Flashback

Memory gets more epic the older you get.  Maybe that's too much of a cliche to blog about, but here I am.  

I'm reading The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann now.  One of those books that you are supposed to read if you're serious -- or at least if you were serious back when seriousness really meant something to me, like 1989-90, when I was a Junior at Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI), a commuter college that really helped me pull my head out of my ass and figure out what to do and where to go next when I was in my late 20s.  

The campus itself, in my memory and sometimes even my dreams, is a lot of concrete and brick and new construction.  Skeletal sapling trees planted in planters along side new parking lots, lots of icy sidewalk and barren sky footage.  Maroon and blocky signage.  Formica tables in little vending machine canteens and bandage-colored chair-desks you could barely fit into.  In short:  gorgeous.  

All the way through college I had to work, which was fine, and right around late 1989 two things happened:  I started working in a group-home for people with developmental disabilities and I took a fiction-writing class with a professor named Mel Plotinsky.  Two worlds kind of colliding. Lucky for me. 

And I remember walking on icy sidewalks at night after Mel's class.  It was in the basement of the nurse's building, and I was 1 of only 3 students in it, but the class still went on thank God, due to I think Mel's stubborn love of doing it.  "Thank God" because I learned so much because of that small size.  Mel had a low, intense voice.  He was around 50 I think, super-professorial, always laughing at his own jokes, always trying to understand what writing was about, even if it was written by night-schoolers like us.  

I was the only creative writing major in the bunch -- the other two were I think psychology students or something, taking it for English credit.  I wrote some really fucking great stories informed by Mel's enthusiasm and inspiration and recommendations on what to read.  He told me to read Henry James and James Joyce and Katherine Anne Porter and Edith Wharton and Gustav Flaubert and, of course, Thomas Mann.  So I did, and wrote stories inspired by his tutelage, based on my own experiences, based on being gay and white-trash and trying really hard to figure out how to proceed.  I read "A Death in Venice" by Mann on a sleep-over shift at the group-home, wide awake on coffee in the basement where I was situated, every hour or so going up and checking on the sleeping people, just to make sure they were okay.  No seizure activity, etc. Especially one guy.     

Anyway I read "Death in Venice" and it blew me away to the point I think I started a story right after in that very basement on notebook paper, called "A Line Drawn by Angels," and it was about a sad nobody freak who every time he fell in love he would break out in stigmata.  (I was also just getting into Flannery O'Connor at that point too.)   I would write scenes, then go up and check on folks, write more scenes, and so on -- merging work life with writing life in this eerie somnambulist way, and I think this moment kind of inspired the rest of my life in many ways.  Seeing where writing fits in with duty, connected my imagination with my circumstance.  I really did use this pattern for the rest of my life after I finished grad school a few years later:  working with people with developmental disabilities in all kinds of capacities, writing on the side, both activities forming themselves out of the merger.

That early morning I finished the shift and went home and slept and then got up and finished the story and typed it into the computer at school and printed it out, handed it in to Mel, and at the next class he was almost teary-eyed in his response.  I was elated to the point of not knowing who I was, and I told him I was inspired by "Death in Venice," and he looked a little spooked for a sec, trying to really understand how Mann's ridiculously incisive treatise on lust could have inspired by creepy little story, but then I think his altruistic brain made a quick connection to Mann's ability to dramatize and empathize with obsession, and my attempt at it.  

He hand wrote one-page notes for each story submitted, and I still have all of them.  For "A Line Drawn by Angels," he wrote:  "This has amazing finesse.  I regard it as finished.  Just a few touches here and there, which I've marked.  Truly heart-breaking but not sentimental at all, full of feeling but astute enough not to dawdle."

Damn.  I ran through the snow that night so happy it was one of those moment where everything gets beautifully cinematic.  

Also on that note he told me I might want to also read The Magic Mountain by Mann.

I always meant to, but I never did.  Went knee-deep into Flannery and Faulkner and Raymond Carver and Bobbie Ann Mason and so many other greats...  I remember picking it up a couple times and trying but it just felt like a non-starter.  700 pages don't help.

But now I'm 306 pages in and feel sort of ecstatic about it:  it is a slog, but a gorgeous ironic kind of slog, where you feel yourself evaporating into language and ennui and dream.  The translation is great (by John E. Woods), and the scenes, although freighted with all kinds of philosophical bull-shit, are masterfully sensate.  It takes place at a tuberculosis sanitorium in the Swiss Alps, pre-WW-1.  Every room of the place, every meal and thermometer, every patient and patron and doctor and administrator are given his/her due, through the slightly jaundiced perspective of an omnipotent smart-ass author.  The story focuses on Hans Castrop, a real nobody/civil-engineer-student who first comes to the sanitorium to visit his cousin briefly but then slowly starts to absorb the customs and atmosphere until he winds up a patient there himself:  that sinking into identity and circumstance is a metaphor for all kinds of things, including love.

Anyway, getting word-drunk on Mann's scenes and sensibilities reminds me of what it was like being in Mel's class, walking home in the snow with one of his notes praising every move I was trying to make to figure out how to make a story work.  It's a weird and beautiful connection that spans time somehow, which is lovely to the point of helping you get through what's happening now.  By the way, The Magic Mountain is truly a great novel to be reading in 2022, as we slow-motion move through a pandemic.  That same sense of being in and out of time, half-asleep and worried, our brains shrinking and enlarging at the same time with thoughts about returning to normal and never really understanding what "normal" has ever been.  The Magic Mountain has that shit in spades.