emergency press international book contest...emergency press international book contest in praise of...

Emergency Press International Book Contest

In Praise of Nothing:Essays, Memoir, and Experiments

Eric LeMay

Selected by Nicholaus Patnaude

“In Praise of Nothing is jammed with profound, yet effortless-seeming micro-pieces to be read and reread. If you hated writing essays in school, picking up this brutally-honest, heart-wrenching, and new-neural-pathway-forming book might just inspire you to try your hand at some nonfiction, start a blog, or at the very least, you’ll step away enlightened, refreshed, and entertained. LeMay’s work is as original and distinctive as a sort of Walter Benjamin for our digital ADD age of alternate social media realities.”

—Nicholaus Patnaude, author of First Aide Medicine

Praise for

In Praise of Nothing

“A lively collection of pensées, LeMay’s In Praise of Nothing is a charming investigation of memory, humor, serendipity, and the existential problem of ‘being me’.”—Christina Thompson, author of Come on Shore and We Will

Kill and Eat You All

“The erudite essays in In Praise of Nothing are force multipliers, propelling the Zen meditation to Zeno’s paradox. Always null but, no, not dull, the book is never nothing but whole, the complete Enso. It effortlessly records and enacts Pascal’s infinite and noisy silence between the stars.”—Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone and Four for a

Quarter

Immortal Milk

“The next best thing to tasting the cheese itself...a warm, even gooey, appreciation of a much-loved and often misunderstood food.”—Publishers Weekly

“Clearly, this is someone who not only celebrates cheese, but also the written word, which is what makes Immortal Milk such a great read.”—Domenica Marchetti, The Washington Post

“Memorable...bouncing between travelog and poetry, history and buying guide...LeMay is an engaging writer.”—Library Journal

Emergency PressNew York

EricLeMay

In Praise of

Essays, Memoir, and Experiments

Copyright © 2014 by Eric LeMay

All rights reserved

For information about permissions to reproduce selections from this book, translation rights, or to order bulk purchases, write to Emergency Press at [email protected].

A multimedia version of this title is available at the Apple store, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Google.

Design by Eric LeMay

LeMay, EricIn Praise of Nothing: Essays, Memoir, and ExperimentsISBN 978-0-9885694-7-81. Literary Collections—Essays. 2. Literary Collections—Popular Culture. 3. Biography and Autobiography—Personal Memoirs.

Excerpts of original media are included in this text: Selections from Views in and about Athens Asylum for the Insane: Picturesque Athens Asylum (Columbus: Baker Photogravure Co., 1893). �e entire volume, which was prepared for display at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, may be viewed at http://media.library.ohiou.edu/. Images courtesy of the Athens County Historical Society and Museum, kindly loaned to Ohio University Libraries for digitizing and made available online by Ohio University Libraries. Other images in “�e Lost Garden of Herman Haerlin” are used by permission, courtesy of the Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections, Ohio University Libraries. �e report quoted in “Gatean Degas, A Personal History” aired on 60 Minutes on November 15, 1987. I have quoted under the provision of fair use as explained in section 107 of the copyright law of the United States, which allows for exceptions to exclusive use of copyrighted material for the purpose of comment.

Emergency Press New Yorkemergencypress.org

In Praise of Nothing website at: inpraiseofnothing.com

Printed in the United States of AmericaDistributed by Publishers Group West

In Praise of

(I)


A Biography of the Nameless

Known Unknowns

Gatean Degas, A Personal History

Fallen

(II)

Once More to the Lake

Viral –Ize

Dropped Baby

Resistible, A Comic Memoir about Comedy

Hamlet, A Failure

(III)

Of Studies

Readymade Heuruex

Losing the Lottery

Wynde

The Lost Garden of Herman Haerlin

1

5

29

37

49

57

69

79

85

131

139

145

149

171

175

for Chuck

The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the Aequinox?

—Sir Thomas Browne, “Hydriotaphia” (1658)

Inasmuch as we are now entering upon the fourth part of a three-part essay, we should brace ourselves for some inconsequentiality.

—Anne Carson, “Decreation” (2005)

Dropped Baby


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It began badly. I, who am less than comfortable at parties, drink more than is wise at parties. I am aware of this fault and yet, when I find myself faced with one, two, perhaps as many as five hours among people who excel in the art of sustained chit-chat, I see no choice. I must, I think, survive. And I do, although somewhere around hour five, I start to feel comfortable, even jovial. I am in what might be called a festive mood. By then, the other guests have usually left, having said their thanks, having kiss-kissed on the cheek, and my hosts are enduring what I imagine are my charming flights of fancy, my impromptu pith, while I wrestle the cork out of wine that no one will drink but me.

And so it was, or I was, slumped on the couch at a friend’s apartment, where we were celebrating the end of the winter solstice. From now on, the days would grow lighter and so, presumably, would our spirits. We were drinking a Hungarian liqueur called Zwack, a dark herbal concoction that was originally devised as medicine for Emperor Joseph II of the Habsberg Court. It looks like poison ink and tastes like liquefied toad, and we were sipping it and shouting “Egészségetekre!” as though we were robust Hungarian royalty, and for some reason that I cannot reconstruct I thought it would be provocative or amusing or delightfully improbable to ask of no one

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in particular but with a volume that startled everyone, “IF YOU DROPPED A NEWBORN BABY, WOULD YOU WANT IT TO BE YOURS OR SOMONE ELSE’S?”

Silence. Our Habsbergian revels had ended. I did not register this fact, but instead grinned with dopy expectation. After a prolonged moment, the refrigerator’s hum suddenly audible from the kitchen, my host acted graciously. Instead of taking away my Zwack, which was now tasting warm and delicious, he said, “Well, the answer is obvious.”

Obvious? Was it? No, it wasn’t obvious. It was a conundrum, a riddle. It was one of those unwinnable scenarios like “If you had to fight a grizzly bear or great white shark, which would you choose and why?” Either one, you die. Except mine was wittier, because it involved not only the sure-fire slapstick of a damaged baby, but also an ethical dilemma: when confronted with inevitable suffering, do you inflict it on yourself—the baby here being an extension of one’s self—or someone else? My hypothetical pitted altruism against self-interest. It revealed, through one choice, your internal hierarchy of values. What could be less obvious than that?

And yet, as I mulled it over in the breath between my host declaring it obvious and his giving the obvious answer, I saw that perhaps it was obvious, that, yeah, okay, I can see how, in posing the question, my own limitations might have inadvertently clouded what was clear for everyone else and that, right, if you had to drop a baby, had to, no other way around it, then you’d obviously want to do unto others as you’d have others do unto you: you’d drop your own baby.

“Obviously,” my host stressed, “you’d drop someone else’s baby. I mean, come on.”


83

I looked around the room. Everyone’s face said, “Come on.” Actually, they said, “Come on and stop asking stupid questions and don’t you know that your lips are stained black with Zwack?” But I missed these nuances. I was bewildered. How could I have gotten what was so obviously right wrong?

And then, in that vertigo that occurs in Hollywood thrillers, where the lens zooms in as the camera dollies out, creating a push-pull effect that makes it look as though the entire world is warping around the troubled teen who realizes, right then, that she’s not really human but a cyborg or around the kidnapper who realizes, right then, that the supposed victim he’s locked in the cellar is actually the criminal madman who’s hired him, I realized why I, alone among the drinkers of Zwack, why I, who do not have children of my own, thought it obviously better to drop my own hypothetical baby rather than someone else’s. For how else do we learn what’s so obvious as to go unquestioned? How else do we internalize who we are and what we value, especially when it comes to family? How else but from our parents? I realized, right then: I am the dropped baby.

The Lost Garden of Herman Haerlin


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You search for a lost garden, to enter, to drift through, the early sun lighting its seared grass, your image doubled in the lake’s clear water. As though the sky had always been empty of clouds. As though, as you stopped and listened—now robin, now house finch—you turned your face toward the day’s first wind.

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This garden was designed by Herman Haerlin for the patients of the Athens Lunatic Asylum, which opened on New Year’s Day, 1874. The buildings still stand, on a hilltop of the rough Alleghany Plateau in Southeast Ohio.


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In 1874, you would have been able to stand on the asylum’s upper terraces and look out—over the garden, past its man-made lakes and winding paths—to the town of Athens in the distance. Today, huge pines shroud most of the view.

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Haerlin, a German-born designer, shared a vision of landscape gardening made famous in America by Frederick Law Olmsted, who with Calvert Vaux co-designed New York City’s Central and Prospect Parks. In Olmsted’s vision, natural beauty has the power to uplift and even restore those who look on it.

In 1865, two years before Haerlin devised his plans for the garden, Olmsted claimed that “the enjoyment of scenery employs the mind without fatigue and yet exercises it, tranquilizes it and yet enlivens it; and thus, through the influence of the mind over the body, gives the effect of refreshing rest and reinvigoration to the whole system.” For Olmsted, nature, experienced rightly, could heal both the mind and body.

Haerlin’s garden would try to provide such healing. It would offer the asylum’s patients “moral treatment.” The phrase comes from Philippe Pinel, a French physician working in Paris at the end of the eighteenth century. Pinel’s method of treatment, which he called traitment morale, followed a psychological, rather than a physical approach to healing mental illness. Pinel argued against using corporal punishment and placing restraints on patients, a regular practice at the time. Instead, he claimed that the most effective method for treating patients came from giving them a regular routine in a peaceful setting.

This method, translated into English as “moral treatment,” came to influence American psychiatry throughout the nineteenth century. Physicians sought to provide humane care for their patients through direct interaction with them and through the institutions and institutional life established for them.


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In 1879, the superintendent of the asylum—a position that would be held by several men over its first few decades—described this medical vision in his annual report to the Board of Trustees:

Under the head of moral treatment must be considered all those means that tend to lead the mind into a normal and healthy channel, and direct the thoughts, as much as possible, in another course, remote from their delusions. See your patients as much as possible. Give them moderate exercise. Walking, riding, and driving in the open air have a tendency to break the monotony of asylum life and add to the comfort and happiness of the patient. Voluntary exercise is indicative of improvement and should be encouraged. Occupation engrosses the mind and withdraws it from empty longings and illusions of the imagination.

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The landscape surrounding the asylum would be an essential contribution to this treatment. The year before, in 1878, the previous superintendent explicitly described how the design of the grounds would help to cure its patients. Asking for $8,000 to continue grading the landscape and improving the lake, he wrote:

The slope in front of the eastern division of the building, in which are the female wards, remains untouched and presents a foreboding appearance. It should be brought to harmonize with the gracefully finished lawn lying in front of the western division as early as practicable not only for the purpose of pleasing the public eye, which it is always well to do, but for stronger reasons, to present to the view of those who look out for relief a landscape marked by no violation of the laws of harmony. For surely no agency contributes more potently to the relief of a mind disturbed than strictly harmonious sensorial impressions.


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Seen in this light, the garden influences: its outward state affects your inward state. Its strict harmonies amend the disharmonies within you, as though the garden, through your exposure to it, somehow tends you, somehow cultivates you. You are corrected, set right, remedied by the garden.

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If that’s true, does the influence run the other way? For this vision of the garden imagines it as a stable and unchanging place: throughout the seasons, from high summer to winter’s blight, the garden unvaryingly gives health to those who enter it, however unhealthy they are. But could the unhealthy person also affect the garden? Could you or I, in sickness, sicken it?

Much of your answer to this question will turn, like Olmsted’s, on how you think about the mind and its power to create change. If your mind, catalyzed by the garden, ultimately causes the change that occurs in your health, then the garden can remain changeless, no matter who sits along its lakeshores, no matter your ills. Gardens don’t have minds.

(Though, in Western mythology, gardens do have a spirit, a genius loci, that was considered divine, animate, capable of helping or harming those who encounter them.)

Yet you might also think about this vision as an exchange of breath: as you inhale the oxygen that the garden breathes out, the garden breathes in, builds itself from, the carbon dioxide you exhale. What you release into the air, whatever is inside you, the garden takes and turns into its own fiber, xylem and phloem, root and leaf.


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The patients who entered Haerlin’s garden suffered from a variety of “moral” sicknesses, most of which remain with us today: melancholy, forgetfulness, lethargy, grief, fright, shock, disappointment, excitement, loss, the stresses that come from overbearing parents, pregnancy, spinsterhood, financial and marital troubles, the overuse of alcohol, tobacco, and cocaine, as well as physical “maladies,” from pneumonia and asthma to masturbation and menstruation.

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Female Patient 286: “distress caused by her son, being killed in the late War”

Female Patient 6: “unhappy family relations with herhusband”

Female Patient 36: “probably childbirth or the puerperalstate”

Female Patient 331: “menstrual derangement”Female Patient 26: “religious excitement”Female Patient 377: “over anxiety about her children”Female Patient 192: “compunctions for having disgraced

herself and her family”Female Patient 242: “Matrimonial disappointment”

(“it appears that she is sensible of having disappointed someone else by Marrying her present husband and for that reason she ought to put herself out of the way of all”)

Female Patient 5: “unknown except her father was a drunkard and abusive”


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Male Patient 1: “business perplexity and general ill health”Male Patient 150: “Financial Embarrassment”Male Patient 221: “failure in business”Male Patient 209: “mental trouble from death of his Father

some seven months since, and I suspicion onanisme”Male Patient 334: “thrown out of employment” Male Patient 332: “protracted use of alcoholic liquor”Male Patient 10: “loss of property, intemperance, and in

January last his wife died”Male Patient 231: “chronic mania” (“The cause is nervous

derangement, probably acquired while in the Army. He received a sudden shock from cannonading.”)

Male Patient 200: “blood poisoning”Male Patient 216: “Typhoid Fever, from which he suffered

while in the Army during the year of 1864”

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The garden of Herman Haerlin was not a garden for perfection. It assumed you were broken when you entered it. The garden began its work there, because the garden knows that to be alive is to be broken. This is the story of the Fall, the story of the lost Garden.


189

In Genesis, the first mention of the first garden uses the Hebrew phrase gan-beEden, “a garden in Eden.” We learn that out of this garden ran a single river, splitting into four separate branches.

(Genesis also tells how God forms man from the ground of this garden. The words themselves ring of each other: adamah, meaning “ground,” adam, meaning “man,” from which comes the name of the first man, Adam. God breathes life into man—inspires him—and man becomes a living soul.)

The Greek translators of Genesis chose the word paradeisos for the Hebrew gan. In its earliest use, paradeisos described a walled-in field, full of woods, animals, and flowers. This Greek word originated from a Median word, paridaeze, which meant an enclosure (pari) surrounded by a wall (daeze). This wall would have been made of a sticky substance, such as clay or mud, a substance taken from the ground. Through this translation, the garden became bounded, a space set apart, separate. You could know when you were in it and when you weren’t. You could hold it in your mind’s eye and imagine its edges.

(Consider the body as an edge, a garden, rife with the soul.)

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The asylum would eventually encompass over a thousand acres of land just south of the Hocking River, but in 1867, the year Haerlin drew up his plan, it covered 150 acres of steep woodlands that would need to be transformed.


191

Executing the plan took decades. The landscape had to be graded, paths had to be laid, trees had to be removed and planted, and eventually the lakes, which also served as a reservoir for the asylum, had to be built. The construction would require blasting, as well as moving tons of dirt and rock by hand and with the help of carts and mules.

For the first fifteen years, Haerlin oversaw the construction, which was carried out in part by the patients themselves. Their labor, like the garden that came from it, also benefited their health. In 1883, the asylum’s superintendent noted in his annual report:

There has been a daily average, for every working day in the year, of 137 patients who have been employed at some form of labor outside the wards.The work done has been in every case voluntary, though all proper inducements and arguments have been brought forth to encourage such a disposition. A variety of employments have been utilized: grading, gardening, fencing, painting and the various kinds of work in the different departments. These have been taken principally from the most disturbed wards, and the improvement has been plainly evident…as a result fewer brawls and disturbances among the patients have been noted. There has been a decrease in the number of complaints; a smaller amount of stimulants and medicines of all kinds has been found necessary….They have better appetites, and the record of noise and disturbance by night indicates of diminution in the amount. The patients are a better color and more rugged. Their muscles are firmer and they can endure more fatigue. They have more red blood. There is an absence of the sallow, cachectic and haggard countenance so common among this class.

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In the making of it and in its use, Haerlin’s garden was a success. Haerlin fulfilled the aims expressed by the superintendent in 1872, two years before the asylum opened: “to develop the pleasure-grounds and gardens, drives and walks, of such interest to all, but so necessary to the comfort of those who may be compelled to spend months or years, or even pass away the rest of their lives within its boundaries.”


193

The garden remained open to the asylum’s patients and the townspeople of Athens until 1968, when the Army Corps of Engineers rerouted the Hocking River at its base to avoid the damage regularly caused by the river’s high-water levels and frequent flooding.

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Now the garden is gone, except perhaps for the images of it that remain. The ones I’ve used here have been taken from a photo book published in 1893, Views in and about Athens Asylum for the Insane. I’ve attempted, with much guesswork, to merge these images with others that I’ve taken of what’s there now.


195

Along with the remaining images, there’s also the garden of the mind, the one that exists in memory for those who saw the garden before it was destroyed, but also the one we can build with our imagination and, perhaps, through imagining, enter.

Here is the garden I imagine: in this place you can bring your life’s burdens—your cares and your longings, your brokenness—and give them over. To the white trillium, with its three petals open like a chalice, to the willow trees on the far bank, their branches draped into the lake’s glass, or to the lake itself, give over whatever stirs in what Augustine called your “unquiet heart.” The garden will accept them.

The garden says, “Place them here.” Whether you know precisely what they are. Whether you know only that they are. Here, alongside the snow curled by the wind. Here, among the dogwood blossoms and the ants going about their business, head, thorax, and abdomen, put them here.

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