64
PARTISAN REVIEW
to
himself, and the revelations weren't always consciously intended.
Again and again in his essays he seems
to
discover himself inadvertently,
though he says he wrote his essays for his family to help them remem–
ber him as he was in life. All this is
to
say only that your radically per–
sonal identity, with or without your consent, is made evident in your
writing. Like a fingerprint. Or what is even more personally telling, a
face print-according
to
experts there are eighty places in the human
face that can be used
to
identify a person.
One rainy night many years ago, I went with a friend
to
a jazz club
called Basin Street in Greenwich Village
to
hear a Miles Davis quartet.
There was a small, sophisticated crowd. You could tell the crowd was
sophisticated because it applauded in the right places. At a certain point
Miles Davis began turning his back
to
the crowd whenever he played a
solo. I don't know what he thought he was doing, but the effect was
to
absent himself from the tune, as though he were saying, "Don't look at
me. I'm not here. Listen to it." He gave us a lesson in music apprecia–
tion, or the appreciation of any art. With Davis's back turned, the music
seemed
to
become more personal.
A professor of mathematics at Berkeley told me that, while reading a
newspaper article about the Unabolllber, he suddenly realized the man
had been his student. The professor then went
to
his files, pulled out the
Unabomber's math papers and reviewed them. He said,
"B/B+."
Mathe–
matics couldn't be further from the kinds of self-presentation and self–
revelation to which all of us are constantly susceptible, but even in the
absolutely neutral language of equations, the Una bomber had declared his
identity. From the point of view of a mathematician,
B/B+
was the man.
I think we name ourselves, more or less, whenever we write, and we
always tend to write about ourselves. When people ask if you write by
hand or use a typewriter or a computer, they are interested
to
know how
personal your writing is. But even now in the age of electronic writing,
when the immediate revelations of handwriting have become rare, a
ghostly electronic res idue of persons remains faintly discernible in
words and sentence structure. A more familiar example of what I'm get–
ting at is phone calls. Imagine answering the phone and hearing a voice
you haven't heard in years, a voice that says only your name or even
only hello, and you say instantly, "Aunt Molly, it's been so long since
you phoned." There's a joke that touches on this experience: The phone
rings, Molly says, "Hello," and a man's voice says, "Molly, I know you
and I know what you want. I'm coming over there and I'm going to
throw you on the floor and do every dirty thing
to
you." Molly says,
"You know all this from hello?"
