Barnaby Sandwich has a system. Whenever he is confronted with a terror that nothing really divides him from any other obsessive-compulsive counting beads, or paranoid looking for radio transmitters in his vacuum cleaner; whenever he feels awash in guilt over his fickle moods, which cause him to cry desperately to a friend in one moment and deprecate that friend’s sympathy the next; whenever he begins to think that despite the social graces which allow him to crest invisibly the cocktail party of bourgeois life and hide his teeming dementia under gentle smiles and smart, self-deprecating humor, he might as well panhandle with a cardboard sign around his neck; whenever he fails in avoiding sight of the reality that he spends most of his life working hard to produce books that make no difference to anyone, he invokes his “parallel audience fantasy.” This is how it works.
Normally, when sitting at his writing desk with a can of sardines in his pocket and a coffee-with-tea in an Oakland Raiders mug, Barnaby does his best to transport himself into whatever fantasy he is attempting to transcribe, and to ward off all other distractions. But when his “parallel audience fantasy” is invoked, he bounces back and forth between the matter at hand and the picture of an ancient Greek stadium full of dead souls, watching him. He cannot see them; but in the truer spiritual world—according to this fantasy—his writing desk, with its golden lion statue, incense brazier, and pin-up calendar, sits at the center of a stadium of the illustrious assembled well-lettered dead.
As he walks into the stadium—that is, across his tiny, unheated bedroom—the audience respectfully stands. They do not applaud, because it would distract him; but he is aware of their standing presence, and grateful. Though he must work alone, he knows their thoughts are with him. For a moment he, too, stands, staring down at the desk, steeling himself to leap—as the idea of Joseph ben Shalom of Barcelona has it—to leap over the primordial abyss of nothingness which serves as the well of all being and the underlying reality of all change. He is gathering his concentration, and around him, tens of thousands of readers and believers from the entire span of human history pray with him, because they know the importance of what is to be accomplished. And then, most often, he leaps; and succeeds in leaping, landing on the other side; and on that far, unknown shore he sits down and begins to write.
Around him he can hear the murmuring of the watching crowd, who whisper in appreciation at all his leaps and turns, at his tricks and triumphs, the murmuring of the crowd that can see into his very soul, that see as if projected above him the workings of his mind, so that they admire the force with which he rejects his own despair, sloth, and folly; so that they see the pain it causes him to block open the door into his own dream life; so that they see shimmering past like flying computer code the million, million calculations necessary to point properly any one metaphor—this crowd, indeed, can see the entirety of creation as being pointed and directed into Barnaby’s fingers, that type these words. They can see the process leading to his work in far greater detail than he can himself. If he knew it, it would distract him and confuse him, and so part of his work, therefore, is to accept and even work to maintain an almost total blindness to the method, meaning, and import of what he himself is doing. Barnaby can hear the murmuring, but he ignores it—he can ignore it, because he has perfect faith that this audience will wait and watch patiently until he is done.
And when he is done—in the "parallel audience fantasy"—Barnaby stands up, takes a breath, and turns to face the crowd. They are roaring. He raises his arms in the air, and as he does, he looks from face to face: there is George Eliot; there is Joseph Roth; there is Orwell and Somerset Maugham and all his other friends, in the first row—they are admiring and impressed. Beyond them are ancestors and heroes and martyrs, there are angels and guiding lights, who look down with approval; simply from the cast of their eyes Barnaby can be assured that what he has just done is important and to the good. He bows. They roar loader.
They continue roaring as several attendants surround him: one to place a laurel wreath on his head; one to throw a tarp over his desk; two to take him by the arms, and guide him gently out, to the spa beneath the stadium, where he will lie down in a sauna, or a mint-flavored steam room, and then eat a large meal, and possibly watch a movie, and then fall deeply, deeply asleep, with plenty of time to rest before he is called upon again. In the morning he will put on a silk bathrobe and sift leisurely through the thousands and thousands of letters written overnight in response to his day’s work: comments, questions, arguments, paeans, attacks. It will be impossible to imagine the world without him.
Thus goes the fantasy. In the real world, he spends as long as he can in this “parallel audience fantasy,” but finally he must always let it go. It has served its purpose: he has finished another stroke of his useless work. He has written eight hundred or a thousand words of yet another novel. When he has finished it, three or four friends and relatives will ask him for copies of the manuscript, which he will duly provide, and which they will not read. One or two editors may relay to him, through his agent, that the book is wonderful, and that they cannot publish it. All his labor will recede silently into the mist whille Barnaby shackles himself to the next one.
Normally, when sitting at his writing desk with a can of sardines in his pocket and a coffee-with-tea in an Oakland Raiders mug, Barnaby does his best to transport himself into whatever fantasy he is attempting to transcribe, and to ward off all other distractions. But when his “parallel audience fantasy” is invoked, he bounces back and forth between the matter at hand and the picture of an ancient Greek stadium full of dead souls, watching him. He cannot see them; but in the truer spiritual world—according to this fantasy—his writing desk, with its golden lion statue, incense brazier, and pin-up calendar, sits at the center of a stadium of the illustrious assembled well-lettered dead.
As he walks into the stadium—that is, across his tiny, unheated bedroom—the audience respectfully stands. They do not applaud, because it would distract him; but he is aware of their standing presence, and grateful. Though he must work alone, he knows their thoughts are with him. For a moment he, too, stands, staring down at the desk, steeling himself to leap—as the idea of Joseph ben Shalom of Barcelona has it—to leap over the primordial abyss of nothingness which serves as the well of all being and the underlying reality of all change. He is gathering his concentration, and around him, tens of thousands of readers and believers from the entire span of human history pray with him, because they know the importance of what is to be accomplished. And then, most often, he leaps; and succeeds in leaping, landing on the other side; and on that far, unknown shore he sits down and begins to write.
Around him he can hear the murmuring of the watching crowd, who whisper in appreciation at all his leaps and turns, at his tricks and triumphs, the murmuring of the crowd that can see into his very soul, that see as if projected above him the workings of his mind, so that they admire the force with which he rejects his own despair, sloth, and folly; so that they see the pain it causes him to block open the door into his own dream life; so that they see shimmering past like flying computer code the million, million calculations necessary to point properly any one metaphor—this crowd, indeed, can see the entirety of creation as being pointed and directed into Barnaby’s fingers, that type these words. They can see the process leading to his work in far greater detail than he can himself. If he knew it, it would distract him and confuse him, and so part of his work, therefore, is to accept and even work to maintain an almost total blindness to the method, meaning, and import of what he himself is doing. Barnaby can hear the murmuring, but he ignores it—he can ignore it, because he has perfect faith that this audience will wait and watch patiently until he is done.
And when he is done—in the "parallel audience fantasy"—Barnaby stands up, takes a breath, and turns to face the crowd. They are roaring. He raises his arms in the air, and as he does, he looks from face to face: there is George Eliot; there is Joseph Roth; there is Orwell and Somerset Maugham and all his other friends, in the first row—they are admiring and impressed. Beyond them are ancestors and heroes and martyrs, there are angels and guiding lights, who look down with approval; simply from the cast of their eyes Barnaby can be assured that what he has just done is important and to the good. He bows. They roar loader.
They continue roaring as several attendants surround him: one to place a laurel wreath on his head; one to throw a tarp over his desk; two to take him by the arms, and guide him gently out, to the spa beneath the stadium, where he will lie down in a sauna, or a mint-flavored steam room, and then eat a large meal, and possibly watch a movie, and then fall deeply, deeply asleep, with plenty of time to rest before he is called upon again. In the morning he will put on a silk bathrobe and sift leisurely through the thousands and thousands of letters written overnight in response to his day’s work: comments, questions, arguments, paeans, attacks. It will be impossible to imagine the world without him.
Thus goes the fantasy. In the real world, he spends as long as he can in this “parallel audience fantasy,” but finally he must always let it go. It has served its purpose: he has finished another stroke of his useless work. He has written eight hundred or a thousand words of yet another novel. When he has finished it, three or four friends and relatives will ask him for copies of the manuscript, which he will duly provide, and which they will not read. One or two editors may relay to him, through his agent, that the book is wonderful, and that they cannot publish it. All his labor will recede silently into the mist whille Barnaby shackles himself to the next one.
posted by Will Heinrich | 3:50 PM
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