He waited there passively, in the end,
looking down upon the stage.
He may have wished it was Shakespeare,
Hamlet, Cordelia, Macbeth passing through his mind,
a grave digger, Yorick's skull.
'And the more pity that great folk should have
count'nance in this world to drown or hang themselves
more than their even-Christen.'
It was instead some third rate hack play
perfectly worthy of going down in memory solely
by the one line heard before the fateful moment, as in
'You can't say Dallas doesn't like you, Mr. President,'
ha ha ha.
And so the action upon the stage, the words,
the spoken lines, presumptuous,
could not stop, could not delay
for a moment, a moment to think,
the actor on his way to the President's box.
And there the old man sat of fifty-six.
After the long nightmare
at last able to be hopeful
tender with his wife again,
a carriage ride, a spring day,
the sweet thought went through his head
that all our sorrows
are our joys, our greatest moments to be proud of.
And all his sorrows,
alone, on a horse,
in the rain,
all had become joys for him.
He had regained the proper smile
he'd kept all along.
And the actor stepped in, crept in,
and raised the gun
and the man had all his dreams
and all his memories
going on in his head,
of old New Salem
and countless towns
and then he heard a bang
not from the stage, not at all,
but from behind him.
And who will be kind enough
to lead the nation
to be the good and forgiving father,
hating violence most of all?
Across the street they took him
and he did not remember,
being carried so, except the strange voices, darkness,
a flash of light.
They laid him out,
diagonal on the bed,
and in his mind somewhere
his own voice remarked, within,
yes, this is what it will be like
to be in my coffin, arms across my chest,
the story ended,
as God wills,
as God wills.
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
The Logic of Writing
If there were a formula for good writing, any writer would be happy to share it.
Writers work through becoming egoless. The formula is safe from exploitation.
Start out when you are fresh, before you’ve been bombarded with words from an outside source. Write in the morning, before turning on the television, before looking at the headlines, before talking to anyone. Write after a long walk, after listening to a symphony, after a time free from verbal behavior. To escape the gravity of your own ego, you must avoid the interference pattern of other egos. Through time and practice, you can train your ego to leave you alone.
Tolstoy entertained a freedom from ego while in writing mode, even as he possessed a large, healthy and proud one. As he wrote out his story of Levin--a stand-in for himself with obvious similarities--he found himself identifying more and more with the character of Anna Karenina. No longer the outlined character of a morality play of a woman fallen in adultery (thrown in to offset the marriage of Levin and Kitty) she becomes so real to Tolstoy that he takes us inside her head. He reveals ‘her’ vulnerability in all its dimensions, her own achievement of separation from ego, here to a tragic end. (Did Tolstoy see the force and logic of the ego as so strong that death would virtually be necessary for the self to be detached from its binds?)
Still, it would be a valuable story without her, because Tolstoy gives us Levin. In stepping aside from his own ego, as is necessary to describe himself as a character fully and richly, he reveals his own version of the formula, his template. For Tolstoy, Levin, the self-portrait, is a tool, a channel into human nature.
Tolstoy, writing in this new form, no longer history, not even fiction so much, is caught in the act of discovering the mode of selflessness, realizing its necessity. Anna Karenina's selfish affair becomes the reflection of Levin’s selfish ego as he endeavors, over the course of season and year, to step away from it. Anna Karenina achieves her freedom after a long crises that began in romantic happiness, whereas for Levin, thanks to his patience, his freedom from ego ends in romantic happiness, more or less. Levin and Anna Karenina, and Tolstoy himself as well, are linked in the difficult act of detaching themselves from the egotistical. They achieve the perspective that the ego's imposed images of self are an illusion.
Shyness is the self-protection of the creative mode. Emily Dickinson, retreating from the world, is the classic example. In her great privacy, the world came to her.
The grasp for the mode of creative selflessness coincides with vulnerability.
Abraham Lincoln presents an example of falling into a state of depression, of feeling incapable of coping. Regularly and periodically accessing his vulnerability, he was able to find the reasons for living. His logic in politics was a formula of selflessness, and so was he able to see the issues of his day, the constitutional evils of allowing slavery.
Aram Saroyan describes Kerouac as a ‘hero who dared to have a series of long, tender nervous breakdowns in the prose of his dozen or so books.’ This is something for a writer to chronicle, as Kerouac did in the long legend of Dulouz from childhood onward. Carver’s stories, personal history and correspondence reveal a similar achievement of breakdowns
These states of breakdown are the source of what makes a work accessible.
Even if we are not musicians, we find in listening to the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven (consider he wrote it while deaf) a language we understand. (Ode to Joy--Beethoven’s mathematical representation of selflessness.) We find a similar sense of full expression in Van Gogh’s brushstrokes. In their ‘deafness,’ the two display the greatness of their individual formulation of giving up the ego.
What would happen if we were to try this all ourselves? What if we were to put our own lives to egoless shy broad artistic productivity? Would we discover through the mode of egoless states the deep soul of humanity?
As I look around my bookshelves, seeing books that are common to many libraries, I suffer a strange realization. That realization is not far away from what the author of Don Quixote observed about the books of chivalrous lore and epic that an individual, a gentleman from long ago of uncertain name, kept in his library, more importantly, the effect those volumes wreaked upon him. The fellow in question became mushy in the head, he took them seriously, he took them as useful example, when in fact they were diametrically opposed to providing useful information bearing upon one’s ability to exist in society.
All the books I have here are preaching a strange but simple message, which is to lay aside that mode of dealing with the world in a protective and selfish way, to embrace selflessness as a mode of existence. They tell me that beyond, or within, the self such as it is, there is someone remarkable enough to write about, even as I am ordinary and unremarkable.
And so, what is one supposed to do with himself? Face the prospect of being tossed out into the street along with all his precious books? Endure the long series of indignities, unbelievers, and painful beatings that a similarly delusional long ago Spaniard endured in his own conceited journeys? Does one have a choice after the point of reaching an understanding about the ego’s illusion?
Writing must be seen as not just writing but some form of spiritual learning, an embracement of a path toward the salvation of an honest economy and a society’s access to wisdom. Such is the charge that hides in books. One must not simply read, but write, write for the sake of his own self.
“Abandon the ego.” That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need know.
Writers work through becoming egoless. The formula is safe from exploitation.
Start out when you are fresh, before you’ve been bombarded with words from an outside source. Write in the morning, before turning on the television, before looking at the headlines, before talking to anyone. Write after a long walk, after listening to a symphony, after a time free from verbal behavior. To escape the gravity of your own ego, you must avoid the interference pattern of other egos. Through time and practice, you can train your ego to leave you alone.
Tolstoy entertained a freedom from ego while in writing mode, even as he possessed a large, healthy and proud one. As he wrote out his story of Levin--a stand-in for himself with obvious similarities--he found himself identifying more and more with the character of Anna Karenina. No longer the outlined character of a morality play of a woman fallen in adultery (thrown in to offset the marriage of Levin and Kitty) she becomes so real to Tolstoy that he takes us inside her head. He reveals ‘her’ vulnerability in all its dimensions, her own achievement of separation from ego, here to a tragic end. (Did Tolstoy see the force and logic of the ego as so strong that death would virtually be necessary for the self to be detached from its binds?)
Still, it would be a valuable story without her, because Tolstoy gives us Levin. In stepping aside from his own ego, as is necessary to describe himself as a character fully and richly, he reveals his own version of the formula, his template. For Tolstoy, Levin, the self-portrait, is a tool, a channel into human nature.
Tolstoy, writing in this new form, no longer history, not even fiction so much, is caught in the act of discovering the mode of selflessness, realizing its necessity. Anna Karenina's selfish affair becomes the reflection of Levin’s selfish ego as he endeavors, over the course of season and year, to step away from it. Anna Karenina achieves her freedom after a long crises that began in romantic happiness, whereas for Levin, thanks to his patience, his freedom from ego ends in romantic happiness, more or less. Levin and Anna Karenina, and Tolstoy himself as well, are linked in the difficult act of detaching themselves from the egotistical. They achieve the perspective that the ego's imposed images of self are an illusion.
Shyness is the self-protection of the creative mode. Emily Dickinson, retreating from the world, is the classic example. In her great privacy, the world came to her.
The grasp for the mode of creative selflessness coincides with vulnerability.
Abraham Lincoln presents an example of falling into a state of depression, of feeling incapable of coping. Regularly and periodically accessing his vulnerability, he was able to find the reasons for living. His logic in politics was a formula of selflessness, and so was he able to see the issues of his day, the constitutional evils of allowing slavery.
Aram Saroyan describes Kerouac as a ‘hero who dared to have a series of long, tender nervous breakdowns in the prose of his dozen or so books.’ This is something for a writer to chronicle, as Kerouac did in the long legend of Dulouz from childhood onward. Carver’s stories, personal history and correspondence reveal a similar achievement of breakdowns
These states of breakdown are the source of what makes a work accessible.
Even if we are not musicians, we find in listening to the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven (consider he wrote it while deaf) a language we understand. (Ode to Joy--Beethoven’s mathematical representation of selflessness.) We find a similar sense of full expression in Van Gogh’s brushstrokes. In their ‘deafness,’ the two display the greatness of their individual formulation of giving up the ego.
What would happen if we were to try this all ourselves? What if we were to put our own lives to egoless shy broad artistic productivity? Would we discover through the mode of egoless states the deep soul of humanity?
As I look around my bookshelves, seeing books that are common to many libraries, I suffer a strange realization. That realization is not far away from what the author of Don Quixote observed about the books of chivalrous lore and epic that an individual, a gentleman from long ago of uncertain name, kept in his library, more importantly, the effect those volumes wreaked upon him. The fellow in question became mushy in the head, he took them seriously, he took them as useful example, when in fact they were diametrically opposed to providing useful information bearing upon one’s ability to exist in society.
All the books I have here are preaching a strange but simple message, which is to lay aside that mode of dealing with the world in a protective and selfish way, to embrace selflessness as a mode of existence. They tell me that beyond, or within, the self such as it is, there is someone remarkable enough to write about, even as I am ordinary and unremarkable.
And so, what is one supposed to do with himself? Face the prospect of being tossed out into the street along with all his precious books? Endure the long series of indignities, unbelievers, and painful beatings that a similarly delusional long ago Spaniard endured in his own conceited journeys? Does one have a choice after the point of reaching an understanding about the ego’s illusion?
Writing must be seen as not just writing but some form of spiritual learning, an embracement of a path toward the salvation of an honest economy and a society’s access to wisdom. Such is the charge that hides in books. One must not simply read, but write, write for the sake of his own self.
“Abandon the ego.” That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need know.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Plane Crash
The first summer I came to Washington I was the lowest of the low. I wanted to be like Abraham Lincoln, but the best I could do was get a job through a temp agency. I Xeroxed, I stuffed envelopes, I went back and forth on the metro delivering documents. I ended up working two jobs. An office job, as a clerk sitting in front of a computer and a constantly ringing phone for an HMO, exhausting enough, and a job at night bussing tables at a new Tex-Mex restaurant I’d taken a liking to where the beers were cold and the margaritas made with fresh lime juice. The restaurant was a gentle place, and I could lose myself in running glasses, clearing tables, bringing the beer down at the end of the night. I was skinny, and so I could slip through the lively crowd easily and good-naturedly. I liked the food very much, and it soon became for me a home-cooked meal, which is not unimportant when you are a hungry young man. I liked being kept busy, constantly running, until I was tired out and it was time to go home. There was a lot going on, between the kitchen, the dishwasher, all the way to the glass front door and the big picture window people would watch snowstorms from when winter came.
I didn’t have to work one evening and I was walking along Pennsylvania Avenue into Georgetown where, above the river, between a gas station and the modern brick clock tower of The Four Seasons, the avenue becomes M Street. I walked home, following M Street through Georgetown then past it where the university stood up on a bluff, the road becoming a divided highway above the old canal, and when it became Foxhall Road I was not far away from the little grey house with a porch that I shared with two women.
Planes come in and out of National Airport following the river. You heard them as they rose shining and silvery towards the clouds, lifting their bellies up into the humid blue sky above the river and its rising banks. There’d been a plane crash a few days before, and I thought, what if that had been me, and also, what if that had been her, and for that matter, what if it had been anyone who ever knew anyone. An engine fan went in the tail of one of the big planes, a DC-10, somewhere over Iowa, taking the whole hydraulic system with it, leaving the pilot no way to control it. The passengers heard, and felt, the explosion. The pilot, a man of much flying experience, did a valiant job of powering the wing engines, a last ditch effort before the plane rolled, in such a way that he and his crew could steer it somewhat, trying to get it to the nearest airstrip, something to land on. There happened to be a DC-10 training pilot on board and he came up to the cockpit to help them fly it. They got it to the airstrip in Sioux City.
They brought the plane down lined up for the landing as best they could. The nose and the right wing dipped at the last moment, the moment of touchdown. The plane came careening in fire down the runway, breaking apart. A strange silent clip of the crash, seen from a distance with a hangar in the way, was played on TV. There were survivors, including the pilot crew, whom they extricated from the broken-off nose of it after they’d put out the fire.
I thought of the people on the plane, the sudden short and awful vulnerability of life. Some people in certain rows lived, and some in other rows, as happens in some plane crashes, died. And I am sorry to mention it all, for to do so, as much writing does, is to cruelly interfere with the privacy proper to a matter.
When I got home I worked up the courage to call her house. Her mother answered, and I asked for her, and with a muffled groan in the background, I was told that she was out. “I’ll call back Thursday,” I said. It didn’t last long. When you were talking on the phone in the house, you had to stop and wait when a plane came over until you could hear yourself and the other end of the line again.
So Thursday came and I took the bus home and called her dutifully, as I said I would. Because there had been a plane crash. Maybe it was then that I heard the background groan, again her mother saying with a slight hesitation, as if she were watching the reaction of her daughter with some surprise, that she was out, or not in. “I just wanted to say hi to her,” I said with a kind of cut-off chirp in the face of some child’s big unhappy mystery. “Bye now,” her mother quickly added, with a gentleness reserved for the complexities of such many-sided matters. “Bye,” I peeped, and the phone clicked.
I went for a walk afterward, the evening sky turning into a deep blue before dark blackness, here and there a star, the moon above the trees hanging steep over the dark primeval river banks. A plane was flying low, coasting in, banking slightly on its way down, its engines drawn back, letting itself drop down, the lights of its underbelly flashing, blinking, flashing, blinking. The landing gear had come down and it was making that different noise, wooshing as if something had been opened up on the outside, quieter, spidery on a whispy web of air with the right kind of grip, full of stillness and hesitations, like a long-legged bug on the surface of water, more forward than down, in a way that doesn’t quite seem to make sense, a special relativity of coming back to earth as seen from the perspective of the ground, the separate reality of something heavy made light by forward motion, like in swimming. The river was there, as if to guide, as if to show, but what more could it do than keep its banks and flow on, and take the wind with it. And the plane seemed to stop for a moment, tilt down just slightly more, then keep on, then stop again, tilt its nose down just again as if it were a creature of thought watching itself do what was necessary, as if according to a recipe.
I figured that all the people on that plane were feeling that feeling in their chests, of being held up and back, in their bellies the feeling of dropping down a sudden unexpected hill, in the windy parts of themselves, the descent, the almost-there relief of making it back to earth, but for the crucial moment of landing ahead of them still, which would be enough to make them nervous now, no matter how many times they had flown. And with recent events, they would particularly feel the relief of not dying in a plane crash, but being let back to Earth. And when they would step off the plane and onto something more grounded, even a walkway, they would feel something too, even as they looked around for baggage claim.
Looking out over the river’s silent space, I felt like I was, what it would be like to be, on such a plane, no way to control itself, but fling its stuck wings into the forward air, a valiant pilot somewhere unseen up front, revving one engine, then the other trying to get the thing to a landing strip, not a cornfield. “I just wanted to say hi to her,” I said to myself, feeling I was looking out a little window at the ground far below, nothing in my control. I’d become as close as I could to being like a James Dean character, and I found out it wasn’t so hot.
The hardest thing of writing is to put it out there, where it is left to float or sink, only the reader there to provide it motion. If taken too literally, its version of facts would be far too pulled upon by reality to ever fly, not touching upon real life anymore. And if taken as too much of the literary, of an overwrought imagination, it would fly off where no one would ever see it again, having no bearing upon the things of the world. Too much scrutiny would take the wings and engines off. Taking it too seriously or, on the other hand, too lightly, would be contrary to the flying spirit of its inner poetry, the gentle acceptance of the thinness of air, the knowledge that only forward motion keeps one from falling from the sky back to earth. The shy humor, even if dreadful, of the situation written about must be observed. But to leave respectfully to it the mysteries of its inner complexities, is the only way to let it have its motions. Lost into the air, barely able to guide itself, but by small almost errant and experimental motions and levers to guide its veering, is the only way a plane can fly. For which I am sorry. One has to admit such things, sorry and as gentle as they are. As if to say, “Oh, I’m a real golden boy. Yeah.”
I didn’t know how to write back then, but by some partly sorrowful instinct, if it could be said that I ever pulled it off. I still don’t. Why, and how, did such things come to be so, is about all one can write about. I had a lot to learn about writing, and so I read things like Ernest Hemingway identifying himself with a waiter who had a garden to care for on his days off, and Sherwood Anderson’s introduction to his own little book, the part about an old writer who, as a way of departing from his own ego, could imagine within a woman in a suit of armor. For one must remember, that very little is important, that very little matters, very little worth putting out there in the way of something for others to read, if one were to be quite honest with himself. There are masters of this certain kind of humility, and I would count Kerouac and Carver amongst them too, because I found them a comfort. Because they were honest.
I’d drank tequila one night and hurt my foot by jumping out of a moving car to get to a party where the pretty waitress was a little faster than the cook’s cigarette run would allow, but my foot was better now. (“Keep it elevated,” the doctor had told me, which got me fired from a job filing savings account statements for an office of Riggs Bank, the day after I’d crashed the bartender’s car into a Porsche the perfect color not to see after an intense summer electrical storm out back behind the restaurant after an ice run.) She was the only one to wait for me as I swept the floor and helped the bartender restock. That fall the hole in the side of my foot below the ankle had healed and I’d go and lie on my back in the woods and wish for something happy, like a nice pretty girl who would hold me. I wished for something to go away. And when I got back once one of my housemates, the one who got mad at me about my foot and told me to go see her doctor, picked the twigs off of the brown sweater my mom had found for me in the Salvation Army in Oneida, that some farm mother had knitted for her son.
They called me one day and asked me if I wanted to bartend, starting out with sleepy toiling dayshifts. I was quite happy to just be a busboy, running things around without having really to deal with people and their egos. (Perhaps they gathered that I had a healthy distance from my own ego.) But I had just quit my other job, so that I would have time to write, and I needed the extra money. So, against my better judgment, I said yes. I knew the recipes of how to make the margaritas for the frozen machines by the five gallon tanks which were refitted stainless steel soda syrup canisters and which I had a fondness for, anyway. As if they were parts of an airplane that could take you far away and over an ocean.
I would of course suffer much torment at the hands of the egotistical demands that people carry about with them. Not that I didn’t share many times and things with many marvelous people, and the wonderful good sides of many flawed people, over the years. Perhaps it was an education, something through which to defeat, as much as one can, my own egotistical will. Maybe it served the same cleansing function that Abraham Lincoln found met by his ‘baths in public opinion,’ which was like on certain Mondays when any nut who wanted to, anyone wanting something, could stand in line to go in and talk, cajole, harangue, and curry favor with the President of the Untied States. But that is another story.
And fortunately, thank god, this is a blog, no one having to bother about it or with it anyway. No one has to read it, and there is absolutely no need to pull it from the obscurity that it enjoys. For that would interfere with the powers of its flight.
I didn’t have to work one evening and I was walking along Pennsylvania Avenue into Georgetown where, above the river, between a gas station and the modern brick clock tower of The Four Seasons, the avenue becomes M Street. I walked home, following M Street through Georgetown then past it where the university stood up on a bluff, the road becoming a divided highway above the old canal, and when it became Foxhall Road I was not far away from the little grey house with a porch that I shared with two women.
Planes come in and out of National Airport following the river. You heard them as they rose shining and silvery towards the clouds, lifting their bellies up into the humid blue sky above the river and its rising banks. There’d been a plane crash a few days before, and I thought, what if that had been me, and also, what if that had been her, and for that matter, what if it had been anyone who ever knew anyone. An engine fan went in the tail of one of the big planes, a DC-10, somewhere over Iowa, taking the whole hydraulic system with it, leaving the pilot no way to control it. The passengers heard, and felt, the explosion. The pilot, a man of much flying experience, did a valiant job of powering the wing engines, a last ditch effort before the plane rolled, in such a way that he and his crew could steer it somewhat, trying to get it to the nearest airstrip, something to land on. There happened to be a DC-10 training pilot on board and he came up to the cockpit to help them fly it. They got it to the airstrip in Sioux City.
They brought the plane down lined up for the landing as best they could. The nose and the right wing dipped at the last moment, the moment of touchdown. The plane came careening in fire down the runway, breaking apart. A strange silent clip of the crash, seen from a distance with a hangar in the way, was played on TV. There were survivors, including the pilot crew, whom they extricated from the broken-off nose of it after they’d put out the fire.
I thought of the people on the plane, the sudden short and awful vulnerability of life. Some people in certain rows lived, and some in other rows, as happens in some plane crashes, died. And I am sorry to mention it all, for to do so, as much writing does, is to cruelly interfere with the privacy proper to a matter.
When I got home I worked up the courage to call her house. Her mother answered, and I asked for her, and with a muffled groan in the background, I was told that she was out. “I’ll call back Thursday,” I said. It didn’t last long. When you were talking on the phone in the house, you had to stop and wait when a plane came over until you could hear yourself and the other end of the line again.
So Thursday came and I took the bus home and called her dutifully, as I said I would. Because there had been a plane crash. Maybe it was then that I heard the background groan, again her mother saying with a slight hesitation, as if she were watching the reaction of her daughter with some surprise, that she was out, or not in. “I just wanted to say hi to her,” I said with a kind of cut-off chirp in the face of some child’s big unhappy mystery. “Bye now,” her mother quickly added, with a gentleness reserved for the complexities of such many-sided matters. “Bye,” I peeped, and the phone clicked.
I went for a walk afterward, the evening sky turning into a deep blue before dark blackness, here and there a star, the moon above the trees hanging steep over the dark primeval river banks. A plane was flying low, coasting in, banking slightly on its way down, its engines drawn back, letting itself drop down, the lights of its underbelly flashing, blinking, flashing, blinking. The landing gear had come down and it was making that different noise, wooshing as if something had been opened up on the outside, quieter, spidery on a whispy web of air with the right kind of grip, full of stillness and hesitations, like a long-legged bug on the surface of water, more forward than down, in a way that doesn’t quite seem to make sense, a special relativity of coming back to earth as seen from the perspective of the ground, the separate reality of something heavy made light by forward motion, like in swimming. The river was there, as if to guide, as if to show, but what more could it do than keep its banks and flow on, and take the wind with it. And the plane seemed to stop for a moment, tilt down just slightly more, then keep on, then stop again, tilt its nose down just again as if it were a creature of thought watching itself do what was necessary, as if according to a recipe.
I figured that all the people on that plane were feeling that feeling in their chests, of being held up and back, in their bellies the feeling of dropping down a sudden unexpected hill, in the windy parts of themselves, the descent, the almost-there relief of making it back to earth, but for the crucial moment of landing ahead of them still, which would be enough to make them nervous now, no matter how many times they had flown. And with recent events, they would particularly feel the relief of not dying in a plane crash, but being let back to Earth. And when they would step off the plane and onto something more grounded, even a walkway, they would feel something too, even as they looked around for baggage claim.
Looking out over the river’s silent space, I felt like I was, what it would be like to be, on such a plane, no way to control itself, but fling its stuck wings into the forward air, a valiant pilot somewhere unseen up front, revving one engine, then the other trying to get the thing to a landing strip, not a cornfield. “I just wanted to say hi to her,” I said to myself, feeling I was looking out a little window at the ground far below, nothing in my control. I’d become as close as I could to being like a James Dean character, and I found out it wasn’t so hot.
The hardest thing of writing is to put it out there, where it is left to float or sink, only the reader there to provide it motion. If taken too literally, its version of facts would be far too pulled upon by reality to ever fly, not touching upon real life anymore. And if taken as too much of the literary, of an overwrought imagination, it would fly off where no one would ever see it again, having no bearing upon the things of the world. Too much scrutiny would take the wings and engines off. Taking it too seriously or, on the other hand, too lightly, would be contrary to the flying spirit of its inner poetry, the gentle acceptance of the thinness of air, the knowledge that only forward motion keeps one from falling from the sky back to earth. The shy humor, even if dreadful, of the situation written about must be observed. But to leave respectfully to it the mysteries of its inner complexities, is the only way to let it have its motions. Lost into the air, barely able to guide itself, but by small almost errant and experimental motions and levers to guide its veering, is the only way a plane can fly. For which I am sorry. One has to admit such things, sorry and as gentle as they are. As if to say, “Oh, I’m a real golden boy. Yeah.”
I didn’t know how to write back then, but by some partly sorrowful instinct, if it could be said that I ever pulled it off. I still don’t. Why, and how, did such things come to be so, is about all one can write about. I had a lot to learn about writing, and so I read things like Ernest Hemingway identifying himself with a waiter who had a garden to care for on his days off, and Sherwood Anderson’s introduction to his own little book, the part about an old writer who, as a way of departing from his own ego, could imagine within a woman in a suit of armor. For one must remember, that very little is important, that very little matters, very little worth putting out there in the way of something for others to read, if one were to be quite honest with himself. There are masters of this certain kind of humility, and I would count Kerouac and Carver amongst them too, because I found them a comfort. Because they were honest.
I’d drank tequila one night and hurt my foot by jumping out of a moving car to get to a party where the pretty waitress was a little faster than the cook’s cigarette run would allow, but my foot was better now. (“Keep it elevated,” the doctor had told me, which got me fired from a job filing savings account statements for an office of Riggs Bank, the day after I’d crashed the bartender’s car into a Porsche the perfect color not to see after an intense summer electrical storm out back behind the restaurant after an ice run.) She was the only one to wait for me as I swept the floor and helped the bartender restock. That fall the hole in the side of my foot below the ankle had healed and I’d go and lie on my back in the woods and wish for something happy, like a nice pretty girl who would hold me. I wished for something to go away. And when I got back once one of my housemates, the one who got mad at me about my foot and told me to go see her doctor, picked the twigs off of the brown sweater my mom had found for me in the Salvation Army in Oneida, that some farm mother had knitted for her son.
They called me one day and asked me if I wanted to bartend, starting out with sleepy toiling dayshifts. I was quite happy to just be a busboy, running things around without having really to deal with people and their egos. (Perhaps they gathered that I had a healthy distance from my own ego.) But I had just quit my other job, so that I would have time to write, and I needed the extra money. So, against my better judgment, I said yes. I knew the recipes of how to make the margaritas for the frozen machines by the five gallon tanks which were refitted stainless steel soda syrup canisters and which I had a fondness for, anyway. As if they were parts of an airplane that could take you far away and over an ocean.
I would of course suffer much torment at the hands of the egotistical demands that people carry about with them. Not that I didn’t share many times and things with many marvelous people, and the wonderful good sides of many flawed people, over the years. Perhaps it was an education, something through which to defeat, as much as one can, my own egotistical will. Maybe it served the same cleansing function that Abraham Lincoln found met by his ‘baths in public opinion,’ which was like on certain Mondays when any nut who wanted to, anyone wanting something, could stand in line to go in and talk, cajole, harangue, and curry favor with the President of the Untied States. But that is another story.
And fortunately, thank god, this is a blog, no one having to bother about it or with it anyway. No one has to read it, and there is absolutely no need to pull it from the obscurity that it enjoys. For that would interfere with the powers of its flight.
Friday, July 20, 2007
The Cinematography of the Tour de France
I was sitting one afternoon in French class in high school digesting my lunch by pondering the perfectly flat grassy yard outside the windows. The teacher was a new one and had set upon a year of administration rather than letting fly with the impressionistic brushstrokes of the language of the French people, the sound devices of approval and disapproval that are the walls of its fortress against vagueness. She made a point to catch me inking the carvings someone had left on a desk one day.
It was one of those sleepy afternoons and she surprised us with the happy news that we would be watching a film. The blinds were pulled with a metallic crinkling noise. A refreshing coolness spread through the room. Miss W. pulled the screen down from the green tube above the blackboard. She opened the round case bearing the film reel. She loaded the projector, turned off the lights at the switches by the door and then the numbers came on and then suddenly we were rolling through a town unlike anyone I’d ever seen. The street was narrow, bathed in sunlight. A lively accordion was playing. Somehow it was obvious that this was a boy film, not a girl film. I had a breathless feeling of profound discovery.
The spectacle of the Tour De France, circa the Sixties, unfolded in proper order into out little classroom, much as it would have passed through a small town. First came the gimmickry of the advertising cavalcade, a bowing neck of a giraffe, a giant fly on the top of a car, a giant hand lifting a giant bottle of Pelforth Ale, a convey of propane tanks weaving in unison across the road, pretty girls tossing candy bars to the transfixed crowd gathered beside the road, signaling their approval. And then, the townspeople themselves, as we would see them if we were neighbors, an old woman sitting in her chair, a gathering of a Catholic school, the priest watching intently, nuns, children, families having set up roadside picnics, drinking wine.
And then the peloton comes flying along in a blur, strung out in a long line. We heard the cheer of the crowd and then the riders were gone. And then the men on bikes were stopping, quickly propping their bikes up beside a roadside café, running into the cool darkness to raid for bottles of beer and wine and soda, and sometimes even water. And these were incredibly handsome and well-muscled men, and not only that, but with jaunty cap, colored jersey and black shorts, they looked to be wearing what everyone should be wearing if one really had a choice in the matter. There were crashes, and men getting up after them in terrible pain. Then we see one rider still on his bike, blood running down the whole side of his head, the rolling doctor reaching out of a car putting the man’s bloody cap back on. Suddenly there was something shocking and unedited before us, but something we all could take and it felt right in the silence of our darkness before the screen. I lost all concept of time.
There was the countryside, ever shifting, changing in nuance, green farm fields with ridges the long lines of riders sailed over, the dry landscape of low scrub, the flats of pine and sand, the men riding with their noses to the handle bars. I was a spectator, transfixed, struck by the beauty of the whole thing. I was somewhere descending a mountain, with newspapers in my jersey, after the pounding of the drums of the climb, evading through the mist when I heard the first ring of the fire alarm going off. At once I knew it was a fire drill.
“You’re kidding me,” the spoiled young man I was said, shepherded by the tall attractive dark-haired woman as we left the room, the film still playing. “No!”
“They all get to Paris,” she said, as if revealing the mundane end, inconclusive despite its build-up, of a juicy soap opera.
And so I stood squinting in the sun with my classmates, thinking desperately of ways to disappear from the long line-up and Miss W. taking attendance, to sneak back in and see where they were, these men who had endured everything, in the name of something finer. When we got back, the screen was blank. And I was crestfallen, wearing a curse. The one day, the one day we finally get something cool, the fire alarm has to go off. I looked around at my unconcerned classmates. I said nothing the rest of the day.
Here was a film of a sporting event, done by the hand of a master, its concise but epic statement something for a film student to study. It felt supremely odd that such a sublime thing should fall to Earth one day into the mundane of an afternoon classroom. So it lived in my mind, for years, the brief shining moment, the beautiful golden movie about The Tour de France. And not just about one, it must be, but capturing the true Tour, the Tour of Platonic Tours de France.
For a good third of life I wondered about this film, as if it had been a dream I had, but for the rude awakening. Then one day, perusing a cycling catalog, I saw a film being offered. A Louis Malle, a film of the Tour done in the mid-Sixties. I sent for it. The tape arrived. I put it carefully into the machine.
Twenty years after first seeing it, and having not viewed it since, it seemed smaller, less than I expected, shorter. But slowly, as I watched it again and again, I saw the things I had remembered, one by one. To my surprise the film is not a long one, twenty minutes. It had not seemed like that at all to the boy in the darkened classroom. Then the movie’s images had carried across the room, exploded largely before me, expanded across my conscious horizon; each captured scene vibrated in fullness to the boy I’d been. Now, as a grown man, more or less, the heroic film has the condensed beauty of an opera’s main aria. You don’t mind playing it over again, and maybe even again.
Watching the Tour, I enjoy the timeless idyll of it more than the details. The French TV coverage is artistically done--of course they have good material--with towns tucked on top of hills like, for example, Briançon is, the open fields, the tree-lined streets. Now with helicopters the camera’s eye can sweep in magnificently as if you were God looking down watching His mortals go along their way, with the wind, against the wind, in their long strung-out line in single file. And no, not for the details should one bother, as the riders swoop by, slowing only to be handed a feed bag, stopping only for flat tires and the need to pee, and also, for the terrible crashes, but for the energetic spectacle, which is as real as anything, like the hand of karma visiting the road somewhat incomprehensibly, a cruel blow (as far as winning the race is concerned) granting as much grace, if not more, then a stunning victory, for showing bravery, courage, the emotion of the heart.
The Tour de France is a thing of beauty. The French have been, even in the Byzantine manner of allowing the traditional caravan of advertising vehicles, gendarmes, organizing officials, motorcycle escorts and cameramen, the gentle and wise custodians, gracious to whatever magic might arise, as that at least little boys will enjoy it, and quite probably grown men and women, too. What they add to the pilgrimage seems to lend the whole thing balance, a richness that will age in the memory of years alongside all the details and the race particulars.
This year’s Tour, the camera eye sat on a crag, hovering, looking down at the riders march up the Galibier mountain pass. Suddenly the eye of view lifted, dropped, came away from it's mountain lair, and one felt like an eagle, lifting off. One felt like looking down at something historical, the retreat of a legion, or rather a proud and mythical Gallic march of conquest, as if Roman domination never really existed and was a matter of wrong-headed opinion. Hannibal, the announcer reminds us, came down the very pass with thirty-seven elephants. (One should comment on the excellence of the announcers for Versus Channel’s American broadcasts, reverent, appropriate, steeped in lore, sensitive to the humanity of spectator, rider and viewer alike. Bravo.)
The Tour is a spectacle, a tribute to the inherent restlessness of humanity, as if once a year at least, we would drop everything, mount a bicycle (not a bad form of locomotion, all in all), and venture out across the countryside, out and over the varying landscape of France, in search of ourselves and the unknown and perhaps our own forms of Platonic knowledge. The Tour de France confirms to the boy, wishing to be studious, in the darkened room, the projector whirring behind him, the teacher sitting next to it, the images flickering before him, that restlessness as the vehicle of all history, all change, all human endeavors.
It strikes one as wise to allow for an expression of that restlessness. It gives a nation of people the chance to watch the spectacle, reflecting over a beer, a glass of wine, in the company of family and friends. It is not, and never has been, a prudish sport, and so it is welcomed through all the small towns along the route, as something real and honest, on one level a sport, but far more, an epic of humanity that touches down to earth once a year faithfully and religiously. Old men and women welcome it, the clergy welcome it, the local officials, regular people, man and wife and child, and perhaps particularly young boys groping for the mysteries of manhood held in their own bodies.
The Tour de France is one embodiment of a style of living that modernity has difficulty accommodating. The time spent to get in form on a bicycle must be cut out of the office, out of other requirements. Few have that allowance of time in the material world. Where in human evolution did it become so that doing well by the physical body became be disregarded, secondary, at best shunned to an hour in the corners of a gym rather than the body being out in nature, amidst the forest, the mountains, the rolling hills? Where did the species veer off the healthy path?
So do the advertisers flock to this strange pilgrimage to ancient vigor, festooning every inch of rider uniform, bicycle, crowd barrier, official Tour vehicle, with its name brands, with the guilty pleasure of a feeding frenzy. A pope does not die every day, something to bring us to our television sets, and so the intensity by which advertisers strive to propagate in the special oxygen rich environment of the Tour. (American commercial television seizes the day with its customary loud shouts, encouraging violence and other forms of reprehensible behavior, selling the illusion of the self, the self with its mysterious made-up needs for that which brings the body little in the way of health and development. The advertisements tell us what we might win in sweepstakes; tell us what will make us better.)
Against the backdrop of the televised coverage, the riders of the Tour de France rise, bringing us a picture of human development. The Tour brings us back, contrary to the driven nature of our times, back from the compartmentalized understandings and narrow judgments of the advertised world, to be, for a moment, back in touch with our instincts, our goodness, our generosity, at least our sense of being out in nature.
Of course one might argue, what is the point of a silly bike race? To waste such time is given only, and rightly so, to the freaks of physical conditioning, one might say, so that the spectacle is just that, an almost super-human contest. Who but a child would see the good in riding a bike, and who but the child has such time and leisure? The well-known words of Antoine Blondin say it well:
From Bordeaux to Bayonne, I am surprised to find myself in this caravan that ruffles the girls’ hair, lifts the priests’ cassocks, petrifies the police, and transforms palaces into press rooms, rather than among these small boys overwhelmed with admiration and running on caffeine. I can say that my only regret is not seeing myself pass by.
Louis Malle’s short film, Vive Le Tour, is a prism held to that. Within its passing images we see what modern television coverage bring us. Thankfully, the landscapes of the film will be immediately familiar to the modern viewer, and yes, the spectacle of it, thankfully, remains the same down to virtually every old custom. The countryside of France and the towns that have situated themselves into it as if they were living being themselves, are as much the stars of the show as anything else.
The whole thing brings forth a candor we aren’t so often in touch with. The route itself does not need hype, as to hype such a thing pushes us back to our office cubicles, to our shells, away from the open air, leaves the open road to commerce rather than poetry, leaves it a team impossible to make rather than, as it should be, to ourselves.
The Tour is not idolatry, but reverence for the human need for physical action. The Tour leads us to wonder about our own selves, about our capacities, our gifts, hidden, underdeveloped and otherwise. The Tour leaves us with a very valuable inkling of how our higher intellectual and spiritual lives are made possible largely through the intense physicality of engaging our bodies in something that tests them. The Tour reminds us that our bodies and our minds and our spirits are incredible instruments, up to the feats of the Pyrenees and the Alps, of all the long roads of the yearly route of the Tour de France, and who knows what else.
The nation of France graciously and generously gives to the world something beautiful. That is something I learned in French class one afternoon, despite the fire drill. Vive le Tour de France.
It was one of those sleepy afternoons and she surprised us with the happy news that we would be watching a film. The blinds were pulled with a metallic crinkling noise. A refreshing coolness spread through the room. Miss W. pulled the screen down from the green tube above the blackboard. She opened the round case bearing the film reel. She loaded the projector, turned off the lights at the switches by the door and then the numbers came on and then suddenly we were rolling through a town unlike anyone I’d ever seen. The street was narrow, bathed in sunlight. A lively accordion was playing. Somehow it was obvious that this was a boy film, not a girl film. I had a breathless feeling of profound discovery.
The spectacle of the Tour De France, circa the Sixties, unfolded in proper order into out little classroom, much as it would have passed through a small town. First came the gimmickry of the advertising cavalcade, a bowing neck of a giraffe, a giant fly on the top of a car, a giant hand lifting a giant bottle of Pelforth Ale, a convey of propane tanks weaving in unison across the road, pretty girls tossing candy bars to the transfixed crowd gathered beside the road, signaling their approval. And then, the townspeople themselves, as we would see them if we were neighbors, an old woman sitting in her chair, a gathering of a Catholic school, the priest watching intently, nuns, children, families having set up roadside picnics, drinking wine.
And then the peloton comes flying along in a blur, strung out in a long line. We heard the cheer of the crowd and then the riders were gone. And then the men on bikes were stopping, quickly propping their bikes up beside a roadside café, running into the cool darkness to raid for bottles of beer and wine and soda, and sometimes even water. And these were incredibly handsome and well-muscled men, and not only that, but with jaunty cap, colored jersey and black shorts, they looked to be wearing what everyone should be wearing if one really had a choice in the matter. There were crashes, and men getting up after them in terrible pain. Then we see one rider still on his bike, blood running down the whole side of his head, the rolling doctor reaching out of a car putting the man’s bloody cap back on. Suddenly there was something shocking and unedited before us, but something we all could take and it felt right in the silence of our darkness before the screen. I lost all concept of time.
There was the countryside, ever shifting, changing in nuance, green farm fields with ridges the long lines of riders sailed over, the dry landscape of low scrub, the flats of pine and sand, the men riding with their noses to the handle bars. I was a spectator, transfixed, struck by the beauty of the whole thing. I was somewhere descending a mountain, with newspapers in my jersey, after the pounding of the drums of the climb, evading through the mist when I heard the first ring of the fire alarm going off. At once I knew it was a fire drill.
“You’re kidding me,” the spoiled young man I was said, shepherded by the tall attractive dark-haired woman as we left the room, the film still playing. “No!”
“They all get to Paris,” she said, as if revealing the mundane end, inconclusive despite its build-up, of a juicy soap opera.
And so I stood squinting in the sun with my classmates, thinking desperately of ways to disappear from the long line-up and Miss W. taking attendance, to sneak back in and see where they were, these men who had endured everything, in the name of something finer. When we got back, the screen was blank. And I was crestfallen, wearing a curse. The one day, the one day we finally get something cool, the fire alarm has to go off. I looked around at my unconcerned classmates. I said nothing the rest of the day.
Here was a film of a sporting event, done by the hand of a master, its concise but epic statement something for a film student to study. It felt supremely odd that such a sublime thing should fall to Earth one day into the mundane of an afternoon classroom. So it lived in my mind, for years, the brief shining moment, the beautiful golden movie about The Tour de France. And not just about one, it must be, but capturing the true Tour, the Tour of Platonic Tours de France.
For a good third of life I wondered about this film, as if it had been a dream I had, but for the rude awakening. Then one day, perusing a cycling catalog, I saw a film being offered. A Louis Malle, a film of the Tour done in the mid-Sixties. I sent for it. The tape arrived. I put it carefully into the machine.
Twenty years after first seeing it, and having not viewed it since, it seemed smaller, less than I expected, shorter. But slowly, as I watched it again and again, I saw the things I had remembered, one by one. To my surprise the film is not a long one, twenty minutes. It had not seemed like that at all to the boy in the darkened classroom. Then the movie’s images had carried across the room, exploded largely before me, expanded across my conscious horizon; each captured scene vibrated in fullness to the boy I’d been. Now, as a grown man, more or less, the heroic film has the condensed beauty of an opera’s main aria. You don’t mind playing it over again, and maybe even again.
Watching the Tour, I enjoy the timeless idyll of it more than the details. The French TV coverage is artistically done--of course they have good material--with towns tucked on top of hills like, for example, Briançon is, the open fields, the tree-lined streets. Now with helicopters the camera’s eye can sweep in magnificently as if you were God looking down watching His mortals go along their way, with the wind, against the wind, in their long strung-out line in single file. And no, not for the details should one bother, as the riders swoop by, slowing only to be handed a feed bag, stopping only for flat tires and the need to pee, and also, for the terrible crashes, but for the energetic spectacle, which is as real as anything, like the hand of karma visiting the road somewhat incomprehensibly, a cruel blow (as far as winning the race is concerned) granting as much grace, if not more, then a stunning victory, for showing bravery, courage, the emotion of the heart.
The Tour de France is a thing of beauty. The French have been, even in the Byzantine manner of allowing the traditional caravan of advertising vehicles, gendarmes, organizing officials, motorcycle escorts and cameramen, the gentle and wise custodians, gracious to whatever magic might arise, as that at least little boys will enjoy it, and quite probably grown men and women, too. What they add to the pilgrimage seems to lend the whole thing balance, a richness that will age in the memory of years alongside all the details and the race particulars.
This year’s Tour, the camera eye sat on a crag, hovering, looking down at the riders march up the Galibier mountain pass. Suddenly the eye of view lifted, dropped, came away from it's mountain lair, and one felt like an eagle, lifting off. One felt like looking down at something historical, the retreat of a legion, or rather a proud and mythical Gallic march of conquest, as if Roman domination never really existed and was a matter of wrong-headed opinion. Hannibal, the announcer reminds us, came down the very pass with thirty-seven elephants. (One should comment on the excellence of the announcers for Versus Channel’s American broadcasts, reverent, appropriate, steeped in lore, sensitive to the humanity of spectator, rider and viewer alike. Bravo.)
The Tour is a spectacle, a tribute to the inherent restlessness of humanity, as if once a year at least, we would drop everything, mount a bicycle (not a bad form of locomotion, all in all), and venture out across the countryside, out and over the varying landscape of France, in search of ourselves and the unknown and perhaps our own forms of Platonic knowledge. The Tour de France confirms to the boy, wishing to be studious, in the darkened room, the projector whirring behind him, the teacher sitting next to it, the images flickering before him, that restlessness as the vehicle of all history, all change, all human endeavors.
It strikes one as wise to allow for an expression of that restlessness. It gives a nation of people the chance to watch the spectacle, reflecting over a beer, a glass of wine, in the company of family and friends. It is not, and never has been, a prudish sport, and so it is welcomed through all the small towns along the route, as something real and honest, on one level a sport, but far more, an epic of humanity that touches down to earth once a year faithfully and religiously. Old men and women welcome it, the clergy welcome it, the local officials, regular people, man and wife and child, and perhaps particularly young boys groping for the mysteries of manhood held in their own bodies.
The Tour de France is one embodiment of a style of living that modernity has difficulty accommodating. The time spent to get in form on a bicycle must be cut out of the office, out of other requirements. Few have that allowance of time in the material world. Where in human evolution did it become so that doing well by the physical body became be disregarded, secondary, at best shunned to an hour in the corners of a gym rather than the body being out in nature, amidst the forest, the mountains, the rolling hills? Where did the species veer off the healthy path?
So do the advertisers flock to this strange pilgrimage to ancient vigor, festooning every inch of rider uniform, bicycle, crowd barrier, official Tour vehicle, with its name brands, with the guilty pleasure of a feeding frenzy. A pope does not die every day, something to bring us to our television sets, and so the intensity by which advertisers strive to propagate in the special oxygen rich environment of the Tour. (American commercial television seizes the day with its customary loud shouts, encouraging violence and other forms of reprehensible behavior, selling the illusion of the self, the self with its mysterious made-up needs for that which brings the body little in the way of health and development. The advertisements tell us what we might win in sweepstakes; tell us what will make us better.)
Against the backdrop of the televised coverage, the riders of the Tour de France rise, bringing us a picture of human development. The Tour brings us back, contrary to the driven nature of our times, back from the compartmentalized understandings and narrow judgments of the advertised world, to be, for a moment, back in touch with our instincts, our goodness, our generosity, at least our sense of being out in nature.
Of course one might argue, what is the point of a silly bike race? To waste such time is given only, and rightly so, to the freaks of physical conditioning, one might say, so that the spectacle is just that, an almost super-human contest. Who but a child would see the good in riding a bike, and who but the child has such time and leisure? The well-known words of Antoine Blondin say it well:
From Bordeaux to Bayonne, I am surprised to find myself in this caravan that ruffles the girls’ hair, lifts the priests’ cassocks, petrifies the police, and transforms palaces into press rooms, rather than among these small boys overwhelmed with admiration and running on caffeine. I can say that my only regret is not seeing myself pass by.
Louis Malle’s short film, Vive Le Tour, is a prism held to that. Within its passing images we see what modern television coverage bring us. Thankfully, the landscapes of the film will be immediately familiar to the modern viewer, and yes, the spectacle of it, thankfully, remains the same down to virtually every old custom. The countryside of France and the towns that have situated themselves into it as if they were living being themselves, are as much the stars of the show as anything else.
The whole thing brings forth a candor we aren’t so often in touch with. The route itself does not need hype, as to hype such a thing pushes us back to our office cubicles, to our shells, away from the open air, leaves the open road to commerce rather than poetry, leaves it a team impossible to make rather than, as it should be, to ourselves.
The Tour is not idolatry, but reverence for the human need for physical action. The Tour leads us to wonder about our own selves, about our capacities, our gifts, hidden, underdeveloped and otherwise. The Tour leaves us with a very valuable inkling of how our higher intellectual and spiritual lives are made possible largely through the intense physicality of engaging our bodies in something that tests them. The Tour reminds us that our bodies and our minds and our spirits are incredible instruments, up to the feats of the Pyrenees and the Alps, of all the long roads of the yearly route of the Tour de France, and who knows what else.
The nation of France graciously and generously gives to the world something beautiful. That is something I learned in French class one afternoon, despite the fire drill. Vive le Tour de France.
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