Q&A: Donald Barthelme chases down a deep one--

J. D. O'Hara: What about the moral responsibility of the
artist? I take it that you are a responsible artist (as opposed,
say, to X, Y, and Z), but all is irony, comic distortion, foreign
voices, fragmentation. Where in all this evasion of the straight-
forward does responsibility display itself?

Barthelme: It's not the straightforward that's being evaded but
the too-true. I might fix your eye firmly and announce "Thou
shalt not mess around with thy neighbor's wife." You might then
nod and say to yourself, quite so. We might then at lunch at the
local chili parlor say scurrilous things about X, Y, and Z. But it
will not have escaped your notice that my statement has hardly
enlarged your cosmos, that I've been in the largest sense, respon-
sible to neither art, life, nor adultery.

I believe that my every sentence trembles with morality in that
each attempts to engage the problematic rather than to present
a proposition to which all reasonable men must agree. The en-
gagement might very small, a word modifying another word, the
substitution of "mess around" for "covet," which undresses
adultery a bit. I think the paraphrasable content in art is rather
slight--"tiny," as de Kooning puts it. The way things are done is
crucial, as the inflection of a voice crucial. The change of em-
phasis from the what to the how seems to me to be the major
impulse in art since Flaubert, and it's not merely formalism, it's
not at all superficial, it's an attempt to reach truth, and a very
rigorous one. You don't get, following this path, a moral uni-
verse set out in ten propositions, but we already have that. And
the attempt is sufficiently skeptical about itself. In this century
there's much stress placed not upon what we know but on
knowing that our methods are themselves questionable--our
Song of Song is the Uncertainty Principle.

Also, it's entirely possible to fail to understand or actively mis-
understand what an artist is doing. I remember going through
a very large Barnett Newman show years ago with Tom Hess
and Harold Rosenberg, we used to go to shows after long
lunches, those wicked lunches which are no more, and I walked
through the show like a certifiable idiot, couldn't understand
their enthusiasm. I admired the boldness, the color and so on,
but inwardly I was muttering "wallpaper, wallpaper, very fine
wallpaper but wallpaper." I was wrong, didn't get the core
of Newman's enterprise, what Tom called Newman's effort
toward the sublime. Later I began to understand. One doesn't
take in Proust or Canada on the basis of a single visit.

To return to your question: if I looked you straight in the
eye and said, "The beauty of women makes of adultery a
serious and painful duty," then we'd have the beginning of a
useful statement.

--Donald Barthelme interviewed by J. D. O'Hara, 1981
in Donald Barthelme, Not-Knowing: The Essays and
Interviews [New York: Random House, 1997]

Works in Progress, 18

1.
maneuvering around car-sized potholes
designing legal strategies
speaking solely in terms of racial justice
examining burial pits and naked skulls

2.
sticking to issues that directly affect them
bemoaning the cautiousness of today's athletes
co-opting the arguments of their opposition
tracking Latino immigrants at the border

3.
supporting any effort to unionize
failing to generate meaningful responses
feeling the centipede in oneself
getting some good poems out of it

4.
rewriting the country's labor laws
seeing a psychic map of our obsessions
building electoral coalitions that will win
emphasizing the overlapping interests of the affluent

5.
slumbering until nightfall
setting this brain of mine afire
reaching irritably after fact & reason
shunning easy consolations

6.
subsidizing extinction industries
helping women victimized by male violence
doubling the sign-up bonus for volunteers
supporting the troops while doubting the war

7.
naming the dead
waiting for him to break silence
descending the steeps of the soughing twilight
assimilating foreign cultures

8.
freeing the slaves
admonishing those who do evil
stamping out political brushfires
democratizing the US

9.
getting in touch with the cable guys
swinging the birches
testing the waters
pushing radical music agendas

10.
getting out the vote
fetching water from the well
educating the masses
confessing to our personal demons

11.
clearing minefields from past wars
laying them for wars yet to come
staying executions, pardoning the innocent
blurring the boundaries, the borders

12.
reading maps in the dark with the top light off
folding them all back up rightly
cramming them into the glove compartment
getting moving again in the right direction

13.
cooling our heels
voting early and often
keeping our fingers crossed
paying full-price for our journey

14.
assembling a glossary of oft-used phrases
keeping silent while the tea is poured
maintaining an inventory of our beliefs and belongings
finding time to clean up around the house

15.
making the world safe for plutocracy
clearing the minefields and cow pastures
converting analog files to digital
rereading An Anatomy of Melancholy

16.
fighting the high cost of prescription meditations
comparing the works of Proust, Gide, and Sartre
putting something aside for a rainy day
asking for another user's name and password

17.
scanning the shelves for news
cleaning up after the latest tsunami
taking care of our parents
looking forward to end-of-life decisions

18.
reassessing works already completed
exterminating the brutes
removing the snow from the car
rebuilding the old road from Fredrikstad to Skjeberg

19.

"Rauschenberg is continually being offered scraps of this and that,
odds and ends his friends run across, since it strikes them: This is
something he could use in a painting. Nine times out of ten it turns
out he has no use for it. Say it's something close to something he
once found useful, and so could be recognized as his. Well, then,
as a matter of course, his poetry has moved without one's knowing
where it's gone to. He changes what goes on, on a canvas, but he
does not change how canvas is used for paintings--that is, stretched
flat to make rectangular surfaces which may be hung on a wall. These
he used singly, joined together, or placed in a symmetry so obvious
as not to attract interest (nothing special). We know two ways to
unfocus attention: symmetry is one of them; the other is the over-all
where each small part is a sample of what you find elsewhere. In
either case, there is at least the possibility of looking anywhere, not
just where someone arranged you should. You are then free to deal
with your freedom just as the artist dealt with his, not in the same way
but, nevertheless, originally. This thing, he says, duplication of
images, that is symmetry. All it means is that, looking closely, we see
as it was everything is in chaos still."

--John Cage, "On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work"
in Silence [Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961]

Poems from the Book of Nanoseconds, #26

he secretly regretted
the purity of his zeal,
a sacred vessel

Fragments from Thoreau, 4

as I was told,
sixty dollars in a day
skinning and all took two days

Works in Progress, 17

1.
maneuvering around car-sized potholes
designing legal strategies
speaking solely in terms of racial justice
examining burial pits and naked skulls

2.
sticking to issues that directly affect them
bemoaning the cautiousness of today's athletes
co-opting the arguments of their opposition
tracking Latino immigrants at the border

3.
supporting any effort to unionize
failing to generate meaningful responses
feeling the centipede in oneself
getting some good poems out of it

4.
rewriting the country's labor laws
seeing a psychic map of our obsessions
building electoral coalitions that will win
emphasizing the overlapping interests of the affluent

5.
slumbering until nightfall
setting this brain of mine afire
reaching irritably after fact & reason
shunning easy consolations

6.
subsidizing extinction industries
helping women victimized by male violence
doubling the sign-up bonus for volunteers
supporting the troops while doubting the war

7.
naming the dead
waiting for him to break silence
descending the steeps of the soughing twilight
assimilating foreign cultures

8.
freeing the slaves
admonishing those who do evil
stamping out political brushfires
democratizing the US

9.
getting in touch with the cable guys
swinging the birches
testing the waters
pushing radical music agendas

10.
getting out the vote
fetching water from the well
educating the masses
confessing to our personal demons

11.
clearing minefields from past wars
laying them for wars yet to come
staying executions, pardoning the innocent
blurring the boundaries, the borders

12.
reading maps in the dark with the top light off
folding them all back up rightly
cramming them into the glove compartment
getting moving again in the right direction

13.
cooling our heels
voting early and often
keeping our fingers crossed
paying full-price for our journey

14.
assembling a glossary of oft-used phrases
keeping silent while the tea is poured
maintaining an inventory of our beliefs and belongings
finding time to clean up around the house

15.
making the world safe for plutocracy
clearing the minefields and cow pastures
converting analog files to digital
rereading An Anatomy of Melancholy

16.
fighting the high cost of prescription meditations
comparing the works of Proust, Gide, and Sartre
putting something aside for a rainy day
asking for another user's name and password

17.
scanning the shelves for news
cleaning up after the latest tsunami
taking care of our parents
looking forward to end-of-life decisions

18.

"In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes,
try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two,
and so on. Eventually one discovers that it's not boring at all
but very interesting."

--John Cage, Silence

[Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961]

Poems from the Book of Nanoseconds, #25

these morning walks
continued to blame
not able to persuade

New Year

Cardinals fly up
from the edge of the near
field, another
year's luck.

The haiku poet gives
us a morning gift:

Starry night:
she squeezes in between
her husband and her ex

A road, a fence, a field.

A table on which a book
lies open: History
of the Great American
Fortunes by Gustavus Myers.

A glimpse out the window
of gray and white
cat. I open the door
and in it comes.

This is the first day,
unlike any other.


--Halvard Johnson