Sky Gilbert - Small Things: (a Random Selection of Anti-Essays)

SMALL

a random selection of anti-essays

ESSENTIAL ESSAYS SERIES 70

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a random selection of anti-essays

Copyright 2018, Sky Gilbert and Guernica Editions Inc.

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Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 2017964544

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Gilbert, Sky, author

Small things : (a random selection of anti-essays) / Sky Gilbert. -

First edition.

(Essential essays series ; 70)

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77183-293-9 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77183-294-6 (EPUB).-

ISBN 978-1-77183-295-3 (Kindle)

I. Title. II. Series: Essential essays series (Toronto, Ont.) ; 70

I can imagine no more successful and productive form of manufacture than that of making mountains out of molehills.

G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles

This book is for Ian

A little boy walking with his mother. He dances along, uncaring, blithe. She seems to be irritated by holding his little hand. He is literally skipping. This vision inspires in me many feelings, among them: sadness, want. I wish of course that I was that little boy. It seems to me that I was him. This might of course be a misconception, but nevertheless, I am touched.

I constantly see her; my mother. She had a very anglo-saxon face, and beauty it turns out, is ultimately mundane. There are so many beautiful women. But its as I remember herolder, somewhat worn, blonde, a lined, once-pretty faceits this face that stops me dead on the street, entering a streetcar, walking past a store, its a kind of shock, but not entirely unpleasant. For suddenly its my mother sitting there. Only perhaps less troubled, nicer. Less her. But still, for a moment, she was there. I do enjoy those moments and I am foolish enough to nurture the fancy that she is appearing to me, that these resemblances are a kind of apparition. Haltwho goes there! On the battlementsHamlet and the Ghost of His Father.

I am quite entirely certain there is one. This would be for some, the evidence of my spirituality. For those who err on the side of fact, there is no mystery anywhere, whereas those of us who believe that there is a mystery at the heart of it all are in that way good corporate citizensif religion could be thought of as a corporation (which it really most certainly is). I dont want to be a member of this clubthe mysticsnever have. I know that when my father asks me if I believe in God I always tell him that I dont believe in the man but in the spirit. He seems vaguely disappointed, and always asks the same question Not a man? No, I say, no, not a man, feeling sad again that I am not able to satisfy his expectations. Then I say something that he doesnt understand at all, and which sounds pretentious on the face of it, that my religion is my work, or, even more pretentiously, my art. Words. That poetry makes me believe that there is a spiritual world. Yes, it all sounds so overwrought and the height of aestheticism. But the fact of the matter is, if there are any factsand there may be only one fact, and if so it would be this: I am one who believes that at the heart of it all there is a mystery and not a truth.

O f course you dont know about him, no one does. He wrote the short story on which the movie Rear Window is based, and so many of his novels were turned into films that you may or may not have heard ofPhantom Lady, The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, Black Angel, The Bride Wore Blackmore than 38 films from 1938 until now. Who was he? I can still see his thin, gaunt face, his haunted eyes. He lived with his mother for the greater part of his life in a hotel in New York Cityin the days when people still lived in hotels. (This was before the dawn of apartment buildings, when there was worry about fires. In a hotel, you would order up your meals from the hotel kitchen or have you lunch in the dining room, but you would not be cooking in your room.)

You have heard of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain. Not Cornell Woolrich. And I wish I could say this was the mystery but clearly, you havent heard of him because he was a homosexual. And I say that standing ready to be accused of paranoia. But there are no wisecracking private eyes in his novels; they are not about tough guys or gun molls. Woolrichs novels are about women in love, usually tragically in love, or men who are held in the thrall of a woman, and they are often written from a womans point of view. Woolrich clearly was a woman in his own imagination. It was through a womans tragedy, the eternal tragedy of being a woman that he found his inspiration. And dare you or anyone accuse him of appropriation? Why bother; his gender confusion was enough to cause him to be ignored.

So no mystery there. America of course watched perhaps one movie a year for forty years based on a Cornell Woolrich story. But he was not to be celebrated. This is not my bitterness showing, believe it or not, I am not bitter; no, the mystery lies not in the neglect of his work but in his life.

A rumour that Cornell Woolrich was present on the film set for Rear Window, and the possibility perhaps that he told Hitchcock about his living situation with his mother and that Hitchcock was inspired to make the film Psycho because of his fascination with Cornell Woolrichs personal life.

And what was going on between Cornell Woolrich and his mother? Call me what you will, I am morbidly fascinated by men who live their whole lives with their mothers. What did he/they talk about? Did he bring her the newspapers each morning? Did they attend the theatre? Did he buy her pickles at night (her favourites: dill)? She was apparently, often ill; one imagines an old woman with a conveniently psychosomatic cough, an imperious look, a mid-Atlantic accent, propped up by antique bed pillows, demanding things, like the mother in