Vanishing Point
by David Markson
As someone said below, this is a great novel...unless you're in the mood to read a novel.
"Ravenna, Dante died in..."
"El Greco was a pupil of Titian's"
"Forgetting to remember that Tintoretto's name comes from the fact that his father was a dyer."
"Or that Correggio's comes from the name of the small town where he was born."
"Farinelli was at one period commissioned to sing to Philip V of Spain every evening for a decade."
"Luca Signorelli, at the sudden death of a young son--having the corpse striped and making a full length drawing of the boy for remembrance. And with extraordinary fortitude, shedding not a tear, Vasari says."
"Cafavy worked for the Ministry of Public Works in Alexandria for thirty years."
"Shakespeare's equal, Voltaire called Lope de Vega."
"Was Andrea Mantegna's Padua fresco, The Martyrdom of Saint James, destroyed by a bomb in 1944, perhaps the greatest loss to art since WWII?"
This the book... there is an "Author" who talks about wanting to transform these many index cards of factoids that he keeps in two shoeboxes into a novel... how? And to what end...? The book is like that. But it is wonderful...
I am going to start a Vanishing Point section on my blog to jot down interesting things found in texts... in the old days, I always did this--jotting them on my journals to be treasured and thought about again and again... now? Not so much. Highly recommend this... have wanted to read Wittgenstein's Mistress for years. The closest thing this reminds me of is Sebald's Unrecounted Poems--also recommended!
Below from Joan's great essay on rest.
During this time that I’ve been so exhausted, David Markson’s Vanishing Point has been the only book I recall in which the author (or Author as he calls himself) very occasionally mentions just how tired he is while he writes. How his tiredness is keeping him from getting his work done. I believe Markson had cancer at the time he wrote it, though at that stage probably undiagnosed. Early in the book he writes:
One reason for Author’s procrastination is that he seems not to have had much energy lately, to tell the truth.
For work, or for much of anything else.
It’s unusual for a writer, not writing a memoir, to be this frank about his physical state. And the book, which is funny and weird, full of great two- or three-line stories about racism and writers and musicians and artists and the whole odd business that is life, illuminates the sometimes funny, sometimes tragic strangeness that is reality. It is also a lot about death. And, Author’s very occasional mentions of himself give the book an even more moving quality.
Toward the end Author has developed some difficulty moving his body in the way he’s used to as well.
Actually, more than his persistent tiredness, what has started to distress Author lately is the way he has found himself scuffing his feet when he walks.
Markson suspects some neurological issue. Or just age. There is the “damnable obstinate weariness.”
In the last few pages of the book there is a section comprised only of dates and locations. Some are easy to recognize:
Fireplace Road, East Hampton. 10:15 P.M. August 11, 1956.
Ketchum, Idaho. Soon after dawn. July 2, 1961.
Others I’d have to look up. But obviously all are the times and locations of singular deaths. Death is the Vanishing Point.
While fortunately my own mood remains good, and fortunately the people I know who contracted Covid-19 have all recovered, I’ve also noticed that recently I’ve been reading (in a lax and weary way) about ghouls and crypts and mourning and melancholia. Because states of deep tiredness do naturally lead to thoughts of death. My own fatigue has made me more cognizant of the phrase dead tired. Whether or not this is how one would feel when close to death, certainly there is a sense that this is how it might be. When exhaustion forbids almost all activity, death leaps (crawls?) to mind. I found myself going back to those two great poems: Donne’s A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, and Dylan Thomas’s A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London. Forbid. Refuse. It is possible I can’t let myself feel all my grief about the world, the unnecessary and terrible deaths from Covid, the unnecessary and terrible deaths from racism, the unnecessary and terrible death of the planet, and so I transfer my feelings about death to my reading. And though I think my fatigue has a pretty clear physical basis, I don’t discount the possibility of some somatization; after all, many people who don’t have immune issues and have not been exposed to the virus are also tired.
Near the end of Vanishing Point, Markson brings up the term Selah.
Selah, which marks the ends of verses in the Psalms, but the Hebrew meaning of which is unknown.
And probably indicates no more than pause or rest.
Why does Author wish it implied more—or might stand for some ultimate effacement, even?
While I’m not yet ready for ultimate effacement, I am looking forward to a time when rest rejuvenates and I can stop rattling shakily around in my skin.
Pause. Rest. With Markson, Selah.