Dane: A Very Short Introduction by D. Beveridge

Dane: A Very Short Introduction by D. Beveridge

No way can I retell how the map has haunted me. It was left behind by my brother, D. Beveridge, the contents of which are superfluous, there’s no stuff that gives the map any motion in terms of sense-data. So qu'est-ce c'est? Well. It’s really something other than a map, strictly speaking, and I’m calling it such by way of a theoretical convention, as I was inspired today by an account of how Stevenson wrote Treasure Island based on a map he drew beforehand, and because I’ve been sitting on this untold material about my brother for a long, long time and need help getting it out. That being said, the contested status of cartography, currently, I think, allows for a bit of play on what constitutes a map anyways. So it’s not a totally dismissible conceit, and I’ve decided, just now, to stand on it. On one reading it’s a map of his particular brand of rationalism, the one that led to the ethereal suggestions visited upon him from some daemon Beyond, leading thusly to his decision to murder himself. A voice of his still calls from the umbrageous margins.

I’m struggling. Yes, there is an element of hesitation. No doubt also an allurement (as in all things evil). But most importantly, what I have to say about it consists of a re-description á la Dick Rorty, whom Dane also adored. I’ll get to all that shortly, maybe, but before I do, I have a few if not several observations to make regarding that peculiar state in which those of us who survived Dane remain his avatars. Maybe I won’t speak for the rest of them, I suppose that wouldn’t be very kindly. I’ll speak for myself.

Since his death I’ve gone through a number of stages that I can no longer identify as made up of, or even close to grief. If anything now those feelings about his destiny are nearer joy. I’ve only written one bad review in my life, and I learned the lesson early, that if one can only come up with bad things to say about the art, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. I’ll have to apply that now because most, if not the entirety of what I have come to believe about my brother, or at least his thinking, is hateful—inside the joy, if that makes sense. (The map here would point toward Eigenvectors as a measure of internal vibrations.) I will add that I believe I am corrigible in this matter of the hatred, so please don’t leave with the wrong impression.

He had his head so far up his ass by the end that it would’ve been entirely predictable to hear him mutter some meaningless shit about how ‘the Real’ is a counterfactual conditional. He didn’t say that, but might as well have. Or take it a step further: If all of reality were a counterfactual conditional, then I would’ve been happy. That’s Dane at his most distilled. It seemed he couldn’t help himself in this kind of pompous rhetorical move that distanced himself from everyone around him, even his most adoring students. If he had been a young man at the time, we could’ve excused him. The war didn’t help, but we should allow our vets to hide behind that specific excuse for only so long. I suppose, had the psychological community known more of PTSD at that time, we may have found him some better treatment. (Clearly, I’ve been buggered by his ghost recently.)

He wanted so badly to rise to originality. He thought at one time closer to the mid-point of the trajectory, that a grand allegory could save him from obscurity. He began work on an epic poem about an explorer in the Age of Discovery who followed closely after the Magellan expedition (keep in mind for the map), the circumnavigation getting at the deeper meaning of completing a Gesamtkunstwerk. The project was meant for him to externalize the drive for his own historicity, but he quickly understood that the whole premise was flawed, that his hero was merely retracing the steps of another, greater figure. Quite the blind spot he sighed after the first draft. Why he didn’t straighten it out and keep going is indicative of his half-rate discipline. In fact, upon reading what he sent me, I had told him—in good faith, I might add—that it had legs, and, suboptimal premise aside, I could see the work growing into something valuable. I didn’t say necessary at the time, and maybe should’ve because that would’ve been the word to stick. Again, in everything I’ve said so far, and in the remainder—I’m understanding as I write—there is no tragedy to be spelled by this genius felled by his lack of discipline. I’m sure he will be forgotten in the middle of a large cohort of such. The tragedy is rather that instead of learning from his example, I’ve simply come to accept it. Certainly there were other options available to him, to me.

He retreated to his study after the failed epic, and despite the English department’s demands he swerved into the philosophy of mathematics, auditing an undergraduate course in differential equations, for which he had taken a ‘W’ as a young man. (“The Transcript” was a constant menace well into his career.) When I visited him in his apartment in Brentwood my visits became table-talks with his wife, not himself. His children, in their own way, were asking—if only with their eyes—for me to do something about their father’s isolation, but the best I could come up with was telling them to, “Say your prayers tonight.” It was around this time that his dog died, a large black mastiff, Eurydice, who had been his only companion in the study. He didn’t so much as blink when I told him Olivia had confided in my wife that she was filing for a divorce (his second). I held on to the hope that the shell of the man could be re-inhabited by the next crab, who would grow up in fresh digs and subsequently move on to the bigger, brighter shell, and that there would be a continuity in all of that. A Thesean ship that could’ve been puzzled out of an annihilating paradox. When it came to a head, I asked him outright, which he must have received as an accusation, “Do you believe at all anymore?”

And that was the end of our relationship. He didn’t take my calls, wouldn’t open the door when I knocked, and with the absence of Olivia I had no inside agent. I had been an enabler, and despite his funny line about the enabler who should be praised for enabling good behavior, I felt responsible after the news of his death for years.

Decades he stole from me.

I’m not in the business of—of anything, really. But to the point here, I’m not in the business of sustaining things. Dane and I were cut from the same cloth in that. There were dozens of occasions as boys and young men that we received lightning, started on a supremely beautiful concept together, only to see it die as a suffocating, infant instantiation. It was his influence, as the older, upon me to devalue matter as crass, which subverted all of our efforts to create something better. Still in my brother’s shadow I continue to make decisions that preclude the possibility of me correcting that. The nameless vocation, according to Howe, of poetry. For the thousands of pages of pragmatists I have consumed, I am no closer to a method that lives by any amount of fidelity to truth. It’s a problem with mission objectives. But I’ll give myself a little grace, and admit that such a category is hard to fill for anyone. Especially if one’s ambition is apart from wealth, power, or prestige. The tragedy, again, is that by accepting his fate, and by extension my own, I’ve become an old man with little to show. Turned out there were no treasures to unearth at ‘X’.

And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpiller,
and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you.

I’ll visit his grave today, his would’ve been centennial, even if I don’t want to. I’ll have to ask his granddaughter to help me in the wheelchair, but I’ll go. Leave some zinnias in honor of his ekphrastic about Albert York’s painting. I know they won’t desiccate too quickly.

———

D. Beveridge writes in Los Angeles where everything is concrete. He is an editor at American Ontology. Twenty-two a day.