“Seneca At The General Store” is a special contribution from Edward Koren’s long-time friend, the author Howard Norman. (Mr. Koren passed away in April of 2023). This is the second installment from Mr. Norman (and Mr. Koren’s) in-the-works, “No Conversation Long Enough: Ed Koren’s Haiku Dialogues”. (The first can be found here). My thanks to Howard Norman for permission to bring this installment to Spill readers.
SENECA AT THE GENERAL STORE
“We spend every hour of our lives dying; we spend every hour of our lives living — and sometimes a third experience is had.”
–Seneca
“I’ve got a lot of stamina today,” Ed said. “I can’t ever count on that. It’s one day at a time.” We were at a corner table in Three Penny Taproom in Montpelier. He set the Princeton University Press edition of How To Die by Seneca on the table. “I’d never read Seneca before, but he was a favorite of Charlie Williams, and Charlie in fact read Seneca when he got ill himself. So Seneca also led me back to Charlie’s last book, which you sent me. Some of his best work, in my opinion, absolutely perfect for me to read — part of my ongoing education in the mortal realm.”
Ed was referring to poet C.K. Williams’ final collection Writers Writing Dying, which, in a profound and inimitable way, to paraphrase Seneca, is self-eulogizing. In fact it contains a poem called “Cancer.” But if there is a coda to the whole collection, it is from haiku-master Matsuo Basho: “In this mortal frame of mine, which consists of a hundred bones and nine orifices, there is something, and this something can be called, for lack of a better name, a windswept spirit…“
We ordered dinner and Ed set a drawing on the table. It was of a cat observed by a mouse. The caption was a haiku by Michiko Zento (l928-2009) whom I had met in Kyoto in 2007:
Mouse observes me
crossing out mistakes
In a love letter
“This haiku seems timeless to me,” Ed said, “in the sense that romantic desire is timeless, and — no pun intended — courtship is always a cat-and-mouse game. But what I love most is the word ‘observes.’ That word is very funny to me, the mouse is so studious. But I love the idea of someone being observed making mistakes and just desperately trying to find the right words — the desire, the hopelessness of it all, yet you have to make the attempt. You can’t give up. There’s a lot at stake in a love-letter, don’t you think?”
“Everything is at stake.”
“And I wanted the cat to look….chagrined….pensive, wracking his brains….trying to snatch the right word right out of thin air. Of course, the ‘me’ in the haiku wasn’t a cat, but I made it a cat. Artistic privilege. I realized I was quite touched by the sort of ‘getting caught in the act’ element of the scene….and I actually remembered writing a love letter when I was about fourteen or fifteen. I can’t remember who it was meant for or what I wrote, but I remember a kind of….clandestine feeling. I think I wrote it late at night. I remember feeling secretive about it. I think I did a drawing in the margins. There was some sort of anxiety connected to all of it.”
“You know, Ed, when my mother died at age 85, she didn’t leave much, I mean in terms of objects or memorabilia of any sort. She did leave me a spiral notebook I filled with letters I wrote in sixth grade. After my mother died, I didn’t look at this notebook for five or six months. But when I finally did look at it, I discovered it was filled with direct-address marriage proposals. It was all marriage proposals, which I suppose is a category of love-letter. I’d written a marriage proposal to every girl in the class and to my teacher, Mrs. Botton.”
“So you wanted her to become a bigamist.”
“And the longest marriage proposal –three full pages — was to Daphne Portman, who was a custodian. I complimented her green uniform and said that I thought we were meant for each other. But pretty much I said that to each recipient, ‘we’re meant for each other.’ I guess I had some sense of predestination.”
“How optimistic, to think there might be that many options in life to find love. “
“Yes, turns out, there wasn’t.”
“But obviously you didn’t send the letters or else they wouldn’t have still been in the notebook.”
“Yes and this in retrospect gave me some real insight into my mother’s philosophy of life, or at least her nature, or something like that. My mother used to write letters — she always looked like she was steaming when she wrote them, really worked up — she sent letters to rabbis and relatives — and she’d fold them neatly, and then always made a big dramatic deal out of tearing a letter up. Her philosophy was, it’s best to write the letter, ‘ to vent and spleen’, as Katherine Mansfield put it, but to not actually send it. This was her instruction to me, too. I’d come home upset about something and my mother said, ‘Write a letter but don’t send it.’ In the end I think this constructed a sense of unrequitedness between me and the world. I think that I didn’t send the marriage proposals was a version of that. “
“Yes, because how could anyone say ‘Yes.’ If they didn’t know you asked.”
“Or say ‘No.’”
We ordered dessert and looked at the haiku drawing again. “The other thing I was thinking about with this haiku,” Ed said, “was how to make the letter-writing seem in media res — actually being composed. I wanted one paw to be holding the piece of paper in place, which I felt was part of the nature of love — that it was ephemeral, that it could just fly off the table in the slightest breeze –whoosh, off it goes — the paper had to be held down.”
Glum rainy night out. There were only two other people at the tables. We decided to have a whiskey. The conversation turned to what Ed called, “One of the most remarkable books on the mortal realm.” He was referring to In The Face of Death by Peter Noll. Noll taught at Mainz and wrote a bunch of authoritative books on jurisprudence. He was a great friend of Swiss novelist and playwright Max Frisch; in fact, it might be said that Frisch’s posthumous book, Drafts For A Third Sketchbook is to a great extent a eulogy for Noll, or at least an introspective treatise on friendship. Ed and I had decided to read In The Face Of Death at the same time, and we — for similar and also different reasons — found it remarkable. “At this point, I’m very grateful for it,” he said. I remember Ed reading this passage out loud in his studio:
June 29
Strong pains since noon, almost to the limit of what is tolerable. The medicines are without effect, even the new ones that Christoph sent me. Only very slowly, toward evening, have the pains been subsiding.
Joy has its own meaning; pain must derive meaning from a purpose. Pain as a warning symptom: that is the simplest, medical explanation—suffering for a cause. Maybe pain still has some intrinsic value; I don’t know, have difficulty believing it, even though pain is more part of everyday living, of human existence, than joy.
Zingg told me that for him death was always the enemy, nothing else. Everyone has to talk that way when somebody else’s death is at stake, especially the physician. To one’s own death it is possible to gain a more neutral relationship.
It is not right, however, to see merely a simple contrast between joy, pleasure, well-being on the one hand and pain, grief, and despair on the other. The longest periods in the lives of most people lie in the realm of the masked pain, the masked grief, and the masked despair. It seems possible to take joy in one’s work on an assembly line, as a little clerk in an office. Perhaps only through pain—and that would be its totally different, unbiological meaning—do we become aware that life is mostly toil, interrupted now and then by little oases of meaning. Thus pain would have a metaphysical meaning, especially as masked pain, as destruction of meaning, by revealing that this world, at least since the existence of man, is dominated by evil and that the transcendent good succeeds only occasionally in brining joy to the individual. Developed logically, this thought means that joy and good deeds are signs from a better world beyond.
Of course, the trivial explanation is more plausible. The totality of world events follows a physical-biological course, indifferent to anything else, neither recognizing its own need of redemption nor striving for it, either.
When I am dead, I shall know all this, at worst only at the very last moments, when I realize that now, now nothing exists anymore.
“Every page of this book there’s something to think about, argue with, or just admire the guy’s ability to write what he honestly thinks, during everything else happening to him in the mortal realm,” Ed said. “It’s the style of writing — nothing sanctimonious or trying to convince you, just a reading experience like…..like….maybe reading someone’s private diary.”
Ed wanted to talk about the group of friends and acquaintances who summer in Port Medway, Nova Scotia. Bud Trillin, Philip Slayton and Cynthia Wine. (the latter a couple I featured in a novel, Next Life Might Be Kinder), and we did that for about half an hour; then Ed wanted, before we headed out in the rain and darkness, to return to Seneca. (tape recorder on again)
“What do you think Seneca meant by “a third experience?”
“I am almost completely uneducated in Seneca’s thinking. I’d have to ask my Latin teacher, or William Altman, or maybe a former colleague who teaches the stoics at University of Amsterdam.“
“No, but just conjecture –.”
“I can’t imagine what he meant.”
“I think he meant–possibly–maybe–what happens when you stop thinking in terms of ‘life’ or ‘death’ — something else reveals itself. And who knows what it might actually consist of. Memory? Premonition? Hallucination? Seneca wrote about people who’d seen ‘the other side’ so to speak—and they told him things. Maybe they told him ‘third experiences.’ I’m going to keep thinking about that one, Howard. If I had the time, maybe I’d do a bunch of drawings: Seneca holding forth in front of a Vermont general store. Just talking to whoever comes in to have a coffee.”
“Seneca at the general store. I can’t wait.”
“How about, the general store as a ‘third experience?’”
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More Edward Koren Reading:
The Ink Spill Interview with Edward Koren
The New Yorker‘s Edward Koren “Postscript” by the magazine’s cartoon editor, Emma Allen.
The New York Times Edward Koren obit.
Edward Koren’s A-Z Entry:
Edward Koren (photo above, Fall 2016, courtesy of Gil Roth) Born, 1935, New York City. Died, April 14, 2023, Brookfield, Vermont. New Yorker work: May 26, 1962 — . Key collections: Do You Want To Talk About It? ( Pantheon, 1976), Well, There’s Your Problem (Pantheon, 1980), Caution: Small Ensembles (Pantheon, 1983), What About Me? (Pantheon Books, 1989).