Alan Catlin
All the Coney Islands of the Mind: Essay
Electricity
I force myself to touch electric fences
every day, or every other day,
in just the same humiliating way
my mother must have struggled to touch me
Selima Hill
“I remain in darkness” were the last words Annie Ernaux’s mother wrote. They are also, the title of Annie’s memoir of her mother’s final years spent descending into the abyss of Alzheimer’s. These were fraught years, to say the least.
I was struck, as I always am reading Ernaux’s work, by the plain spoken, compelling, no artifice way she has of immersing the reader in her life. Ernaux’s life that is neither extraordinary nor exceptional in many ways but for that one gift she has: seduction. By words (discounting, of course, the very obvious fact of her winning the Nobel Prize for Literature with that gift.) One can only imagine how she employed this gift in real life with the many men she came to be with, but that would be (mostly) beside the point.
I’m not sure how she seduces us either. Yet, after a few sentences, I feel as if I am, and have always been, part of the ongoing saga of her life. Certain themes, which you could call obsessions, are present in all these books: notions of class, sexual awakening, relationships that span naïve first experiences with inappropriate men, abortion, marriage, divorce, sex with older men, sex with younger men when older, sex with married men when married, sex with married men while divorced, fear of losing her physical attractiveness….family ties with children, her ex, her parents, and more sex. What Annie does is examine the seminal stuff of living and how it has impacted her life.
Apparently, that includes a lot of sex. Maybe more than many people have, maybe not, which is neither here nor there. What she does is not look away from potentially embarrassing, potentially reputation damaging facets of how she lived her life, and takes us there. And we read on, entranced by her apparent honesty, her foibles, her missteps, and her determination to move on despite near catastrophic emotional setbacks including an unbecoming, near incapacitating period of intense jealousy for a woman who superseded her in a relationship. She does in non-fiction what most are afraid to do in fiction.
After her mother’s death, a year’s long struggle entering into the darkness she refers to, Annie concludes “tears come to my eyes, thinking of time.” She begins at the end and returns to it, wiser and sadder, all the while working on another book about her mother’s life.
While compiling poems for Misfit #37, I accepted a poem by Francine Witte with the title, “That Time in Coney Island.” I told Francine that I thought Coney Island was one of those vital poetic touchstones we all have, a particularly strong one for me, and I said I’d never write an essay about it. And I thought, really, why not? Why indeed?
Then I thought about my own literary obsessions, the ones I wrote most intensely of in an autobiographical way, and Coney Island was at the top of the list. Not Coney Island as, in where people lived, the neighborhood, but Coney Island, the amusement park that exists only in my mind. This obsession is followed closely by recalling time spent on St Croix when I was a small child while my mother was going mad; a paradise with a large snake in it. Followed by visits to Pilgrim State where she was confined twice, once some months after we returned from St Croix, for a “rest cure,” which actually meant a complete nervous breakdown. And one more, intense, fraught visit, decades later, after a violent assault on her mother led to an involuntary confinement.
In retrospect, other topics related to these appear larger in the imagination than they ever were in real life. Those would include subways, (my mother’s mythic conception of the underworld embodied by the network under New York City) the city itself, which like Wittgenstein’s Mistress’s, only existed in her mind: Staten Island ferry riding; which I may not even have done with her; horse racing, (horses have an outsized and to me, inexplicable significance in her world); fractured fairy tales, stories taken literarily, as fact, as opposed to fantasy; noir movies in black and white…All these topics and others , closely related, are intertwined in one large mental construct of obsession. I now believe these obsession were, caused by my early total devoted love for my mother that was inextricably intertwined with her paranoia and her madness. While they all share a common bond, each has its own significance in my writing.
What became clear to me was that as a highly sensitive, naturally shy child, I repressed my feelings and became more and more inclined to internalize experiences at the expense of interrelations. My mother’s intense raging, fluctuated with her state of mind; she was either furious and domineering, or at rest, which felt like building up energy for an explosion of rage and domination. One thing remained constant, her determination to impose a vision of the world on me that was a fractured fairy tale existence; water babies existed and doctors did not, children were all born perfect and should be kept that way at all costs, knowledge came with birth as all children were born whole and complete with all things they need to know.
I was never taught anything basic, like say, tying your shoes. Childhood pains such as an acute ear infections were not real and should be ignored. Doctors will make you deaf if they interfere. People never get sunburned and if they did vinegar must be poured on the skin to relieve the pain. This kind of thinking would have profound consequences later on beyond being hearing impaired in both of my ears. Basil skin and precancerous lesions began appearing later in life. Needless to say, by the time I was in my middle teenage years, I was a complete emotional mess.
The school psychologist I was eventually made to see, concluded I had “severe depressive tendencies” among other issues suggesting a possible inclination towards schizophrenia. Like my mother, whose love, world view, life, I would have to reject in order to survive. Much easier said than done. In fact, given that I am writing this, I’m not even sure totally rejecting and escaping her legacy can be done at all. What can be done is to give all these conflicting emotions, dead ends, emotional traumas and edge of the cliff impulses, context. That’s what writing is for.
Writing/reading became my silent talking cure.
But first, I had to get out from under her direct influence.
And I did to, of all places, Utica, N.Y., where I went to college.
Looking back at these subjects ( obsessions) it is the idea of these topics and, the imagined world they represent, are more pure imagination, than memory. The more potent the significance emotionally, the deeper in the cortex of imagination these subjects lie. I choose Coney Island to speak of further as, not only is it the strongest emotionally, but also the one that manifested itself in the widest possible ways in my work. Some are memory distorted by time, others are fantastical, but all connect in the deep roots of an emotional core.
I will start with a sense of a beginning and finish with a sense of an ending by quoting opening lines of a wide variety of written pieces that struggle to provide a context for what can never be fully expressed:
“The last summer
We went to Coney Island
Aunt Marion was stopped
for doing 30 on the Belt Parkway.”
The fallibility of memory quotient applies to the largely true opening lines of the “Last time we went.” I don’t know if the events here are from a last trip. I do know we went to Coney Island multiple times and then we stopped going completely seemingly without explanation. None that I can recall, anyway. It was the highlight of my two cousins and my summer. We once went to Rockaway Play Land, and later, on school trips in high school ,to Rye Playland, all of which figure in a narrative documentary.
By we in the first poem, I refer to my slightly younger cousins, a brother and sister, who lived next door, Doug and Deb, their mother Marion and my mother, BJ. I do recall that we were once stopped on the Parkway for going too slow and my mother was asked to drive. Whether this incident occurred not long after she was released from Pilgrim State when she may not have had a valid driver’s license, may or may not be true. My supposition is that the fact she wasn’t driving in the first place reinforces this notion. I state it as fact in the poem because it makes a better story.
A short prose piece called “Lost in the Funhouse” was a story about one of those trips or all of these trips as they are all the same in my memory. Unfortunately, the file had been corrupted, I had no hard copy and was only partially reclaimed. I intended to use an example of how these trips went by jumping in and out of time, the kids and Marion having fun, and BJ complaining, observing, and bitching with increasing ferocity until there was no fun to be had by anyone.
The opening lines of the poems cover the same ground: high excitement by the children, Marion as the overgrown kid participating in the fun, and BJ as the sour, grim reaper spoiling everything by continually criticizing and commenting on the outing. That would be the story of much childhood in one sentence but there are many pieces missing that one sentence can’t contain.
House of Horrors Coney Island
In daylight this place seems like
just another rundown roadside
attraction
“The House of Horrors” is a vague memory of an actual place in Coney Island circa 1950’s. I no doubt went on several rides with her, but this is the one that stands out for me. The poem also is a personal ekphrastic reaction to a photo by Diane Arbus simply called “The House of Horrors.” House of Horrors indeed. All the places where I lived with her were houses of horror.
All the Coney Islands of Pilgrim State
She describes overhead
rows of white bulbs,
the crack of air rifles
& the sound of pellets
against bells, the roar of
the roller coaster, the smell
of the crowd
“The Pilgrim State Coney Island” is wholly imagined. The first time she was admitted there, I imagined she met Joe Gould, the hero of Joseph Mitchell’s portrait, Joe Gould’s Secret originally published in the New Yorker. Joe Gould was a local eccentric, a larger-than-life personality in the city who claimed to be writing a huge book that encompassed Everything. A book of life, so to speak, that clearly never existed much to Mitchell’s chagrin. Gould was finally unable to exist as a vagabond, a basically homeless man, and was taken to Pilgrim State for evaluation. He lived the last couple of years of his life there and was admitted at the same time as my mother, overlapping for some time, as were many other colorful, often well-known people in that prime time for sending people to asylums.
I wrote an unsuccessful series of poems imagining, “If BJ knew Joe Gould at Pilgrim State, what would that sound like? How would it go?” The answer was in these failed poems, something like the way the poem opens and continues down a black hole of madness they both occupied on the different planets of their minds.
Balloon Man
Black as
the balloon man
that Coney Island
summer
“Balloon Man” is more e.e. cummings( a chanson innocents) than a. c. catlin and is totally made up. Is a fantasy of a black man selling helium balloons to people in the park.; a childhood fantasy with pins in it.
The Vertical Journey: Six Movements Within the Heart of the City
In bumfucked night, down Bowery
bottlenecks, under Coney Island
boardwalks, nighttown rings lower
than hell, sideshows and freakouts
“The Vertical Journey…” is a reaction to a series of photos of Coney Island “freaks,” off- beat personalities and their habitats, that put Dinae Arbus on the map as an artist. They are rooted in place, interiors, where only an imagination such as Diane’s could go. And one like mine, would follow.
S. Dali’s Dream of Venus
Coney Island night memories
that haven’t happened yet
The Dali poem is one of several that connects to Dali’s mind-boggling exhibit that he created for the 1939 World’s Fair. It is a psychosexual drama: a drowned taxi, dead passengers, mermaids, half naked ladies, a twisted sex fantasy in a cave….think the cab in “Silence of the Lambs” in that garage where the death watch beetle was and you get sense of an entryway into the interior of this exhibit. Then look up Dali’s Vaticination: his dark fantasy that he somehow got permission to erect on the fairgrounds. It is a pure, or should I say, impure, Coney Island of the Mind even if it was on a world’s fair ground a few miles away.
Coney Island Dusk: A Nocturne for a Fat Lady
(from Poet in New York)
“Coney Island is heaven, “ she says, “After dark
I’m queen of the midway.”
“The Nocturne for a Fat Lady” is from a sequence evoking Lorca’s time in New York called Poet in New York. The point of this series of books of personalities (which included , in addition to Lorca: Mahler, Wallace Stevens, Stephen Crane, and Glenn Gould) was to explore the aspects of creativity and madness. How genius exists just this side of complete immersion in an unreal world. While there are biographical refences to all the people in these books, references to their work, the result is their creations exists well outside of those persons, despite being drawn from within. Their work, and mine, use a mad creative energy that can be thought of as abnormal given the often-extreme conditions I give these personas to create in.
The books are works of the imagination using others as a cipher whose thoughts, places, and situations were vehicles for a concept more than the actual people they once were. Except in my mind. Who among the creative is normal? This duality, in general, also is a personal obsession. The actual image of the fat woman comes from a photo by Weegee.
All the Coney Islands of the Mind
(from the poetic transcription of the short story of the same name)
There is a man standing beneath the EL.
In the shadows.
He is wearing black slacks and a black hat like mine.
He is wearing a black rain coat like mine.
He is wearing black leather boots.
I am not.
The man standing beneath the EL is from a poetic transcription of my star-crossed early story, “All the Coney Islands of the Mind.” The words are the same as the story though they are arranged differently for effect.
An unnamed first-person narrator is being pursued in a kind of Kafka story, The Trial (which I typed as Trail as a kind of Freudian slippage?)reimagined in an amusement park. That wasn’t the intention when it was written, but is what I see it as now. There is no explanation why he is being pursued, to what purpose, just the fact of it. Is the pursuit a paranoid delusion or an actual thing? In the end, it makes no difference.
From the All the Coney Islands of the Mind a narrative documentary
script: a study in Suspense and Illusion
In black and white
The credits are superimposed over an aerial view of the amusement
park in the morning. This shot must leave the impression of free
floating, of hovering overhead. Subdued/distant/carnival music/
noises are heard as the traveling camera cuts to the interior of the
amusement park.
Lyrics from a Freddy Cannon song are heard as far away.
“last night
I took a walk
In the dark
To a swinging
Place called
Palisades Park
I could see-
That’s where the
girls are……
The final piece cited, is from a script for a narrative film, roughly an hour long, of an amusement park, purported to be Coney Island. Any relation to Coney Island is purely coincidental, other than particular references to existing landmarks (or once existing landmarks, I haven’t been there in fifty or so years). In fact, the script is an example of the fallibility of memory which combines elements of all the amusement parks ever visited including Rye Playland and Rockaway Park (but not Palisades Park where I have never been Does it even exist anymore?) The end result is a completely imagined, though highly tangible place; one that exists only on the page and in my imagination. ( Like J. G Ballard’s Running Wild of children plotting and carrying out the mass murder of their parents which I took as actual reportage the first time through. I hadn’t read that when this script was written because Ballard hadn’t written it yet).
The cited examples are to illustrate how an obsession can become a constructive outlet; of offering many ways to look at a subject As all these pieces exist only in my mind, ranging from the tainted by the fallibility of memory autobiography, to the created completely from the imagination, with no reference other than a title, to an actual exiting place.
These examples are subjectively arranged in decreasing order of autobiographical content. They are by no means chronological. In fact, the first examples were written well after the completely imagined pieces at the end.
In a Coney Island of the Mind, even a fantastic place can seem real when the pursuer is a camera. The camera is the eye of the mind and it can go anywhere it chooses. The camera is he mind’s eye ( like a noir movie) and it never blinks even when the mind that imagines has lost all sense of itself. I remain in darkness but I write to find the light.