NOTNITZ THE HEADHUNTER
Tête (Teste, Head).
The organ of potentiality is nature’s masterpiece.
—Paul Valéry, Monsieur Teste
Notnitz brought a friend to see The Turin Horse at a microcinema. Afterwards, as they stopped by the ticket booth so that he could check whether the film would be showing again, he wondered aloud how such a slow bleak film could be so exhilarating. “And wasn’t the hot potato scene sort of hilarious, at least the first time?” It must not have been the right moment to introduce the friend to windswept Hungarian cinema, however. She reached into the pocket of her jeans, extracted a Chapstick, and stuck it in one of her nostrils.
At the museum, though his lower half was well behind the safety cable, a guard told Notnitz to step back from the Guston painting. He dutifully obliged and seized the moment to ask how he, the guard, felt passing a portion of his day alongside the bleeding, time-fettered Stationary Figure. The guard extracted a Chapstick from the pocket of his blazer and, well…
Not long after, Notnitz used lugubrious in conversation. His interlocuter tee-heed and said, “Is that even a word?” Purse: Chapstick: nostril.
In his novel discussion group, Notnitz brought up Kundera’s dictum that every novel is based on a set of theme-words and suggested it would be fruitful to apply it to the novel under discussion. Before he could make his case with preposterous, the word’s absurd yoking of before and after and its motif throughout the novel, the host unbuckled his leather satchel and rooted around inside with a desperately hurried hand. Chapstick: nostril. Notnitz went into silence like an anchorite into a musty cell.
He read a lugubrious book-length essay about the degeneration of culture and ended up writing about it in his notebooks because he didn’t have anyone to discuss it with. That wasn’t really conversation. He read “Masscult and Midcult” and ended up writing about it in his notebooks.
He was well aware of the strengths of American culture and often found himself defending it against anyone who quipped that American culture was oxymoronic. But was this, by and large, life in the United States? Should he move again to Europe or take refuge in a doctoral program? Was he being pretentious? Was he moving in the wrong circles—should he try ovals or squares instead? His dedication to filling his head and synthesizing the fill knew few bounds. Did he need to relieve it instead?
A kind of head-hurt had accumulated. He persisted for a time, then he gave up. It was, indubitably, an important phase of his education—but also one that was lasting too long.
Notnitz the anchorite retreated from the waste places of average humanity(1) to set up camp in another kind of wasteland. Being a fanatical masturbator, intellectually speaking, might well be his fate. He also considered that he might be part, if only part, of the problem. Perhaps his seriousness, his hard crush on high culture, was lugubrious, off-putting. He wasn’t trying to make culture a crass social experience or drag all culture through the mud of language alone; but culture was both a private inward experience and a social experience, and language, whatever its muddiness, was one road out of the head’s redoubt.
And was dumb a sort of safety valve? He thought of the erudite history professor whom he’d followed from course to course as an undergraduate. At the beginning of one lecture, the professor had confessed to feeling at loose ends the evening before when, wandering past a multiplex cinema, he saw the poster for Wet Hot American Summer. He bought a ticket on a lark, belly laughed for the entire ninety minutes, and felt put to right. Notnitz also thought of Wittgenstein watching Rootin’ Tootin’ Rhythm or some other horse opera. But he was not Wittgenstein and thus had far fewer excuses for dabbling in anything less than the best which has been thought and said in the world (2). And painted. And composed. And shot. And directed. And dramatized.
Much less confusing in all of this was his conviction that the most vital conversations involve at least three points: two people and a shared, preferably artistic or philosophical experience. With three points, two people can triangulate a temporary search area, unfold and stretch the area, engage in it and with it, and draw in closer to enlightenment, to euphoria. Between two points, one could draw a line instead, and how much slips past a line.
Tired of two points and the vast resulting quantities of slippage, Notnitz left his musty cell for the mundane world,
where, hoping to develop a deeper appreciation of classical music, he attended a performance that included a concerto by a contemporary composer whom he’d never heard of: Vasks. He found the music discordant yet engrossing, like a hand reaching into his chest to massage then squeeze then massage his heart muscle. The man next to him appeared as engrossed and quickened as he was. Notnitz was seated on the first balcony, stage left. Between movements, he let his gaze sweep over the more than two thousand people in attendance. Most of them knew much more about music than he did, and some of them would be interested in educating his experience of the music. But which among them were the most likely points? For a while yet he would keep this image in his mind, of the people in the auditorium and their mysterious potential. It was the closest he could get to hope, but getting even that close required silence on his part. If he broke the silence, if he attempted to take the next step, he could very well be disappointed again. He didn’t want to ruin the image. He didn’t want to ruin the hope.
He returned to the microcinema to catch Two or Three Things I Know about Her, Pierrot le fou, Contempt, Weekend, Breathless. As the closing credits of Breathless ran, Notnitz turned to the stranger next to him while rubbing his thumb over his lips. The stranger had been dozing off throughout the film with dramatic snaps and rolls of the head. The stranger fled.
Classic? Cherry? Medicated? Spearmint? Sun Defense? Looking over the Chapstick collection in a drugstore aisle, he decided to arm himself with variety.
When Notnitz turned his nose up at an invitation to a Pixar movie, suggesting that the movie was for children and their parents, the friend was offended at his dismissal and said he should broaden his horizons. So he went, and it was kitsch, it was the absolute denial of kitsch(3), and he could feel his neurons retracting, shriveling. When his thrilled friend asked what he thought, he said, “Think?” and stuck Sun Defense in one of his nostrils.
The consensus about “Bartleby, the Scrivener” among the participants of his short story reading group was W!T!F!? One participant ranted about the stupidity of the titular character, how Bartleby’s obsessive “nut” consumption was Melville’s message to the reader that Bartleby was out of his mind. “He eats nuts. He is nuts. Nuts does, nuts is.” Notnitz spoke the participant’s name and, with a graceful sweeping move, stuck Medicated in one nostril. The host reminded Notnitz that the reading group was a safe space, and asked him to leave.
A friend brought him to a contemporary dance performance. He’d never really understood dance, but the friend proved a reliable guide. Over coffee afterwards, he admitted to almost total mystification. She gave him her take—(Start by thinking in concepts that you already have a grasp on in other art forms. Think in terms of language—of the body and its movements. Think in terms of abstraction, surrealism. Think in terms of subversion. Think of fixed forms like the sestina, then think of free verse.)—and he started to glimpse what she had seen and realized he needed to give the performance another try.
“Try doing something fun with your leisure time for once.”
Thus was Notnitz goaded into joining a group of colleagues at a chichi house party, even though he knew that fun, as his colleagues meant it, was not the purpose of “leisure” time. Barely arrived at the clamorous party, having been latched onto by a friendly clique discussing transformative cinematic experiences, straining to listen in with naïve hope and, yes, longing, he caused a big murmur and a minor scandal when it came out that he’d never seen Dirty Dancing. “A hole in your education,” one of them shouted above the music, without apparent irony. Notnitz shoved Classic up one nostril and braced himself for a long night among people who had apparently dosed themselves with Davamesque B2.
But then a svelte woman in the clique drove a finger into Notnitz’s chest while raising her other hand in the air, her bangles congesting just above the elbow as she clicked her raised fingers. The mindless music stopped as did everyone in the sunken living room and adjoining spaces. “We have an intruder!” the High Priestess of the Lower Cultures said, for that is how she introduced herself. “You really think high culture is going to save you, relieve you of the suckiness of yourself?”
Notnitz didn’t respond.
Someone else in the crowd spoke up. “We ferreted out a couple over here, too.”
“Hop to,” the High Priestess said. “Form the gauntlet!”
In the ensuing fracas, the partygoers shoved Notnitz and four other intruders together and grabbed books and junk food before forming the gauntlet: two lines like a chute connected to the front door and out across the lawn. As the intruders were hazed between the lines, they were pelted and whacked with hardback copies of Harry Potter and mass market copies of Sparks and King, with brand-name potato chips, barbecue corn nuts, Funyuns.
“Shitty savants!”
“Highbrow doofi!”
“Towering pedants!”
“Intellectuals!”
Once they had slipped through the gauntlet and onto the neighborhood street, once they’d caught their breath and shaken off bits of food and checked each other for wounds—a swollen cheekbone, a dislocated finger, bruised buttocks, a chipped tooth, a torn earlobe—the five of them had a laugh by calling each other shitty savants and highbrow doofi and towering pedants, not to mention, with a most disgusted and peevish tone, intellectuals.
“Intellectual,” one said. “Is it even a noun?”
Another said, “Which experience suggests, what, five out of 150? I knew it!”
And they walked through the night and into the sunlit future, where they found a café and drank several rounds of coffee while penning a warrior-minded manifesto on napkins and menus. They vowed to be couth barbarians wearing tactical brown and sage green, disturbing the centers and the backwaters of empire. They vowed to be a nucleus of resistance where necessary and of solidarity where possible, and every once in a while, then and in the fruitful times thereafter, they lifted off the ground a fraction of an inch and poised there momentarily, and it was balm.
1 Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
2 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy
3 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
