A Manageable Amount
“Maps simplify the world somewhat in the way a heavy snowfall does, give the sense of starting over, clarify for those overstimulated by ordinary confusion. Each path in the snow shows, the ground keeps a record of it but also makes one feel there is a manageable amount going on.”
{Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces}
{Robert Walser, having walked to his death.}
I wish for a map that would tell me that Emily Dickinson had red hair. I wish for a map that draws a line in footprints from Amherst to Haworth. Really, I suppose, I want a map of what I’m writing. Is it a dialogue between them? Between myself and them? Hollering across a moor, peering into a garret? Is the goal, even, to bring something or someone closer, or is it to be ever the more mystified?
Why am I bothered by my own aimlessness so?
Why am I bothered by a dead woman’s red hair?
{Maira Kalman: “it happens quite often in February.”}
“The new perspective changes my sense of the place completely. It clarifies things and I am sorry to have seen it. It shows, for instance, two men in the background, wearing dark coats and hats, watching from behind a rail: even if I revert to the old view, from now on these backgrounders will be looking over my shoulder. It reveals, as well, that Walser’s hat is further away from his outstretched left hand than I thought. In the other view, it appeared to be just beyond his fingertips, almost within grasp, but here the connection is broken. It also answers my question about the apparent lack of curiosity or feeling of those who found the body. There are footprints all around. I was misled by that small, indistinct image. And here is something new that I am glad to know: there is snow in the treads of Walser’s boots.”
{Ivan Vladislavic, The Last Walk, from The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories}
{The buildings, even when complete, bore no resemblance to the house she described.}
Here, then, is the tidy line of footsteps: it is in mythologies and the simultaneous compulsion to verify them in a satisfying way and to break the spell to prove that they’re alive. (“According to Ulric Neisser’s analysis of the structure of episodic memory, we rely in our remembering on complex narrative strategies writers use to produce realist fiction.”) (There are footsteps all around.) And can it be so simple, the line between the two? Bronte, the wild and hearty with her frigid health and staunchly un-female strength. Dickinson, with her wistful fragility, nearly always a reflection in window panes, nothing if not honest in her isolation.
Here is the unavoidable thing: I am neither, and yet I cultivated both identities in secret, both were true. But more importantly, both were false.
