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Ben Lerner

Leaving the Atocha Station

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you: Ariana, Mom, Dad, Matt, Aaron, Brecht, C. D. , Chris, Colin, Cyrus, Forrest, Geoffrey, Jacqueline, Jeff, Joanna, Jo-Lynne, Justin, Kyle, Skoog, Stephen, Tao, and Tom.

I have stolen language and ideas from Michael Clune’s essay, “Theory of Prose,” which appeared in No: a journal of the arts, #7. Like Clune, I am indebted to Allen Grossman’s essays in The Long Schoolroom. I first encountered the phrase “life’s white machine” in Jeff Clark and Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s collaboration, 2A. John Ashbery used the phrase as an epigraph to the poem “Longing of the Accords” (Planisphere). An excerpt of this book was published as a pamphlet by Physiocrats Press. The novel includes, albeit in altered form, a reading of Ashbery’s poetry that first appeared in my essay “The Future Continuous: Ashbery’s Lyric Mediacy,” published by boundary 2. “Leaving the Atocha Station” is the title of a poem in Ashbery’s 1962 volume The Tennis Court Oath.

1

THE FIRST PHASE OF MY RESEARCH INVOLVED WAKING UP WEEKDAY mornings in a barely furnished attic apartment, the first apartment I’d looked at after arriving in Madrid, or letting myself be woken by the noise from La Plaza Santa Ana, failing to assimilate that noise fully into my dream, then putting on the rusty stovetop espresso machine and rolling a spliff while I waited for the coffee. When the coffee was ready I would open the skylight, which was just big enough for me to crawl through if I stood on the bed, and drink my espresso and smoke on the roof overlooking the plaza where tourists congregated with their guidebooks on the metal tables and the accordion player plied his trade.

In the distance: the palace and long lines of cloud. Next my project required dropping myself back through the skylight, shitting, taking a shower, my white pills, and getting dressed. Then I’d find my bag, which contained a bilingual edition of Lorca’s Collected Poems, my two notebooks, a pocket dictionary, John Ashbery’s Selected Poems, drugs, and leave for the Prado.

From my apartment I would walk down Calle de las Huertas, nodding to the street cleaners in their lime-green jumpsuits, cross El Paseo del Prado, enter the museum, which was only a couple of euros with my international student ID, and proceed directly to room 58, where I positioned myself in front of Roger Van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross. I was usually standing before the painting within forty-five minutes of waking and so the hash and caffeine and sleep were still competing in my system as I faced the nearly life-sized figures and awaited equilibrium. Mary is forever falling to the ground in a faint; the blues of her robes are unsurpassed in Flemish painting. Her posture is almost an exact echo of Jesus’s; Nicodemus and a helper hold his apparently weightless body in the air. C. 1435; 220 × 262 cm. Oil on oak paneling.