wax eyes at one another across the table; looks of sheepish guilt tempering intense curiosity. The floor is 3 feet under water walled away. None have a key to get out of this room, nor oars to paddle home again. They start by eyeing the portholes, mouthing statements with no beginning and no end, earing the clocks on the walls and the sounds that their feet flush from the carpet. Huddled like pretensions, quiet, suffering misthought actions on account of Kaddette wine.
Then One claps his hands to begin a story: Childhood
Wearing white sneakers and throwing hot sausage
everlasting gobstoppers
whole chicken
into crowd of other kids at semi-formal
dance. The wine
reminds him of
falling in love
and shooting bullets at people. Now he treads through his thoughts like a finger
through molasses, tasteless, and has not fat but so much wrinkle on his face he
can blow his cheeks out like an accordion. “
One’s love left him defenseless and went something like this :
He coughed, she cackled. He tackled, she limped. She doddled on the expect, he took it as a reject. The disappointment meant disaster, go around again. Starve the morning, shake the shit. She gave him the slip, he drifted flotsam in her wake. His scoff when she joshed, her pucker for another. If he were to stew, she’d call him mush. “Blunderbuss,” she mustered, as he hunkered down. They pulled their punches, from the streets, from the shelves, embrocating their wounds with a rag soaked in gin.
One fell silent and the Other took it up: Childhood
he signed contracts
arranged by his mother in regards to broken rules
fumbled responsibilities
ugly behaviors
continually clarifying certain ambiguities
inherent in Maternal Law for the sake of
“Nex time you cop a attitude.”
This is why the Other now signs legal documents with only his first name,
the last never needed between family.
Now Mother’s always compared to love. Tipping back his glass and whetting his lips, he sputtered to describe a woman to whom he once proposed when they were both young and sporting futures, but she replied backhandedly, using words like star and expansion.
She claimed to see their chute : His success
in business, her tag-along role as wife. “Neti, neti!” she shrieked, “I am one who has gone forth! The bags have sunk so deep their ragged beneath my eyes. Laughter didn’t stick around to prop them up, the skin purple circles. We will be well to do. I will always appear stern. Church on Sundays. You’d think we’d always been. You escort me by the elbow as we exit, smooth as the pews. We are elegant and worn that way.”
The Other thought she overreacted, highly affected by interest bias, and decided he wouldn’t want to marry a clairvoyant anyway. After that, he rode the train’s black muscle to the coast, pent up and settled down to live like a lightless box.
The Last learned to be neat
from her mother, who was messy and disturbed every unbolted item in the house while casting around for some other, snowballing the constant
search and lift, search and
shift of her belonging.
This Last is the daughter of a single woman and that woman’s nervous habits, which include petty larceny of cheap plastic
fake nails, q-tips, handkerchiefs, hand lotion, silver and flatware; eyebrow
smoothing with her pinkie fingers; and a jittery skid into violent fits, swearing herself into a corner.
A rictal grin on the Last’s slim face, she gestured widely, finally, recalling an acid head, the Quirk:
The only manner of escape is to examine details, he said,
The grand performance – a well-planned picnic or a civic parade running on the gaudy side of under funded –
these are not what transmute the brain from its bored
tabula rasa into an organ fit for Peculiarity.
Only listening, leaning in, adjoining one’s self to this minutia raises that said-
same-brain to the status of Foreign from the Familiar.
Mannerisms are not adopted from spectacle, but from steady sandpaper massage of tacit implication.
“Of which category, Implemented or Contracted, is language bourn? I made motions to ask,” said the Quirk in session sixty-seven, proscribing the Laws of Mumblability. “I wake up ever morning full of phlegm every morning phlegm ever morning full morning phlegm.”
“Escape the words which are one-time-only, a mouth to mouth resuscitation, kitsch clop kitsch clop kitsch.”
“Is attention to detail going to make me absurd to all those I surround? I curiosed,” said the Quirk in session two eleven.
“Toss out phobia like one hem of a picnic blanket – scattering napkin holders, cucumber sandwiches – and have none to rely on but yourself,” he said to the Last. “Enjoy the forwardness of time propelled by the backwardness of human hungers.”
Examining the calm socio-physical stimuli jostling frictaceous in the periphery that is “fig sorbet or diet mousse?” makes the subject nervous, finicky, and sometimes ostensibly hostile.
Details, details.
This is what the Last wrote to justify the Quirk’s behavior. Her job was not to justify but rather to analyze, a subtle difference not overlooked by the Big Government Facility (B.G.F.) Board of Directors. This sympathy between patient and subject was the ultimate impetus for her removal.
Once removed, the Last was free to engage this nervous side-stepper of fortune to her heart’s contents.
She waded in blue autumn outside of her PT cruiser convertible, top up,
sick for him
to exit the B.G.F. after one of his “sessions” with Another.
“You’re the gray I’d mist,” he said, “Your waves are miraculous.” “How can such convolution be so spare?” she wondered, reaching out for his twig to twig hips. “You wonder too mooshi-mooshi,” he continued, “and in the endemic all your high fallutin ideas boil down to the tight ah of the spirit with the prick of a pin.”
And they drove
away to
the John Wayne airport to buy a J.W. belt buckle and parody a
woman, spitting, “Fuck you, John Wayne,”
into his nostrils
and his retort, “Well fuck you too little lady.”
They sat for seventeen hours at a twenty-four hour café,
where the Quirk required a repetitive touch on the fabric or rub on the sugar dish, seizing in small portions with the hustle-scuffle music, the voiced plosives of liquid and solid things in contact. He emptied his pockets and pulled paper, chalk, match packets from his hat. During this time, the Last unveiled how the Quirk’s nervous gripness and pinchness, lucidly expounded upon throughout their many quarter hours at the B.G.F., provided too late a glimpse into her own mother’s troubled tap dance.
They drank mint martinis until, pouring their early dinner into the late gutter, bodied down without success in the back seat of the cruiser. Finally collocated by their mutual coercion, the Quirk told the Last about his slaphappy mother (sometimes happy, mostly slap) and pinwheel father (pinned tot he wheelings of a bum rubber deal). He mentioned those who have no enemies, growing old and procreative.
The Last and the Quirk drove Hwy 101 to the redwood forests nine hundred miles north, immediately striking them as the most fertile and by consequence arousing landscape they’d ever encountered. They made mute love and it all worked out to their benefit, matched like bookends: functionally opposite.
Mr. Foer, you will meet One, sculptor and social reformist; the Other, sound art composer; the Last, painter of psychological landscapes; and the Quirk, finite philosopher; but not the Other’s would-have-been fiancé, as she remains undiscovered; the Last’s mother, who is indisposed; nor either of the Quirk’s parents, for delicate reasons.
I
myself am the child of one woman and one half of a conjoined pyopagus twin,
that is “joined at the rump,” named Gregory and Samuel. My mother met the Twin
in the ethnomusicology department at the
Gregory and Samuel never did outgrow certain childish behaviors, like mimicking one another in squeaky voices during squabbles over fig sorbet or diet mousse. With only one set of small intestines, they often argued over which kind of some such foodstuff would be best for the bowls, the circulatory system, the like. A mostly reasonable seat of dissent – wouldn’t want a Tragedy of the Commons coming to pass – and really quite a show. Their heads faced permanently away from one another so that they appeared stubborn and pouty with all of their arms crossed. But it was tiring for my detached family members and me to have witnessed over and over again. Accustomed to walking away form arguments, we could identify the proper point for giving up and going home to a few chocolate chocolate chip macaroons dunked in heavy cream, this being the traditional Maximus family Sunday dinner dessert.
Until
the day they died in a hot air ballooning accident, Gregory and Samuel kept up
another tradition of standing near the dessert table and performing an exchange
between two German extropians whose names are known. “I’ve always believed
religious ascetics antagonize biology.” Then Samuel struck a match and lit
Gregory’s pipe. “But what if sex is mechanized?” This also tired the Maximus
family, many of whom you, Mr. Foer, will meet at sea. My Aunt Margala and
second cousin “13057” are sure to come, but I cannot be certain that my mother
will attend. She rarely leaves her apartment in
Everything is
ruined by the harp music, lean harmony made by mysterious hands. The apartment
is a mess and the morning slow with hunger. Bare refrigerator, penniless couch.
I have finally arrived. The mess troubles me to lose sentences beneath dark
stains creeping like lizards from carpet to blanket to wall to ceiling fan.
Sentences are somewhere, but every morning I begin by breathing. I can’t
remember what I’m looking for. I thought I had problems once, looked at white
spaces leaning against the spotless furniture, said, “I have too many problems
to deal with.” I have arrived since beginning with shucking the corn cob pipe,
the Captain Black tobacco, then shoes, bookcases, now the apartment is empty,
but a mess. Those stains, and there are footprints everywhere. I would wipe
them up, but napkins are precious. Counting five toes for each step, one napkin
for the lot, a ball, a heel, one napkin for each of those. Napkins to wipe away
the harp sneaking through the walls. Every morning I begin, breathing, but
choke on those melodies. There are wires in my throat. The mysterious hands
work for three and a half hours, then lay the instrument against the other side
of that wall, behind the stain. Now maybe I don’t have too many problems. I
have only one. One or two. The apartment is a mess and I lose my sentences
rapidly. I almost choked to unconsciousness on a grape yesterday. The chair I
saved saved me, you know the one, with griffins carved into the legs. I leaned
over the curved back, heaved my abdomen against it and it held while the harp
music snuck. The grape popped out and left a stain on the carpet. Napkins are
good for all sorts of things. They hold sentences, but stains as well. The
music creeps in on all fours. Even when the instrument sleeps on the other side
of the stain. Sometimes I consider moving like chasmosaurus, slamming my weight
against the wall, knocking the poison back, tumble and break, neck from pillar
and pillar from soundbox. I hear the songs pad around like children, chide them
with names: Difficult Birth, Bowling Alley, Late and Tired, Call from
She goes on, but it only grows more worrisome. I have invited her on several occasions to live with me on the houseboat, but spending more than a week or so ocean bound causes her joints to fail and her memory to rupture. This is, at least, what she goes on about most of the time. Now in her late seventies, she is a delicate woman. Not too long ago she wailed and moaned in a public parking lot because she could not walk the straight line of some narrow cement block. “I used to skip on fence rails,” she would not stop sobbing, “I used to skip.”
But I can understand this tempermentality. I have been somewhat delicate, myself, since birth. I began life with a lazy left eye and mild stress-induced asthma, as well as suffering other physical manifestations of emotional distress. The first time I can vividly recall this phenomenon having taken place was at the age of nine. I vomited in class upon the reception of a note marked, “From: Mable.” I took the neatly folded paper into my hands. I looked up from my World Atlas coloring book into her limpid brown eyes, turned toward me from three rows forward and one column across, my lip quivering with the beat of my heart. My stomach roiled like that of a Gaelic warrior entering the battle field as one corner of her mouth lifted gently and she tugged that thick, auburn French braid. I turned on like a faucet. Pepperoni pizza, buttered string beans, and 2% milk. The stiff carped refused to absorb a lick so that my bile spread like an oil spill across the ocean blue floor of Room 203-B. Needless to say, after getting a good-enough look at the moments of projectile and puddling to recount it all during recess, which came early, Mable turned away in disgust. I lost the note in the shuffle.
And this is not the only opportunity ruined by a sensitive physiology. Some others include anxious joints caused by a college interview, made particularly unfortunate because the cracking of joints was the admissions counselor for the university that I did not attend’s most intense pet peeve; flatulence during a very important business meeting in Tokyo; headache and sneezing throughout the Twin’s funeral, causing me to retire early from the ceremony and therefore offend my rich Aunt Margala to such a degree that she cut me out of her will entirely. Aunt Margala still insists on sending for Nanashi each Sunday, making sure to run her bony fingers over everything in the houseboat, leaving behind a streak of pejoratives to make it clear just what she thinks of my success.
And that reminds me, I should also furnish you with the lyrics to a song my family and guests often sing at uncomfortable moments during our maritime tea parties. Imagine the wind in your hair, Mr. Foer, the salt in your eyes as each person tried to drown the other out:
If the going is good, it’s good to get going. Never unlovable, only love-d-less.
It’s good to get going, to go, to get good.
Signed,
Asparagus Maximus