In July 2018, my friend Kimball John Lockhart died. He had been very ill for a number of months, was disheartened by the course of his medical treatment and resented the limitations that his sickness imposed on him. Ultimately, he abandoned treatment and returned to his apartment to die.
Many years earlier, Kim had been admired for his work as a critic. He published a number of essays and edited a prestigious journal. A series of misfortunes, coupled with his alcoholism, undercut his career and he spent many years either unemployed or grievously underemployed. Nonetheless, he maintained an international circle of friends interested in critical theory with whom he continued to correspond until his final illness.
Kim was one of the last friends of my youth – I knew him for 45 years and spoke with him only a few days before he died. He was never married and lived alone. On many occasions, he had been gravely ill to the extent that it was expected that he would not survive. But, until his last illness, he always recovered and, even, returned to the life to which he was accustomed. Therefore, his death was both anticipated but, also, surprising.
The death of a person known for most of a lifetime carves a deep laceration into the survivor’s spirit. Although this wound is hidden, and difficult to display, it exists nonetheless. Kim served as a certain guidepost for me; he represented a constellation of possibilities, desires and fears. When he vanished from my life, I felt an obscure sense of shame and guilt coupled with the fear that always accompanies the death of a person closely contemporary in age. I thought it my obligation to commemorate Kim’s life and make a memoir about my relationship with him, something that I accomplished, although with considerable difficulty. When this task was complete and the writing filed away, I thought that I was done with Kim and that I could put this matter to rest. But this has proven to be more difficult than I thought and there is a sequel to my memoir.
In early July, my sister, Celeste, who is a psychic, told me that Kim Lockhart was hanging around. He’s been present to me as well. She said that he was giving her nightmares. She lives in Bernalillo, New Mexico, and Kim comes in the middle of the night and yanks her awake and, then, she has to sit in her living room with its view of Sandia Peak and meditate on dawn and the Alpenglow behind that noble peak in order to calm her nerves. Celeste can foretell the future and peddles her services as a seer and occult counselor – she gets compensated pretty well for her prophecies and so I generally pay attention to them. She has second-sight and actually can glimpse the future, but the problem is that her prognostications are always so garbled as to be useless. Nonetheless, when Celeste gives me an occult tip, I generally pay attention. She said that Kim had told her to listen to Joni Mitchell’s “Free Man in Paris.” She found a Youtube version of the tune and concluded that the singer was referring to our deceased friend and the time that he spent at the Ecole Normale Superier. (In fact, the song documents a brief vacation to Paris involving the recording executive David Geffen.) In fact, Kim’s mother, Bev, was an admirer of Joni Mitchell and I recall visiting Kim’s home in St. Paul, on Lincoln Avenue, and listening to Court and Spark after a pasta meal with them. The divorce between Bev and Kay Lockhart was still pretty raw, an exposed wound. Bev particularly liked “Free Man in Paris” and we discussed the song; Kim also liked the song and, sometimes, mentioned it and, so, there was a history involving the tune, although, as far as I know, this all preceded Kim’s trips to Paris. Anyway, Celeste told me to listen to the song several times to exorcise the unquiet spirit. I did what she told me, but it wasn’t really necessary – most of the time, I don’t mind having Kim haunt me a little. This exercise did the trick with respect to Kim’s nocturnal visits to my sister. He hasn’t troubled her since she sent me the message to listen to the song.
I mentioned that Kim had appeared to me as well.
Here is how this happened: just as the State was shutting down in March over the Covid-19 virus, my sewer backed up. Raw sewage flooded into my basement. I had the disconcerting experience of flushing the toilet straight into the lower level of my house. Downstairs, I keep most of my books and several thousand DVDs. As you know, Kim’s family gave me a number of his books and I had these volumes stacked on some very low shelves – actually a ruined bookcase that I had taken apart for the wood on which I heaped the books. Unfortunately, some of these books were soaked in sewage. I yanked them out of the grisly flood and tossed them on a bean bag sofa that had been in Jack’s apartment but that he disdained and so was now occupying my basement.
The miseries that I endured with the sewage are too grim to recount. Suffice it to say that I had to hire several contractors to work on the mess and my house was uninhabitable for a week. Julie was working at home due to the Covid-19, seeing her patients by computer, and she had to transfer her operation to the Holiday Inn, at that time, a ghostly place of empty corridors with the pool drained and spider webs adorning the railing around the atrium. I held down the fort, primarily to keep company with my dog. The hound, of course, was thrilled to have a basement full of sewage – it was like a Chinese buffet to my dog. Ultimately, things got fixed. Julie came back to the house and I stopped urinating in a bucket and things went back to normal.
About this time, I discovered a book that I didn’t know that I owned: something called Signs of the Times by a writer named David Lehman. The book was hardcover, very clean and nice and unread. I have no idea how it appeared in my house, but suspect that Kim somehow caused it to materialize. Signs of the Times is an attack on deconstructionism, particularly focused on the loathsome Paul de Man. Kim had studied with Paul de Man at Cornell and admired him, although he also conceded that the man was unpleasant and arrogant. The first part of the book criticizes all the usual suspects – Derrida, Jonathon Culler, J. Hillis Miller and Richard Klein among others. The Dioscuri, that is the Bloom boys (Harold and Alan) are the heroes of the book; in Lehman’s account, they are steadfast enemies of the Deconstructionist crowd, who were mostly hanging around Cornell (and a couple of other Ivy League schools) at the time that Kim was in Ithaca. In any event, this book had just materialized out of nowhere and, often, I would stand downstairs on my way to the toilet or shower and flip idly through the volume, sometimes scanning the index for the names of people that I had might have known, or heard Kim speak about. Then, I found a book by Paul de Man that I had salvaged from the sewage. The book was swollen where the pages had absorbed filthy water and the binding was scabby with excrement but the volume was generally quite readable. I decided to take a look at that book called The Rhetoric of Romanticism. The volume seemed pretty dirty and I didn’t want to deal with it indoors and so I lugged the book up to the porch and put it outside to air out. Then, for the next six weeks or so, I read five or six pages in the book a night, just to flex some mental muscle and see if I could still tolerate this sort of literary discourse. De Man is a much better writer than most of his cohort and about 80 percent of the book made sense to me, although his subject matter was pretty specialized and would not interest most people. The first half of The Rhetoric of Romanticism is about Friedrich Hoelderlin and Wordsworth, two writers that I have studied on-and-off for most of my life and, so, I was interested in what de Man had to say about them. (De Man reads German well, but his command of Wordsworth’s English is very poor and there are some remarkable howlers in which he completely misconstrues idioms in the English poet’s work.) Here is the odd thing: I have a very particular memory of reading a book by de Man about thirty-five years ago in a parking lot somewhere near 50th and Nicollet. I had a bottle of whiskey in the car and was sipping the booze from a McDonald’s styrofoam cup of Diet Coke. I was parked on a sidestreet near a brothel, one of those old sauna/massage parlors that Rebecca Rand used to run. I don’t know exactly why I was at the brothel – it’s not a place that I recall frequenting. Maybe, I had shadowed someone to that business and was planning to commit a murder. The whole thing is vague to me except for the bright sunlight, the parking lot, the traffic on the street, the nondescript whorehouse from which men now and then furtively exited, and, I think, a Best Steakhouse somewhere near enough that I could smell the gyros grilling there. I had the whiskey hidden under my seat, the cup of cola that was about half booze with melting ice, and the de Man book opened in front of me. The essay was about Heidegger’s use of Hoelderlin as evidence for one of his philosophical ideas. I recall that the essay struck me with the force of revelation and that I understood it perfectly. The brothel is gone now. I think the building is now occupied by a bankruptcy lawyer. Some years ago, I defended a legal malpractice case against an attorney in my town who had so badly messed-up a bankruptcy case that his client was sent to Federal prison. I had to hire an expert on standard-of-care and I retained the guy in that building. Oddly enough, when I went to see my expert, I didn’t have any recollection of the afternoon reading de Man in my car with the whiskey just outside his building. All of this has come to me later now, as part of the constellation of thoughts (or, possibly, fantasies) orbiting around the sewage-drenched de Man book in which I read between April and the end of June this year (2020). Usually, I had to wash my hands pretty thoroughly after reading de Man’s Rhetoric of Romanticism but this was necessary anyhow due to the Covid-virus. Sometimes, I forgot to wash my hands. It didn’t matter dried human excrement isn’t an unpleasant substance. In fact, it is salubrious.
In any event, about the time that my sister was being haunted by Kim, I was browsing in de Man’s excremental book and, one evening, just as the first mosquitos were rising from the damp, green grass, I tilted the book and a leaf of paper fell out. This was a tiny essay by Kim. I’m attaching a copy to this writing. The little essay, typed with handwritten marks, was on very thin, almost transparent paper. It was interleaved in the de Man book at the page cited in the footnote, that is, between 244 and 245. This yellow flake of paper, edges worn and crumbling, was like a message to me from my absent friend. What could it mean?
What appears to be an essay is, in fact, a collage. That is Kim has excerpted three texts and set them side by side. He, then, tinkers with the format of the collage and rearranges the order of the footnotes. In his initial conception, the text printed in conventional typed letters is prefaced by two quotes, footnoted below the text. Thus, the block of text is surmounted by two italicized epigraphs that are footnoted below the paragraph excerpted from de Man’s essay, something entitled “Anthropomorphism and Trope in Lyric.” The first epigraph purports to be Baudelaire’s last utterance, the French words for “sacred name”, part of the expression sacre nom de dieux compressed into the ejaculation “crenom!” After gasping this fragment of an exclamation, Baudelaire is said to have lapsed into aphasia – that is, he was unable to speak (and presumably died shortly thereafter). The second epigraph is from Baudelaire’s Ouevres Complete, a paragraph from the French poet’s essay “Some Foreign Caricaturists”. Baudelaire is commenting on the now-forgotten Italian caricaturist Bartolomeo Pinelli (d. 1835). Pinelli enacted the stereotype of the turbulent, vehement and aggressive artist: his appearance was disheveled, he drank too much, and his household was chaotic. He sold his etchings, based on lurid current events and mythology, in taverns. If Pinelli wasn’t paid enough for his work, he would ostentatiously tear it to pieces. Here’s a translation of the passage cited from a 1955 englishing of the essay printed among some of Baudelaire’s other writings on the graphic arts:
Has Pinelli been slandered? I don’t know, but such is his legend (extravagant and disorderly conduct). No,w all this seems to me to be a sign of weakness. I wish that someone would invent a neologism, I wish that someone would manufacture a word destined to blast once and for all this species of cliche – this cliche in conduct and behavior that creeps into the life of artists and their works.
The cliche is that of the wild-eyed Bohemian artist who squanders his energy in disorderly living and reflects this in extravagant and vehement works of art. Baudelaire suggests that true genius requires an orderly and conventional form of life.
De Man’s text relates to Baudelaire’s famous 1855 sonnet Correspondances. This poem is an inexhaustible text subject to a multitude of different interpretations. On its face, the poem asserts that “nature” is a temple that may be imagined as a dark forest. The forest is inhabited by symbols, possibly words by which we attempt to articulate reality. The words or symbols all “intermingle” to create a unity that is, at once, dark and light – that is, a generally pervading atmosphere of radiant obscurity. This radiant obscurity, in turn, exists in some kind of relationship of response to musical tones and perfumes conceived synaesthetically – the tones have odors; the odors are intensely colored. The smell of this forest in which symbols are secreted induces “infinite” ecstasy of the mind and senses. In other words, nature excretes symbols and the symbols react with our senses and mind to engender a rapture of intoxication and ecstasy. Critics relate this poem to Baudelaire’s interest in “correspondences” as imagined by Swedenborg – what we perceive on earth corresponds to objects in heaven.
De Man’s essay interprets the rhetoric deployed by Nietzsche in an aphorism that the critic corresponds to Baudelaire’s sonnet. Nietzsche says: “So what is Truth? An advancing army of metaphors, metonymy, and anthropomorphism...” (From the German’s On the Truth and Lies in an Extra-moral Context.) The gist of de Man’s essay is an interrogation of declarative assertions in literature. The paradigm for such declarations is Keats’ “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” De Man calls into question such declarations or “correspondences” – that is, equivalences: Truth = Beauty or, in Baudelaire’s sonnet. Nature = Temple = Colonnaded Wood secreting symbols. Symbols themselves also represent a kind of correspondence or equivalency although to a broader constellation of ideas and things. De Man claims that the sonnet is serene – by this he means, there is no question posed and, then, answered. The question: “What is Nature?” is suppressed – unlike Nietzsche’s aphorism which asks “...what is Truth?” before offering a problematic answer that seems to deny the existence of Truth, at least, as a unitary concept –Nietzsche’s truth is instrumental, an army of rhetorical tropes that we deploy on a field of battle. With regard to Baudelaire’s poem, de Man (in Kim’s excerpt) claims that poem is all assurance and all answer. The poem confidently answers a question. It is a dialogue in which the interrogatives have been suppressed. But what is the question or questions that the poem answers? This is more difficult to articulate. In fact, de Man says the poem is like the oracle at Delphi – it “serenely” answers any question that we put to it. Each reader will come to the sonnet with a different question and, somehow, the poem will answer them all. De Man, then, says something that is patently false and that fails to follow from his argument: “In all cases, the poem has never failed to answer to the satisfaction of the reader.” This is an absurd non sequitur that is deaf to the implications of the poem. How is an odor an answer? What question does “ecstasy” answer? I think de Man may mean that the poem purports to answer all questions –that is, the sonnet’s formal characteristics and its tone of “serene assurance” pretend to answer the question of what nature might be and how words are secreted between the colonnades of forest. But, if this is what he means, he doesn’t make this clear. To the contrary, de Man closes the passage that Kim cites with a serene declaration of his own that is obviously untrue in that no one knows exactly what Baudelaire means with this poem and any interpretation of the text will ultimately founder on contradictions and ambiguities. In part, the indeterminable aspect of the sonnet makes it great.
So what is Kim doing with this collage of quotations? Obviously, he wishes to deny the concept of “correspondence” – the title of the collage is “Non-Correspondence”. But the shape of the text enforces, at least, one typographical “correspondence” – that is, each quotation is duly footnoted: the quotes correspond with their citations at the bottom of the page. In this aspect of the writing, I think, Kim is suggesting that the only correspondence that he can imagine as credible is that of citation: this text corresponds to a certain book or source. This is a trivial, tautological sort of correspondence but it seems the only kind that Kim is prepared to acknowledge in what is otherwise a realm of “non-correspondence”.
The three quotations, furthermore, don’t “correspond” or equal one another. How does Baudelaire’s compacted final utterance, basically the cry “the Name!” corrrespond with the poet’s writing about Pignelli. There’s some connection: Baudelaire asserts that someone should invent a neologism, that is a name for the kind of life and personality embodied by the Italian artist. Furthermore, I suppose that one could read the sonnet as establishing a principle of naming by equivalencies: Nature = Temple etc. But Kim’s point, as I understand his collage, is that, in fact, these things don’t correlate and any equivalence argued between them is false. Kim has set out to demonstrate in the form of the writing that texts don’t correspond and that this is proven by the sonnet, by Baudelaire’s dying ejaculation that names an absent God, and by the assertion that there’s really no existing word that identifies Pignelli’s pathology (or the correspondence between his disorderly life and art.) The concept of “correspondence”, therefore, is rendered questionable in a variety of ways.
Kim’s impulses as a writer were often primarily graphic. It’s interesting to see that he wishes to “bracket” de Man’s text between the words about Pignelli and the dying exclamation of Baudelaire. This is the substance of the handwritten revisions scribbled onto the paper. In the text as revised, the Pignelli quote poses a question: why isn’t there a word to describe this sort of artist and his life? De Man replies in this dialogue (or trialogue): the sonnet serenely answers all questions, regardless of what they might be – the poem is, in effect, a “magic 8-ball” activated by our own desire for answers to questions personal to us. But this is an absurd cul de sac, and Kim dramatizes the ludicrous aspect of de Man’s text by interposing a wild, half-strangled ejaculation of dismay and discord. This is the only response that can be made to de Man’s bizarre assurance that the poem “will never fail to answer” to our satisfaction. Crenom! Or “Bullshit!” It’s characteristic of Kim’s thinking that he deflates de Man with this interjection. (This interpretation is verified by a handwritten note next to de Man’s claim about the poem. Kim sardonically writes: “Oh really” circling the words “has never failed”.)
The proof-reading or editorial marks on this ecriture are inscribed in tiny pencil marks. Kim instructs the printer to “indent” the “half page” of de Man’s prose. He tells us that the de Man quotation should be “double-space”. Some of Kim’s handwriting is illegible, but, with much study, words can be deciphered. I think he writes “translate” next to the Baudelaire quotation about Pignelli. Below, the interjection “Oh really”, Kim writes mysteriously: “P H L .L : Heidegger never answered anything.” This is part of the word-bubble (or circled inscription) containing “Oh really” with an arrow pointing to the de Man phrase “never failed” (to answer). I am conjecturing that the verb in the sentence about Heidegger is “answered” by context; the actual word is very hard to read. Beneath the writing about Heidegger there is a date “6/12/06" – I am assuming that this is the date of the writing. Kim’s rearrangement of the two epigraphs, converting “crenom!” into a hypograph, seems felicitous in every respect. Not all of Kim’s revisions are helpful: for some reason he amends the comment about Baudelaire’s “last utterances” (“crenom!” seems to me to be singular) from “(utterances made) while suffering aphasia shortly before his death” to “while suffering aphasia before death”). These corrections don’t fix the problem with the sentence in the footnote, namely that you can’t make utterances “while suffering” aphasia. Presumably, Kim meant that the word “crenom!” was the last thing Baudelaire said before suffering aphasia.
Kim is sous rature, that is, “under erasure” to use the jargon of the post-structuralists. I don’t know how I acquired David Lehman’s book Signs of the Times. I recall that I picked it up expecting to read about an album by that name (or approximately: Signs o’ the Times) by Prince. Certainly, I wouldn’t have bought the book and, so, it remains a mystery to me how the volume came into my possession. The green-bound volume by de Man must have come from the books that Kim’s family gave me after his death. But this would have been an error by the family. I asked for books by Peter Carey, Samuel Beckett and some Antonioni DVDs. But I ended up with some other things as well: Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film, Truffaut’s interviews with Hitchcock, and, apparently, the de Man volume. I touched the book once to put it on a low shelf where it was, later, inundated by sewage. I touched it a second time to extract it from the mess on the floor. I told my son, Jack, that he should carry the book out to the garbage to throw it away, but he said “no, it was one of Kim’s books” – Jack had high regard for Kim – and said that it could be dried-out. What guided my hand to pick up the book again, particularly after it had absorbed the waters of my sewer, is a mystery to me. Kim’s ecriture about Baudelaire and de Man now corresponds to him. It’s a mark of his presence. And, so, I suppose that these words are a sort of ghost story.
I hope Kim is resting easier now that I have discovered his message to me, or to the world that spurned him, in the damaged book by Professor de Man.
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