ALL THE MORNINGS OF THE WORLD
(To Karl)
I begin here because it was New Year’s Eve, the eve of new beginnings, the year was 1992 and we spent that New Year’s Eve together. I don’t remember how it came about that we spent it together – we were friends, not necessarily ritual New Year’s Eve friends, but at the time we saw each other frequently, shared our writing, talked about our lives. That night you came to my apartment, we most likely ate something, we drank wine, I have polaroid photographs of each of us with a wine glass in our hand. After eating and drinking we went to a film. It was at the Quad Cinema, only a few steps away, the film was All the Mornings of the World based on the book by the French writer Pascal Quignard, and directed by Alain Corneau. For me the film was a profoundly aesthetic experience, for you not so much. We came back to my apartment afterward for another glass of wine and then you went home. I seem to remember the mood of the evening being one of optimism—about our lives, our writing, the future.
We met several years earlier than that New Year’s Eve – sometime in the very late 1980’s – it was at the one of the open readings in the back room of the cafeteria Windows On The Village located on 6th Avenue and West 11th Street. Windows on the Village later became the restaurant French Roast.
You were Altan Ogniedov then. You wrote as Altan Ogniedov. He was what you called your alter ego. It makes me think of the heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa, or more accurately Pessoa’s semi-heteronyms. Semi because while Altan was not you, he did not differ much from you; he was what Pessoa would have called “a mere mutilation of you.” Altan Ogniedov was Russian. It’s true that someone else might claim a Russian alter ego, but Altan Ogniedov was absolute. Karl Gluck had been a student of the Russian language, Russian literature, was fluent in Russian, had a Russian soul which had one day materialized as Altan Ogniedov. You said Altan Ogniedov was born after your disastrous love affair with a woman who lived in Moscow. You also said: “Mr. Ogniedov occasionally makes his presence known in Mr. Gluck’s life, forcing him to break into tears at work (as a translator for Russian immigrants and social workers) and at other inopportune moments, as well as occasionally writing a poem in Russian for Mr. Gluck…”
Not to be forgotten: You were also fluent in Chinese.
We talked about Buddhism. You were a practicing Buddhist. We talked about your family. You always spoke gently about your family. You told me about something you did annually with them, your parents and your brother and sister, it involved being in nature, something with plants, or was it trees, perhaps beekeeping, though I think not beekeeping, I wish I had it better in my mind, but I see you walking in procession on your annual mission together in some forest: your mother, your father, your brother, your sister, you. We talked about your cerebral palsy. You had what is called a mild case; it manifested only in a limp and also in a limpness in the way you used one of your arms. The cerebral palsy had created sadness in your life. You attributed it to your tendency to melancholia.
Time passed. We saw each other less. You always sent a Christmas card. Sometimes we talked on the phone. You told me you were unhappy. In your poem “Two Faces of Insomnia” (written by Altan Ogniedov and included in your first published collection Phantasmagoria) you say: “Because I have been falling all night…” You were falling.
But then something happened and I heard you sounding happy. It was the birth of Vivian. Your daughter. I remember your voice when you talked about her. You said she did the Buddhist prostrations with you. She was what, two years old, three, when you bowed to the Buddha together? I have been thinking lately, when I think of life and being human, what it means for a person to know they are loved by a parent. Vivian can know without question that you loved her absolutely.
The last time I saw you it was three years before you died. You had come to my reading. The next day you sent me “The Vivian Poems.” You wrote this note to me in your email when you sent them:
Yes, I know #5 needs some re-working, but not now. At one point, I was planning on writing a whole book of Vivi poems. My life is not over yet, though. I hope I may still get to that.
I am thinking again of the night we went to see the film All the Mornings of the World. In the French Tous les Matins du Monde. At the end of the film, and in Pascal Quignard’s novel, the title is extended, explained, as spoken by the character Marais: “Tous les matins du monde sont sans retour… (all the mornings of the world would never return).”
—Rosalind Palermo Stevenson