Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Imaginative Impedimenta

Having just read Lowry’s Under the Volcano, I suppose I was prepared for Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress. The former is an account of life seen through an alcoholic haze. The latter is a life seen through dementia. There are remarkably similarities between them, with the notable exception that Markson’s Kate is much more self-aware than Lowry’s Geoffrey. Kate knows that almost everything about her life is a delusion or a distortion of her experience. She knows neither her age (somewhere perhaps between 47 and early 50’s), nor what she does to make a living (a painter perhaps but there are other possibilities), nor very much about her history at all (she has vague memories of living in various museums around the world). So her condition is a tad less debilitating than that of Geoffrey Firmin. At least she isn’t paranoid and she accepts the possibility of her own madness.

The radical Scottish psychiatrist R D Laing created a wonderfully concise aphorism for his field and for his patients: If you don’t know that you don’t know, then you think you know; if you don’t know that you know, then you think you don’t know. Kate is unsure about almost everything in her life. She knows she doesn’t know - about everything and anything. This is an entirely different logical category to Laing’s classification about knowledge. Knowing that you don’t know is in fact an attribute of wisdom. It also breeds humility, and a certain form of honesty which is sometimes difficult to accept. If none of Kate’s writing is a narrative of actual events, why spend the time writing - or reading - about them? She immediately contradicts almost everything she says. On the other hand, isn’t that precisely the presumption of all fiction? The fact that a fictional character is constantly spilling the frijoles about her lack of concrete existence shouldn’t be so disconcerting.

How does something real, a house say, get to be something mental, a thought in one’s head? What is the connection between the imaginary and the real thing. Clearly it is not language because there are also painting and music and ancient artifacts (not to mention smells and random noise) to consider. These things ‘get in our head’ as well. And they ramify. For example, Kate, thinking about a person in a painting which hangs upstairs in another room: “Although I have also just closed my eyes, and so could additionally say that for the moment the person was not only both upstairs and on the wall, but in my head as well.” In other words she has the mental image of a mental image. And by the way, who is that person in the painting? Why is she there? Who else can be imagined in the house? What is the relationship between her and the painter? Imagination runs rampant as soon as the questions arise. Where might it end? Words, paintings, music, all representations go adrift like rowboats on the ocean, never to be brought back to shore.

All this weight of imagination constitutes excess baggage. The Romans called it impedimenta. And it certainly is that, an impediment to an easy life. Kate has gotten rid of her physical impedimenta - anything run on electricity, flush toilets, in fact all modern conveniences. But she can’t get rid of her imaginative impedimenta. That stuff comes with the territory called age, an accumulation of imaginative connections which multiply even as one tries to restrict them. Imagination is what we can’t control. Imagination is what is behind sex, and greed, and religion, and even violence just as the Ancient Greeks knew. Restricting imagination demands more imagination, not less. Clytemnestra killed her husband Agamemnon not because he sacrificed their child but because she imagined him doing it. And her children, Electra and Orestes, murdered her and her new husband, probably because of a lack of imagination about maternal love. Imagination: Can’t live with it; can’t live without it.

All of Markson’s paragraphs are exactly one sentence long and in the first person. The effect is not so much train of thought as a barrage from long distance artillery. The shells burst everywhere within his landscape in a random pattern. But nevertheless there is a pattern. Somewhere in this pattern lies Kate’s truth. This is a mystery to her: “In addition to remembering things that one does not know how one remembers, one would also appear to remember things that one has no idea how one knew to begin with.” How does a pattern consisting of Archimedes, Bertrand Russell, Brahms and Kathleen Ferrier, for example, cohere? That’s an inductive question. But it requires more than induction to answer. It requires what might be called empathy, that is a presumption that there is a pattern, a purpose, in Kate’s musings to begin with. Kate can supply the raw data points as it were but not the the gesso, the glue and paint necessary to prepare a canvas for for a painting. This is supplied by her readers or not at all. In short, it’s hard to say which requires more imagination, writing or reading. The alternative in both cases is solipsistic delusion.

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