department heads wear academic robes at the college-on-the-hill. not grand sweeping full-length affairs butsleeveless tunics puckered at the shoulders. i like the idea. i like clearing my arm from the folds of the garment tolook at my watch. the simple act of checking the time is transformed by this flourish. decorative gestures addromance to a life. idling students may see time itself as a complex embellishment, a romance of humanconsciousness, as they witness the chairman walking across campus, crook'd arm emerging from his medieval robe,the digital watch blinking in late summer dusk. the robe is black, of course, and goes with almost anything.
there is no hitler building as such. we are quartered in centenary hall, a dark brick structure we share with thepopular culture department, known officially as american environments. a curious group. the teaching staff iscomposed almost solely of new york émigrés, smart, thuggish, movie-mad, trivia-crazed. they are here to decipherthe natural language of the culture, to make a formal method of the shiny pleasures they'd known in theireurope-shadowed childhoods—an aristotelianism of bubble gum wrappers and detergent jingles. the departmenthead is alfonse (fast food) stompanato, a broad-chested glowering man whose collection of prewar soda popbottles is on permanent display in an alcove. all his teachers are male, wear rumpled clothes, need haircuts, coughinto their armpits. together they look like teamster officials assembled to identify the body of a mutilated colleague.
the impression is one of pervasive bitterness, suspicion and intrigue.
an exception to some of the above is murray jay siskind, an ex-sportswriter who asked me to have lunch with him inthe dining room, where the institutional odor of vaguely defined food aroused in me an obscure and gloomy memory.
murray was new to the hill, a stoop-shouldered man with little round glasses and an amish beard. he was a visitinglecturer on living icons and seemed embarrassed by what he'd gleaned so far from his colleagues in popular culture.
"i understand the music, i understand the movies, i even see how comic books can tell us things. but there are fullprofessors in this place who read nothing but cereal boxes.""it's the only avant-garde we've got.""not that i'm complaining. i like it here. i'm totally enamored of this place. a small-town setting. i want to be free ofcities and sexual entanglements. heat. this is what cities mean to me. you get off the train and walk out of thestation and you are hit with the full blast. the heat of air, traffic and people. the heat of food and sex. the heat of tallbuildings. the heat that floats out of the subways and the tunnels. it's always fifteen degrees hotter in the cities. heatrises from the sidewalks and falls from the poisoned sky. the buses breathe heat. heat emanates from crowds ofshoppers and office workers. the entire infrastructure is based on heat, desperately uses up heat, breeds more heat.
the eventual heat death of the universe that scientists love to talk about is already well underway and you can feel ithappening all around you in any large or medium-sized city. heat and wetness.""where are you living, murray?""in a rooming house. i'm totally captivated and intrigued. it's a gorgeous old crumbling house near the insane asylum.
seven or eight boarders, more or less permanent except for me. a woman who harbors a terrible secret. a man witha haunted look. a man who never comes out of his room. a woman who stands by the letter box for hours, waitingfor something that never seems to arrive. a man with no past. a woman with a past. there is a smell about the placeof unhappy lives in the movies that i really respond to.""which one are you?" i said.
"i'm the jew. what else would i be?"there was something touching about the fact that murray was dressed almost totally in corduroy. i had the feelingthat since the age of eleven in his crowded plot of concrete he'd associated this sturdy fabric with higher learning insome impossibly distant and tree-shaded place.
"i can't help being happy in a town called blacksmith," he said. "i'm here to avoid situations. cities are full ofsituations, sexually cunning people. there are parts of my body i no longer encourage women to handle freely. i wasin a situation with a woman in detroit. she needed my semen in a divorce suit. the irony is that i love women. i fallapart at the sight of long legs, striding, briskly, as a breeze carries up from the river, on a weekday, in the play ofmorning light. the second irony is that it's not the bodies of women that i ultimately crave but their minds. the mindof a woman. the delicate chambering and massive unidirectional flow, like a physics experiment. what fun it is totalk to an intelligent woman wearing stockings as she crosses her legs. that little staticky sound of rustling nylon canmake me happy on several levels. the third and related irony is that it's the most complex and neurotic and difficultwomen that i am invariably drawn to. i like simple men and complicated women."murray's hair was tight and heavy-looking. he had dense brows, wisps of hair curling up the sides of his neck. thesmall stiff beard, confined to his chin and unaccompanied by a mustache, seemed an optional component, to be stuckon or removed as circumstances warranted.
"what kind of lectures do you plan giving?""that's exactly what i want to talk to you about," he said. "you've established a wonderful thing here with hitler.
you created it, you nurtured it, you made it your own. nobody on the faculty of any college or university in this partof the country can so much as utter the word hitler without a nod in your direction, literally or metaphorically. thisis the center, the unquestioned source. he is now your hitler, gladney's hitler. it must be deeply satisfying for you.
the college is internationally known as a result of hitler studies. it has an identity, a sense of achievement. you'veevolved an entire system around this figure, a structure with countless substructures and interrelated fields of study,a history within history. i marvel at the effort. it was masterful, shrewd and stunningly preemptive. it's what i want todo with elvis."several days later murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in america. wedrove twenty-two miles into the country around farmington. there were meadows and apple orchards. white fencestrailed through the rolling fields. soon the signs started appearing. the most photographed barn inamerica. we counted five signs before we reached the site. there were forty cars and a tour bus in the makeshiftlot. we walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. all the peoplehad cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. a man in a booth sold postcards and slides—pictures ofthe barn taken from the elevated spot. we stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. murraymaintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.
"no one sees the barn," he said finally.
a long silence followed.
"once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn."he fell silent once more. people with cameras left the elevated site, replaced at once by others.
"we're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. every photograph reinforces the aura. can you feelit, jack? an accumulation of nameless energies."there was an extended silence. the man in the booth sold postcards and slides.
"being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. we see only what the others see. the thousands who were here in the past,those who will come in the future. we've agreed to be part of a collective perception. this literally colors our vision.
a religious experience in a way, like all tourism."another silence ensued.
"they are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said.
he did not speak for a while. we listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank oflevers that advanced the film.
"what was the barn like before it was photographed?" he said. "what did it look like, how was it different from otherbarns, how was it similar to other barns? we can't answer these questions because we've read the. signs, seen thepeople snapping the pictures. we can't get outside the aura. we're part of the aura. we're here, we're now."he seemed immensely pleased by this.
