Commentaries

The following commentaries, as heard on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” are included in Andrei Codrescu’s A Craving for Swan, published by Ohio State University Press. The cloth edition of the book is out of print, but a paperback is available. We’re thankful for permission to reprint these selections.

— Ed.

Chrononaut

When they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I answered: “An explorer!” It was quite the thing for a boy of ten, but imagine being stuck with it. Fashions change but one thing does not: all adults want little boys to be something else besides little boys. Grownups, who are all, with rare exceptions, failures (having never become the things they said they would when they were little boys), ask the little boys that loaded question in order to set the little boys up for failure. In reality, there is only one answer to the question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

That answer is: “Not you!”

Anyway, having committed myself, I spent the next thirty years looking for something to explore. Geography was by and large exhausted by the time I got to it. The only earthly explorers left were mining engineers. I didn’t want to be a mining engineer. The situation that prevailed and prevails in the heavens wasn’t any better: although cosmic exploration is still at the very beginning, it is mostly a military venture, and even as a child I had the good sense to hate the military.

In my twenties I thought that I discovered an alternative: inner space. As vast, if not vaster, than outer space, it seemed to stretch for infinity in every direction. It was not long before I realized that much of this inner geography had also been colonized, and that, what’s more, I too was colonizing it with my notions, and preparing the way for the mining of its resources by drones of tiny capitalists in search of magic markets.

Only time was left, an explorable dimension made all the more mysterious by its closeness. Federico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet, once said to a friend: “We’ll go to town at five o’clock in the afternoon, the hour in which the gardens begin to suffer.” What a splendid vision of five o’clock, that hour when most people think only of driving home to eat! And how about three o’clock in the afternoon, that strange and quiet hour when the whole world is daydreaming?

There is a man, whose name I forget, who wrote somewhere that his life was changed when, upon leaving his room at Cambridge, he encountered Einstein walking. Einstein asked him what time it was. Momentarily speechless, the man pointed at the tower in the square where Time was writ large. Einstein laughed and the man’s life was changed.

It is a fine story, only the man never tells what time it was when this happened. It was 3 p.m., I just know it.

Animals In The Rain

The animals like to stand in the rain. It pours roundly on all sides of the ostriches: their eyes are closed, their elevated beings soothed in every feather. The giraffes stand so still you can hear rivulets of water rushing down their vertiginous necks. The ducks, of course, go bananas: they whir like mini-helicopters around the pond and the fish jump into their beaks. The water pouring down the faces of the banana leaves collects in pools which the smaller birds ravage ferociously. But I like best the way the alligators take it. They make themselves soft like the mud they originally crawled from and stretch so long and so far you mistake them for the logs everyone forever mistakes for alligators. Tropical rain is, of course, a god. From it came these alligators, and certainly these dozens of turtles swimming, necks outstretched, everywhere you care to look.

Only the people are afraid of the rain. Bunched up under the patio roof of the cafe, they hold on to soggy hot dogs and plastic cups like rafts of junk in the debauched water drama surrounding them. A priest dressed in black stands at the edge of the patio with his black umbrella half-open, clearly caught in the teeth of a dilemma: should he go or should he stay? These are big drops of rain, at least as big as the tears the statues of the saints cry on certain blessed days. Should he dare walk through the weeping of the sky or should he stay dry like everyone else? Poised there, on the edge, between human shelter and animal delight, he seems a picture of all our dilemmas.

But then — out among the animals, perfectly exposed under the heavens, stepping lightly, dancing almost, here come two lovers, a boy and a girl, arms around each other’s wet T-shirted midriffs, singing “Singing in the Rain” with a French accent. And for a moment, the ducks, giraffes, and alligators all splash at the same time. And the priest, his mind all made up now, steps right up into a puddle.

Life Against Fiction

Not only do novels and life have nothing in common, they hate each other.

First, there is the life the novel purportedly “comes from,” something called “the past.” If “the past” could get its hands on the author, you would be sure to see blood on the floor. Life, whether past, present, or future, hates to see itself rearranged, clipped, and edited. Life takes itself very seriously.

I once heard of a very famous French author who returned to the scene of his last novel, in which the 500-year-old town cathedral figured prominently: standing next to the cathedral, he was killed by a cornice that fell 300 feet.

A very curious thing happened to me: I wrote an autobiographical novel called The Life and Times of an Involuntary Genius, the first part of which was about my mother. Just before the book came out, I decided to check some facts with the lady since they concerned her. It turns out I had everything wrong. No, she didn’t abandon me on an old chicken farm when I was two months old. No, she didn’t name me Andrei because she was afraid of the Russians. But it was too late to change anything. The book came out, mother read it (several times), and when I next saw her she said, “I’m sorry about the chicken farm, the Russians were really terrible.” Now everything she remembers is out of the book. Her own recollections have vanished, never to return. In their stead stand my yarns, posing as life.

You would think, from the above, that it’s safer to make things up from scratch. Not so. I wrote a novel called Meat from the Goldrush. The action takes place during the gold rush in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, and it concerns a family of enterprising Eastern Europeans who develop a bang-up business in meat by sending all the bodies of the dead Indians, trappers, and miners (it was a time of frequent casualties) up into the twentieth century through a time tunnel-cum-converter that changes human flesh into harmless cuts of beef, lamb, and pork. Twentieth-century America becomes addicted to this stuff, and the country starts slowly eating up its past like a snake eating his tail. History becomes circular and the millennium comes. Fantastic? Not at all. The place I had chosen as the setting for this business venture began to suffer from scores of eerie phenomena as soon as I finished my novel. The natives saw ghosts, barns burnt down, skeletons with axes in their skulls turned up on the dirt road, and a group of cultists practicing, among other things, ritual cannibalism was uncovered by the feds and hushed up because California had a weird enough rep as it was.

On the other side of the continent, in New York City, a friend of mine, a novelist, was starving. (This is not very unusual. Why do you think I’m writing this?) He decided to mug somebody since that is what everybody else did around his neighborhood. Being a writer, he decided to mug somebody who looked like a mugger since he knew that one day he would write about it. (He didn’t but I am, isn’t life funny?) He got hold of a switchblade and went to Central Park. A very tall derelict was walking slowly by the lake. Michael approached him slowly (there is an art to these things) and saw that the man was also holding a switchblade. When they came within a couple of feet of each other, there was the sound of a police siren. They both ran as fast as they could and hid together behind a bush. “Whatcha gonna mug me for?” the mugger asked my friend the writer-mugger. “I was hungry.” “Well, see you later,” the man said, when the police passed. “Hey, you wanna go look at some paintings in the Museum of Modern Art and talk about it?” asked Michael, ever the ready philosopher. “You crazy? I got work to do!” the man said, and left to do it. This has nothing to do with my subject, but it’s a nice story.

More to the point, a few months ago I started a novel that I just finished. Being, by now, well aware of what life is liable to do to me, I decided to write equal parts of fantasy and “true” stuff, hoping to fool whatever it is life uses to get you with. I used an elaborate system of traps and detours. Every time it sounds “real,” it’s actually “made up” and vice-versa. I mixed names, places, and seasons so thoroughly not the best literary detective in the world could figure out where they come from.

Apropos of literary detectives, there is an amazing book by the French writer Raymond Queneau called Icarus, where a novelist hires one to find the characters who keep disappearing, one by one, from his novel-in-progress. Apparently, the characters, dissatisfied with the destinies their author prepared for them, took off to find their own. A man destined for fame and power opens a bicycle shop and is quite happy to patch tires all day. A beautiful, spoiled young rich girl, for whom a doomed sex life and several divorces were being prepared, marries a farmer and settles down to milking cows in Brittany. The detective tracks them down, is about to bring them back, but has a change of heart. He quits sleuthing and marries one of the minor characters in the first chapter. With him out of business it’s highly unlikely anyone will ever find out who my characters are and where they come from.

Having settled this, it was easier for me to put up with the other discomforts life causes the writer, such as having one’s wife almost leave him “because she’s not a character.” Just to be on the safe side, however, I am changing my name and I’m not telling anyone what the book is about.

Stalin

Nobody dies like Stalin did. He didn’t just die, he took the world with him. My world, at any rate. I was eight years old when it happened. At school all the kids had been crying and I’d been crying the most. For us, Stalin was that saintly, fatherly figure that smiled from above, surrounded by adoring children. For me, personally, he was father, pure and simple, because I didn’t have one of my own. On my little nightstand table I had his portrait and I slept securely under the shadow of his moustache.

Devastated, disbelieving, I came home from school through the back alleys, hiding my tears from everyone. When I got home I saw my stepfather and another man sitting soberly at the kitchen table. Unnoticed, I slipped into the room and hid, too upset to talk.

“I’m glad the sonofabitch is dead,” the man said, and my stepfather concurred.

My world was there and then shattered and lost forever. Later, I watched the people cry and tear their hair publicly on the streets, but I somehow knew that it was all a show. They were just using the occasion to grieve, weep, and cry for other sorrows. Stalin was just an excuse to mourn for the world. And I suspected fraud about the whole race of fathers, leaders, and men larger than life.

There are no fathers, I later decided, only moustaches which scatter in the wind, hair by hair, which vanish, disappear, betray, and leave you alone at night.