A Train

My college buddy Jon put me up the night I went up to New York City to see our actor classmate in a play at the Public Theater. We went to a barroom in the Village after the play. Jon and his wife got up early to go to work. I had breakfast with them.

I walked up through the Village, a clear early Fall day, me in my Prince de Gaul suit, my cycling sunglasses, carrying my Dad’s old leather attaché. Past the Flatiron, I went up Madison, past the church Kerouac wrote about in one of his letters, up to the Public Library. A place that is safe for a visitor to New York, where he can blend in and not be necessarily odd.

I climbed the stairs up past the lions and then up to the reading room. I sat in a chair, tested a desk and the light. Some scholarly people sat at small tables, stacks of papers and books in front of them. I didn’t feel like research or looking at books. Maybe I’ve grown to have a sort of Taoist’s disdain for too many books, as much as I love books. A child can grasp an issue, more or less instantly, intuitively, and so it’s okay sometimes just to go with experience as far as an education as opposed to a pile of books you don’t necessarily feel like reading anyway. There will always be books that one is particularly fond of, that speak to us in the way that the personal belongings of the previous lama speak to the child reincarnated to be the next one. The actual experience of living life is necessary to understandings, and scholarliness is free-floating.

I went out and sat at a small table in the shade of some sycamores. I pulled out my legal pad notebook. In New York one is no longer just a bartender at a restaurant. One can be anyone he likes, almost, or whatever he seems dressed for. There was a little girl sitting with her family at a table nor far from mine. Her chair a little high for her, and as she drew with crayons as I wrote my own crayon-drawn kind of writing that has no more place of importance than a kid’s drawing, we kind of noticed each other. Her crayons or colored pencils, whatever they were, took to rolling now and again, and if one rolled and she went to pick it up another one would roll, such to the point that the rolling pencils were the main point of her project of experimentation and study. She’d pick up the one that fell, then half-sit, half-stand in her chair, as she worked away on her drawing.

We noticed each other noticing each other and she would look over her shoulder and check on me as if I too were a pencil about to roll or not roll. The pigeons fluttered, the trees gave dappled shade, the air was low in humidity, and everything was wonderful outside of The New York Public Library and the lions. The girl looked back at me now and again and I smiled in a way she could notice but without smiling directly at her. Her parents were more and more ready to leave, but she kept about her studious experiment until it really was time to go and so we sort of said good bye with a look and then a look away, and then a look back and I thought of what a wonderful place New York City was for meeting interesting people. She too had a little suitcase of her own, a backpack. Off she went, back in the company of her European parents.

I called my mom from a payphone and then I walked up along the west side of the Park, then left at the Natural History. My actor friend, Jeffrey, lived with his wife up on the Upper West Side. And it happened to be about two blocks from the childhood home of—how to put it—the beautiful girl I met back in college. Something you put the best of your intentions toward. And I’m already feeling funny, twitchy, I guess, because this is her territory. I could feel it in my stomach coming up the edge of the Park.

Raymond Carver was kind enough to write about it in a story, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. He puts it in the voice of the nurse who is the wife of his doctor friend. They are drinking gin and tonics with lime. The nurse is looking back on all the crazy things the guy, who was her previous boyfriend, did. One thing was swallowing rat poison, which made his gums recede from his teeth. Carver was brave enough to admit that he had done everything wrong in life. He was a very kind person, to capture the things about being human that he did. And he probably suffered from that sensitivity. And he knew his own mistakes, and admitted them, with candor where embarrassment would be a reactive tendency.

To the Taoist, with a sense of the fullness and the polarity of any ‘one thing,’ what is love? It would include its adolescent acts, its bad along with its good, its silence and distance as well as closeness and understanding and communication. And yet we all know of love as some form of altruistic beautiful ideal that has no wrong to it.

I called Jeffrey from the payphone right outside her building. And don’t think I didn’t think of calling her parents. I didn’t know anything about her anymore, which is I guess what I deserved, or my fate, anyway, so be it. I hesitated, I thought of it, I had the number, but instead I called Jeffrey. “Come on up,” he said. “Okay,” I said. I was polite back then, and agreeable.

Two blocks up Amsterdam, the street address the same as her building. I went in, and up to one of the top floors. Jeffrey’s place. The usual clutter, an old upright piano, a bicycle, a big painting of Basquiat sort, the kitchen sink with dirty dishes and glasses stacked up. Jeffrey’s wife was pregnant at the time. There was some catching up to do. I talked with his wife about where her family came from. She had some yogurt and said that it was too hot to go up on the roof and sit in the sun. The television was on to CNN. An ad for the television show Band of Brothers came on. Jeffrey came back and looked at the screen. “They couldn’t put a brother in it? Shameful.” I nodded, and looked back at the big television amidst Jeffrey’s stuff. “You look distracted, Teddy,” Jeffrey said.

We hung out for a while. Time passed. It was getting toward five o’clock. He had to start thinking about getting down to the theater for the play that night.

Jeffrey and I made our way down through the elevator, back through the lobby, where they had great respect for him, and I followed on his side as he walked confidently out onto the sidewalk. I guess I hoped that we’d walk a while, that he’d go his way and I’d go mine. Then I could go sit in a Starbuck’s or some other Upper West Side place and think about what I should do. Or better yet, just sit there and write in my notebook and maybe by some magical luck she would pass by. A chance meeting between two old friends, low key even about how it was not more than it was.

The human body cannot fake things. You want to see how someone turned out, to resolve the things that to weigh on your thoughts when you try to wake up in the morning, rather than leave the best part of you taken as some sort of a stalker. Things can hang upon you, stay with you, leaving you feeling not very good about yourself, cause you to get funny and not want to talk. It can leave you with scars that make it hard to talk to people without feeling like you have some bad motive.

If there are a million reasons why to call someone, there are a million reasons not to call them. Jeffrey looked back up the street and stuck his arm out. A yellow cab slipped to the curb. He wanted to go get a steam bath and a rubdown with his old Jewish guy pals at 49th and Broadway. Through Columbus Circle we went, and on, the golden light on the Upper West Side flickering away, all those nice sidewalk cafes, places to explore, like Zabar’s. What did I have to get back to in Washington anyway but the same stoic life. The cat. The upstairs neighbor, the nights cleaning up the bar alone after everyone had gone, the drinking having commenced, a stripper at the dive bar next door having a drink by herself if I was lucky. How often do I even get to New York? Have I even ever had one single happy day in Washington anyway?

“She lives right up there, you know,” I said to him.

“Oh, yeah, I’ve seen her before.”

“Well, you should say hi to her.”

“I don’t. Out of deference to you, Teddy.”

“Well…” I looked out the window. Up past the windshield at the street before us. “I brought her flowers once. She wouldn’t take them.”

“Oh, Fuck her, man.”

“She said I was crazy.”

“Fuck her, man. Fuck her. Can’t put up with that shit.”

“Yeah,” I said.

They’d been funny the night before, down at a bar in the Village. One of them, Jeffrey I suppose, had seen her with a girlfriend, pushing a baby carriage. “We shouldn’t have told him,” Jon said. But it’s not like it wasn’t dredged up anyway, just by being there in that city. Her city, even in Penn Station, her city. And you just wonder, how she’s doing.

The cab pulled over to the corner. We stood standing facing each other. “I love you, Teddy,” Jeffrey said. “I love you, man, too,” I said, awkward, with an arm over him.

And then I walked away. Down through sidewalks cut into walkways underneath construction scaffolding, past people of all walks, past young white dredlocked kids out of it, zoned out but still panhandling. And I’d stop with the crowd at the light and see the people waiting to come the other way. An attractive woman looked up into my face. Smart, well put-together, she looked me with open eyes and no defense. Maybe she knew, figuring it out as humans can sometimes. On I walked, without turning, without stopping, the crowd getting touristy as I passed under the marquee of the Ed Sullivan Theater. Me and my cycling glasses, normal enough looking to wear everyday, my Brooks Brothers Prince of Wales suit that I’d found in a second hand shop in Georgetown, didn’t even alter it, my old dad’s leather rectangular briefcase, my new shoes. The suit was to me a subliminal reminder of Bobby Kennedy. I could sort of pretend I was a good person like him when I wore it. The Later Robert Kennedy of the campaign, who reached out to people, had his act together, said remarkable things, very simple things, very true things, with that gentle calm voice he had that had the tone of coming out of some surviving some deep deep constant pain. I walked down through a crowd of loud smiling Germans in easy colorful vacation clothes, then down past crazies, toward Penn Station, then descending into its dreary florescent convoluted depths.

There was a train leaving in twenty minutes, as it turned out. So I bought my ticket and I got in the line and they opened it, and I took the escalator down and slipped into a car and sat down low in a seat. The car was almost empty. The door stayed open for a long time, and there was a pay phone right outside on the platform. My heart pounded. I reached down and opened the old valise of my father’s. My notebook. The shirt from last night. A black hardcover copy of the new translation of Anna Karenina. Something to hold on to.

Then the train moved, lurching with a jerk, and we crawled our way along in the tunnel going very slowly. Then we were out into the light across the low marshy wastes looking back at the island of Manhattan in profile, small industrial areas with roads leading to nowhere, fences, odd piles across the flat landscape. I didn’t want to look back at it, but I did, and it was mythical and unbelievable as ever. Where had it come from? How did it get there? There had to be some magic to where it was, and this you saw as well in the sorrow of leaving it and slipping, pulled away from it, as anywhere else.

The train moved on and I read from Anna Karenina, as the light came over the trees along the banks above the gravel of the railroad bed, the same train I’d taken to Washington, the same tracks as a funeral train once. I read from the book slowly, as if it had some unconscious way to help me in my hour of need when I did nothing and nothing came of it. It was a long way to Washington, and the train was expensive. It’s a trip you want to be over, but then it comes and reminds you of things that are best understood from something like the Funeral Train for Robert Kennedy, with the poor and everyone else coming out by the grit of the tracks and looking up at the thing as it passed. And inside you look out and see the world how it is, not the distant magic of a magnificent skyline, not like the majesty of the Colosseum in Rome, but like that of a broken down factory, or the burned out line of row houses in North Philadelphia and Baltimore, the graffitied trash-strewn discarded underbelly of mass life.

I come up the long escalator out of the metro station at Dupont Circle. It was a week away from Labor Day Weekend, and the town was dead quiet, like a bomb had gone off, as we used to say. I was there standing at the corner of R Street and Florida Avenue underneath the trees and stood there, feeling I wanted to cry. I came home and put the attaché and the book away and went out and got drunk in desperation at the bar I used to go to where I knew the barmen as fellow barmen, “Cities,” in Adams Morgan with its open garage door to the street.

Somehow that night I put a cut in the top of my right shoe, I have no idea how. I’d probably tripped over something in the long shuffling head-teetering miserable drunken walk home, and known even then that I’d ruined them, without being able to remember. It was all like a fairy tale from the old country, the poor boy ruining the special shoes the cobbler had made for him to court the princess one last time. “Must have been a good night,” the guy at Corrective Shoe Repair when I told him I didn’t know how I’d done it. I chuckled with him. “Yeah.”

Two weeks later was 9/11. A lot of golden things came to an end on a day that started out golden.

I wrote her a few weeks after the terrible event. Just a quick note. As if to catch up in four or five sentences. I watched the Tour de France, I mentioned, as the Tour is some metaphor to me for perseverance. I drank green tea, better for me than coffee, as I read a book about blood type and diet and what was good for people like me with type O, with maybe a hint that if I drank green tea I was more conscious than I was in the old days of the booze and beers I used to pour down my throat. I would have liked to have said that I didn’t drink any more, but I couldn’t say that. I said I was reading Anna Karenina. And I wrote that how I felt about her hadn’t changed. A stupid thing to say. But I thought it was true, and so I said it, then sealed the envelope, crossed myself and put in the mailbox, walking away from the mailbox thinking ‘what a mistake that was.’ I never heard back from her. I’d sent her Ted Hughes, The Birthday Letters, before, and I’d not heard from then either.

It took, I suppose, a long time to learn to walk again, and not go on about something that didn’t seem right. That I held on to the dream of her was for me like holding on to my fool kid dream of being a writer. Those were the same years when I didn’t know enough, didn’t have enough wisdom, knowledge of life experience to write, when I was like a kid with a crayon, who knew enough to stand at the big table, but who was more interested with the nature of crayons than any ability and knowledge when it came to presenting a picture. And so I held on to some golden picture that was a dream and an unreality.

I’d brought Anna Karenina with me for the train trip there and back. The example of Levin, of Tolstoy’s distance from himself in order to tell his life as a story, discovering a woman who steps away finally from her own ego, to live in the present, rather than being burdened with the past. One stepping stone on my way to putting something behind me, and moving on, remembering my benevolence toward all people. Letting go, I guess they call it. Letting go. A sweet dumb kid with some dumb idea about being a writer, a path I felt obliged to follow, to work out what I had to work out.

Everything I ever did by my own will and ego, it seems to me sometimes, turned out to be more trouble than good, even when I tried the simplest of things that my heart wanted out of simple good wishes. Except writing, which is merely, or mainly, one’s benevolence, one’s kindness to others, a small attempt to relate the few things one learns in life and endeavors to pass on, if they are worthy of remembering. Kindness, boiled down, as any art form aspires to be.

Perhaps it can be said that the whole point of life is letting your inner voice out, letting it shine like that of the opera singer performing a vast aria. When you’re a kid, you can be shy, you can get bullied, you can think through mysterious and complicated processes that you’re doing the wrong thing when really you’re doing the right thing. There should be some allowances made, is what you end up saying when you come to hone your voice. And the allowances themselves should be celebrated too. That’s a reason I always liked James Dean. He caught that period of being bullied, just about to let his voice out, then doing so. He gently immortalized it, with a shy smile and a wink. After all, you can only be wise if you make mistakes. You can only say something wise about the things you make mistakes over. For Hamlet, ‘the readiness is all.’ Maybe that’s what that means. And he too was making his juvenile beautiful mistakes. Loving words, he wanted to say wise things, understand things, see things accurately. An admirable fellow.

Carver’s stories end with a sense of stripping the matters of life down to the essential. His stories are necessarily personal. Biting off what you can chew, basically. That’s the sense you get from the man splitting the pile of wood, then going on his way, one of his last stories. That’s the sense you get from the ending of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, as we look out over a field with the wind playing across it. That’s the sense you get from the end of Where I’m Calling From. Someone finding the few things he can actually handle, such as he is, at least right now. There’s a sense of limitation, of course, no doubt, but perhaps, maybe in a small almost anxious and frightened sense of the richness of the small things in front of you, which themselves are no small things, enough of a struggle themselves, maybe even heroic ones.

The things you really are saying are those things that cannot be put into words. There are not words for them, and if there were, they too would grow short of meaning out of use. The things you really feel you are as silent and as speechless about as an animal, best in silence. The things as they are thoughts are the brainwaves you send out, like the whale sends his sonar out. The things you really feel and want to say come out, if they are real, in odd peeps and chirps like those of birds. They come out in gesture, in occupation, in physical expression. Sometimes they come out in the form of music, where we must leave them. Those are the things you can trust, in yourself and in other people. We weren’t meant for words, any more than a cat. Only if they lead us to some form of wisdom through long and indirect reflection that brings us back to the door step of that which is silent and beyond words, emotional thought.

And so are some things best left without being said, if they are to remain true. Best left as they are.

Night at the Theater

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.

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.

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.

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.