Bricks and Mortar

I fell into a brown study today at lunch. I cannot explain this as it seemed to precede the moment I began reading the fiction piece by Richard Ford in last weeks New Yorker, but it definitely presaged the punishment inflicted on me by that story. Fiction is always so unhappy I stay away from it. It's like the complaint people often wage against the news on television, that it is so concerned with violence, tragedy and unhappiness that it entirely skews reality. Novelists and writers seem to find the depths, compleixites and myriad shadings of unhappiness more fascinating than the brighter side of life (whatever brighter side might actually exist.) One could make the argument that reporters are simply presenting the news as it happens and that happiness is not an event to be chronicled but a stasis providing little external action or incident. Writers may make the same claim but at least possess a clearer choice. They are actors rather than reactors.

The short story recounted in first person the tale of a man in a second marriage. His wife's first husband, disappeared and long thought dead, reappears and she leaves the narrator to reunite with him. The narrator, struggling for coolness and detachment, comes off as an unpleasant person who is overly satisfied with the complacency of his life and perplexed and angered by people who make other choices. But his description of the differences between first and second marriages rang true to me as far as I can perceive such things. And this caused me, logically, to reflect on my marriage and ideas of healing and the passage of time, issues I continually try to unravel, tease apart, worry at, and reconcile with how I feel.

The following might be instructive as to knowing how my brain works. I thought first of a cracked and split open heart and metaphors of repair. As we speak of mending a broken heart one rarely hears descriptions of how a heart might be broken in a physical sense, of what material it might be made of that it is so apparently frangible, fissile, and fragile. Without describing its material we can hardly begin to describe the process of repair. For instance, the heart does not seem to be such a thing that it can be sewn back together; neither do I think glue or paste would work, so already many materials are ruled out for the heart's composition.

My mind seemed to settle on an idea of ceramic or pottery or brick. I recall that I may have composed this thought before. One image I had was of a person struggling to collect potsherds off the ground, as one might struggle to pick up bruised apples without a basket. Eventually, one's arms are so full of items that the act of reaching down to gather another one in makes one or more bits fall back to earth. Like a gleaner, but without a skirt hem to draw up and use as a makeshift satchel.

But that was a digressive thought. A heart made of brick implies the presence of mortar. Repairing a brick or stone wall is a rich, active metaphor for "rebuilding" a life, making a "house" or container for one's self. Masonry has a storied history (the pyramids, the cathedrals, etc.) and a great accumulation of terminology and tools full of allusiveness (the hod, the quicklime, the trowel) and mortar has the additional meaning of the cup or bowl paired with a pestle, the receptacle within which things are ground, atomized or dispersed, a nice inversion of the material which holds things together.

As I was thinking of these things my mind turned (again, quite logically, I assert) to stories by Edgar Allen Poe. It seems to me that if we reflect on the story "The Cask of Amontillado" we can interpret it not as a simple tale of cruel revenge inflicted by one man on his unwitting nemesis (by inebriating him and then walling him into a niche in a deep medieval catacomb) but as an internal narrative of an act of healing conducted by a man on himself. This is not to say that it is a successful act or healthful. I mean that it is not uncommon for me (and others, I'm sure) to feel as if we have betrayed ourselves, that one part of us has undermined or negated the actions of another part. Is it not fair that, to ensure this ceases, we take action against ourselves? Can we not reasonably imagine that Poe's story is of a man who loathes a part of himself so much that he murders that part through calculated deceit? I think the story is more interesting that way even if the psychological interpretation ends up not having any textual basis.

I thought next of "The Tell-Tale Heart" and imagined that perhaps the shuttered, boarded-up heart belong not to a man killed by the narrator, but to himself. That embedding the heart beneath his floorboards was an attempt to erase a crime but the crime was in fact another misguided act of healing. Does not the bible say "And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off"? (Matt. 5:30). Can an offense of the heart not be solved the same way? (You might ask whether this is a good example of cutting off the nose to spite the face; I will leave that point unanswered.) So perhaps in Poe's story the narrator suffers from the impossibility of removing his own heart; that we cannot ignore for long its beating, that such an attempt makes us criminal even as if we have killed another.

I wish here I could recall the exact plot of "The Fall of the House of Usher." I am not sure if I could analyze it the same way. Another favorite story, "The Masque of the Red Death," does not apply. But I enjoy that story very much for it's similarities to both the Marquis de Sade's 100 Days of Sodom and Boccacio's Decameron. (Again, this is a digression, but I enjoy considering how all three stories focus on an escape from a city as a representation of legality, order, morality and societal structure. Out in the country, the characters in the stories nonetheless feel a greater security, safety and are able to unbridle their imaginations. In the Decameron this results in the telling of stories. In Sade it is expressed as unrestrained licentiousness. And in Poe as a costumed ball, though his ends with the note of futility of escape. One could include other books, such as The Cantebury Tales or Huckleberry Finn in this analysis, but neither involve the demonification of the physical city as a place of strictures and requisite dangers be they physical [the plague], legal, or moral. The more I think about it, the more I should include Huckleberry Finn except that it seems to involve less an idea of going from one place to another and more is about simply being on; and besides, I think in Finn all of society, not simply cities, are demonized, and society is represented by any land, not by a particular mode of habitation.)

You see how far my thought wandered in the space of less than a half hour while reading a short story. I have the image of a man rebuilding a wall stuck in my head like a bad song. I need to go read Frost's "Mending Wall" and see if it bears upon this issue. But I will leave you with this:

"Pass your hand," I said, "over the wall ; you cannot help feeling the nitre. Indeed it is very damp. Once more let me implore you to return. No ? Then I must positively leave you. But I must first render you all the little attentions in my power."
"The Amontillado !" ejaculated my friend, not yet recovered from his astonishment.
"True," I replied ; "the Amontillado."
As I said these words I busied myself among the pile of bones of which I have before spoken. Throwing them aside, I soon uncovered a quantity of building stone and mortar. With these materials and with the aid of my trowel, I began vigorously to wall up the entrance of the niche.

There is no Amontillado, or if there is, it is not his to ever taste. What other quests do I lead my heart on from which it can never return.








Note to self: drink less coffee.