Don t think of the roses on the trellis overhead you motoring through, captain of your tricycle. Don t think of the birdbath either where robins and blue jays drank or just rested nor of the giant copper beech tree near it that you later climbed until you could enter your house through your bedroom window. It was also by the birdbath that you sometimes sang those first songs you learned in school like At the Gates of Heaven or, later, Volare. Songs that seemed to have spread over the entire earth. Don t remember either the red rubber ball you d throw against the garage wall or sometimes off its roof while you played imaginary baseball games with yourself or eventually with your friends. In right field was the enormous weeping willow tree that you used to climb with your sister and, to the right of that, the bright yellow forsythia bushes. Everything was large and bright in your backyard, even the gray cement patio from which you had snowball fights. Your house had three floors (not counting its mysterious cellar) and twenty-one rooms, each one more like a district of a city than a mere room. Your sister s bedroom was opposite yours and next to the upstairs den. Adjacent to that was your father s 2015 Johns Hopkins 1 University Press Burginpp.indb 1
don t think room, separated by the television room (from which you had a clear view of the schoolyard) from your mother s room. Why did they have separate rooms? Don t think of how much older he was than your mother and how you also were a father late in life. Don t think of how you ran in frenzied circles from your sister s room one night. You had been shocked by what you saw there when you d barged in unannounced to sharpen your pencil. Your sister and another girl were lying naked in bed. You finally ran into your mother s room. Forget that your mother guessed what it was without your telling her her special kind of knowledge. Don t remember either the many times you lay on your mother s bed holding her white French poodle while she practiced her violin, or how, when she was finished, she d lay next to you. Don t think of all your mother s kisses or of the time you couldn t sleep because you were either too hot or too cold and your father stayed by your bed lifting up the blanket and then lowering it until you finally fell asleep. Don t realize you will never be loved that way again. The sun-room, the music room with its grand piano, and outside a hill you could sled down in the winter snow with your sister and at the bottom look up at the two rows of cement stairs with their black railing above them like the mane of a frozen horse. Those stairs that led to the front of the house, a house that looked like a palace. But one day you d look at the music room windows to the right of the front door and you d remember your mother making you repeat the same little piece until every note was perfect. Meanwhile, your friends were at the schoolyard waiting for you to play with them. Yet she made you repeat every note until it was 100% correct. You can still see how you cried then a waterfall of tears until it ended with her, at last, relenting. Later, 2 Burginpp.indb 2
your father told her not to force you to play the piano and she agreed and so you had the last real lesson of your life from your mother that day when you were seven years old and didn t become a great musician like them. The whole course of your life was determined in an afternoon. Your parents were both child prodigies, but you would never study music, though you tried briefly a few other times. And although you later made up scores of songs and little piano pieces, you never learned to read or write music and eventually could only play seven or eight of your pieces by memory as time went on because what isn t written down gets forgotten. Don t think of that world of music, lost in that music room in a house that s now lost as well. It was shortly after you realized you would never become a real composer that you began thinking about infinity and the limits of consciousness. It began, perhaps, from a passage in Eliot s Four Quartets: human kind / cannot bear very much reality. It was surprising that such a passage ever escaped from an Anglican monarchist who no doubt believed in heaven. But don t think of Eliot. He was only a fearful man, a fleeting speck, afraid like everyone else, taking shelter under his house of faith, blotting out reality himself, of course. Don t think of Borges or Beckett, either. Don t think of literature, the most pathetic of all religions, with its church of art that enforces the belief that great art will endure forever. Don t think of how we constantly misuse words like forever without grasping their meaning. We could not bear it if we did. And avoid the thought that if the world ends we ll lose everything in art including Shakespeare and Beethoven but if the world goes on forever they ll be lost and forgotten as well. Art is the last illusion, your father once said to you, and all these years later you see that he was right. Don t think of him the only man you ever trusted. Don t think 3 Burginpp.indb 3
don t think of what his life was like with all its struggles and heartbreak and what it did or didn t mean. It was he who led you to the paradox of paradoxes: How can there always have been something; how could there ever have been nothing? But don t think of that, and don t ever speak of it again to your son who told you he didn t like it, that it gave him a headache. Don t think of how much you miss him while he s at his mother s and how much more you ll miss him when he ll inevitably move out in a year or two. Above all, don t go through your Rolodex again. Stop it! It s just an escape. For you to have handwritten cards in this age of the Internet is ridiculous. It s especially painful to see the names and numbers you wrote by hand as if your handwriting somehow makes the dead ones seem alive. Don t think of how some of them are looking at your name and wondering if you are dead. If you had been famous that they would have at least known that. Better to let the TV swallow more of your time, which is its main purpose on this earth. Don t think of the earth how little of it you ve seen or will ever see. Don t hear Mahler s Das Lied von der Erde in your head again. How did Mahler live for fifty years without losing his mind? Don t think of Mahler. Don t think of the great painters either. Stop wondering how many of the old ones fingers began to tremble as yours do now and how it affected their painting. It s a good thing you weren t a painter. But it would also be the same for pianists, if you had become one. Don t think of your own occasionally trembling fingers or of the times they used to bring you pleasure. Don t think of all the time you spent on women pursuing them, placating them, cajoling them, every word in the world you can think of with them, trying to forgive the things they said, or didn t, that hurt you, or all the guilt you felt for the things you did to them. Don t think of your marriage or of your divorce, or of your first 4 Burginpp.indb 4
girlfriend who stayed overnight with you in your house when your parents and sister were away and with whom you lost your virginity in your mother s bed. Don t think of how it foretold in microcosm all the women that were in your future. It was like a single tree foretelling a forest one hundred yards ahead. Don t think of how the women all eventually scattered like the seeds of trees. A single wink and they ve gone with the wind. Don t remember how you mourned the ones you loved nor all the time you spent looking at the photographs you took of them and the places where you took them, often by the ocean. You were so much stronger then. You could teach, play basketball, and make love in the same day! Don t think of how strong you once were and how your body slowly and then more rapidly declined. First you needed glasses, no, first your hair began to thin, no, first you started losing teeth, then your hair began to get a little gray, then it thinned, then your gums began to bleed, then your legs began to ache on airplanes or sitting in the movies. Is that right? You can never be sure when it comes to reconstructing your deconstruction. Everything in a sense was destruction, only your son is creation (although destined to ultimately be destroyed, both he and his work, like all other living things, no matter how great they both may be). Like your father, you had him late in life, so surely you can at least receive the gift of dying before he does. Don t worry about the fate of his work. It s deeply ironic how people believe art expands consciousness and therefore life when it actually does the opposite. Anything with a design, with a beginning, middle, and end, is in opposition to infinity (or reality) and therefore is purposely a lie and a colossal deception. Art is the last illusion. Don t wonder why your father told you this, you ll never know. Don t think of the days you ve lost with your son, days that 5 Burginpp.indb 5