We learned to read with him. He taught us to respect our gut instincts in reading a line of poetry, a passage from a story. We learned to let ourselves open up and see, and trust what we noticed as sufficient and to the point.
He taught with authority, and he taught us to read with authority, to have faith in the opinions our minds would work out for us upon studying an issue, an event, a behavior, a person's speech. We became enabled as critics.
A delivery truck goes by. You feel the overkill, the churning waste of energy to accelerate at every intersection, to wheeze uselessly with pollution at the next. You feel the cost on the planet. It's the same moment of recognition from real life as we had as readers when we read Hardy's "The Fallow Deer at the Lonely House." Seeing the deer on tip toe, ready to spring away. Once seeing it, you don't deny it, even if such a claim of understanding were the same thing that made you stand out as a crazy in the wold of people.
Emily Dickinson's "I Heard a Fly Buzz as I Died," was something he read for us, gingerly, respecting a greater authority on eternity than his own readership. On that one, he stopped, self-consciously, a little bit short, as if to silently point to a whole world of far understandings.
He noticed the essential, about Presidents and 9/11 reports, about the cultural attitudes rife in television shows, just as he would a poem of Keats, the attitude of Lear.
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Saturday, July 19, 2008
A Return to the Tour de France
This year, the advertisements interrupt the countryside and man on bike in peloton. The most common: men in make-up and wigs who follow a sporting event broadcast on the same channel that brings us the coverage of the Tour, which is cage fighting. The screen flashes with autism-provoking violence and hype of a violent inner persona of the rebellious kind. An energy drink that won't let you bonk. Bull-riding. Red hot and blue summer. Kicking, swinging, fighting. Heavy speed metal to accompany. Everything in your face with the frantic mania of those who bring us nothing.
Then back to France. Back to the Tour, Le Tour. Fragile, even with the venerable 93 years of its running, a farmer spelling out Vivre Le Tour with hay bales still speaks of emotion, the allowing of something gentle, archaic, beautiful and emotional to come rolling through our towns, and if we are removed from those towns and country roads, over the airwaves received by our televisons. The only sound that off the helicopter as it hovers over an 11th century castle, then the eye dipping down to follow the pack of cyclists following an old road at a sailing clip. A lot of variables in play, as far as the race, and along with that, many traditions and traditional practices. The peloton closes down on the breakaway, just so as for the team protecting its lead rider to preserve its energy. A sprint finish.
I tape a stage. It gives me a pleasure to stop the recording everytime a commercial comes on. Saab has been particularly cruel on the ear this ear, almost sardonic, with a repetitive statement uttered three times concerning the function exhaust in a turbo engine. Proud of the repetition, thinking it humorous, as a sadistic jailer might when rattling a prisoner's cage, the original captive audience. Advertising to perfection, and yet who can take the commercial more than three times, thence having studied it, shun the television? Cage fighting TapOut. Bull Riding. Energy drink. Saab. Male Enhancement. I record a stage leading from Provence up into the hills on a VCR, cutting out the cancer patiently. A brand name printed on a jersey, I can handle that. I like that. Back before helmets they used to wear jaunty caps, useful to keep sun and rain off the brow, with names of immediately pleasurable and useful things like apperitif liquors and sausage makers before more modern times when the brand names changed to vacuum cleaners, super markets, lottery games, credit issuers, phone services. After a while, the viewer sees only the team colors, which is useful, a necessity for following the race and the individuals one might develop a fondness or an interest for. Green of Thor Hushovd. White of Cancellera. Blue of Hincapie.
The commercials remind me of how people often act in bars. They pretend to be innocuous, relaxed, but if you were to spend any time with them, you would not want to spend a moment witnessing it.
After bartending four straight nights, I don't want to go out. I don't want to talk to people. There is some great abuse of people's basic gentle quality as it is construed and distorted by the ever-present of the commercial, so that each one feels obliged to shout from the rafters.
A writer's work will be good to the extent that he realizes how unimportant talk is, how necessary writing is. Talk is annoying, people having been trained by commercials to think a certain way. Talk is the most problematic and unreliable form of communication, and television relies on it. Talk fosters lies, miscommunication, misrepresentation, misunderstandings passed along. Sunday morning television offers good examples. Placed within the context of a barroom, a speaker, like Mr. Paulson, or Mr. Cheney talking about connections in Prague and weapon stashes, would find a rightful place to the listening ear.
Talk killed Kerouac. Everyone wanting to party with the King of the Beatniks, demanding him to put his understandings beyond words and Zen into cocktail conversation, banging on his window as he sat as his typewriter. Kerouac knew better than to talk. The best minds retreat in a wordy age. So as not to be used.
Then back to France. Back to the Tour, Le Tour. Fragile, even with the venerable 93 years of its running, a farmer spelling out Vivre Le Tour with hay bales still speaks of emotion, the allowing of something gentle, archaic, beautiful and emotional to come rolling through our towns, and if we are removed from those towns and country roads, over the airwaves received by our televisons. The only sound that off the helicopter as it hovers over an 11th century castle, then the eye dipping down to follow the pack of cyclists following an old road at a sailing clip. A lot of variables in play, as far as the race, and along with that, many traditions and traditional practices. The peloton closes down on the breakaway, just so as for the team protecting its lead rider to preserve its energy. A sprint finish.
I tape a stage. It gives me a pleasure to stop the recording everytime a commercial comes on. Saab has been particularly cruel on the ear this ear, almost sardonic, with a repetitive statement uttered three times concerning the function exhaust in a turbo engine. Proud of the repetition, thinking it humorous, as a sadistic jailer might when rattling a prisoner's cage, the original captive audience. Advertising to perfection, and yet who can take the commercial more than three times, thence having studied it, shun the television? Cage fighting TapOut. Bull Riding. Energy drink. Saab. Male Enhancement. I record a stage leading from Provence up into the hills on a VCR, cutting out the cancer patiently. A brand name printed on a jersey, I can handle that. I like that. Back before helmets they used to wear jaunty caps, useful to keep sun and rain off the brow, with names of immediately pleasurable and useful things like apperitif liquors and sausage makers before more modern times when the brand names changed to vacuum cleaners, super markets, lottery games, credit issuers, phone services. After a while, the viewer sees only the team colors, which is useful, a necessity for following the race and the individuals one might develop a fondness or an interest for. Green of Thor Hushovd. White of Cancellera. Blue of Hincapie.
The commercials remind me of how people often act in bars. They pretend to be innocuous, relaxed, but if you were to spend any time with them, you would not want to spend a moment witnessing it.
After bartending four straight nights, I don't want to go out. I don't want to talk to people. There is some great abuse of people's basic gentle quality as it is construed and distorted by the ever-present of the commercial, so that each one feels obliged to shout from the rafters.
A writer's work will be good to the extent that he realizes how unimportant talk is, how necessary writing is. Talk is annoying, people having been trained by commercials to think a certain way. Talk is the most problematic and unreliable form of communication, and television relies on it. Talk fosters lies, miscommunication, misrepresentation, misunderstandings passed along. Sunday morning television offers good examples. Placed within the context of a barroom, a speaker, like Mr. Paulson, or Mr. Cheney talking about connections in Prague and weapon stashes, would find a rightful place to the listening ear.
Talk killed Kerouac. Everyone wanting to party with the King of the Beatniks, demanding him to put his understandings beyond words and Zen into cocktail conversation, banging on his window as he sat as his typewriter. Kerouac knew better than to talk. The best minds retreat in a wordy age. So as not to be used.
architecture, shyness, polarity
Tolstoy was very clever to write War and Peace as a preliminary exercise to include, through great detail, through many characters, many scenes, the variety of human experience worth treating with fiction. And then, as he knew himself, he began with his first real novel. There is architecture to it. Levin, who is Tolstoy's self-portrait, on his way to being married, meets Anna Karenina but once in the story. No one is as alive, no one's consciousness so explored as hers, even as we read of marvelous things like Levin scything grain with the peasants on a hot day. We have two pillars, whose arch and vault we do not even see, not seeing in common experience and record a significant meeting of the two. Within the architecture, well, it's like a parking garage. We can drive a truck of all our own experiences into it, plenty of room, so vague, so huge, so encompassing, so familiar, so full of windows and protective roof, nave and bench, that we feel comfortable curling up with it, letting it reflect some form of our experience if we had to put our experiences into words.
The marketplace for the literary is so burdened with marketing dumbocracies that few can save us from the onslaught of puerile stupidity of architecture that we can see, that we feel comfortable with, the McMansion taking up increasingly its dreadful space next to its clones, that the only thing to save ourselves is, like you have done, remembering how to read, remembering that we all have our own tastes and choices, and that we need not to have to be told that the latest piece of admissions and crap is fine literature, as literature breathes quietly, like that bird on a branch up in a tree, a natural creature, with its own motions and habits peculiar to it. No need for mechanical versions of it. The live thing is better.
Some form of deregulation and greed has eased its common way into the publishing world, and anyone taking ideas seriously, fond of the natural richness of culture, would be concerned.
Shyness is not an attribute we might typically assign to Dostoevsky. (He was a nervous man, we are told, and an epileptic.) We know that he was, more or less, a participant in a radical student group, at least a follower of its intrigues. He knew them personally, well enough to get himself hauled in front of a firing squad for revolutionary activities, then marched off to a penal colony in Siberia.
He had written earlier a sketch of peasant life, making clear his sympathies, in literary form. But it is his Notes From the House of the Dead, his record of prison life that sends him on his way, a first bloom of the literary breadth we know him for. Had it taken such a shocking experience for him to move with a literary confidence new and fresh for him? The Gambler would be next for him, taken from his experience as an addictive gambler set in Baden-Baden.
Moving to the end of his career, he crystallizes his experience as a writer in the character of Alyosha Karamazov. While he is giving us a kind of religious propaganda in this figure of a young monk, rendered with the apparent intention of aiding the Russian nation undergo a spiritual rebirth, Dostoevsky leaves in his portrait of the young monk a fossil record of his own literary career. The book shimmers with the free prose and a bustle of defining moments that took a normal person involved in the discussions of the day and made him a fiction writer. The spiritual rebirth, cloaked in terms of joining in with the First Miracle, is a rendering of the emotional boldness through which the writer claims self-expression.
Get over your shyness; come to the human joy offered by God’s love, as God loves human joy, thus the wine of the First Miracle, the wedding of the poor in Cana. The old High Monk Father Zosima has been laid out for the faithful to keep a vigil over, and Alyosha, his young disciple, exhausted, falls into a dreaming sleep. Within his dream, along with the old monk, he sees that First Miracle scene laid out before him. It’s almost like we have the Giotto fresco laid out before us. We see, through the dream in which the old monk is speaking to Alyosha, Mary encouraging Jesus, and a shy reluctance on the part of Christ; we get the banquet manager, puzzled, then imbibing the new stuff, the essential rendered with familiarity. At the end of the dream Dostoevsky gives us Alyosha leaving the monastery, falling to the ground beneath the stars, and rising the fighter that he will be the rest of his life.
To Dostoevsky, it was all something that sounded familiar, enough so that we get a comfortable twinge of comic humor along with the sacred seriousness. Along with the almost tongue-in-cheek propaganda, we get an almost telegraphic message home of plot, theme and ending that only the bravest, boldest, stupidest, most foolish and schlocky, and yet most clever writer would allow himself. The reader has a sense of the master laying down a theme he will encompass and embellish in great virtuosity, as only the confident writer could. We are drawn along, through the seriousness and oceanic depths with which Dostoevsky treats a writer breaking free to find his voice. (Good to claim our own human oceans, to report on their health.) We see the same urge, finally, in every character of his, yet without the slightest monotony, each an individual with different eyes, a different voice, a different situation, this breadth and diversity no small part of the great virtuosity one might allude to concerning him. As if to say, all, atheist, sinner, sensualist, monk, all have the same struggle. Which is different from a topical political message.
Yes, we can imagine Dostoevsky as a shy very nervous man who rose at one in the afternoon and wrote at night at his desk by candlelight, disliking the glow of electric lamps, when all was quiet, when the claim of the conversations he would fastidiously record as an observer in notebooks had quieted down, reverberating in the perspective brought by the silence of night.
I’ve always found the things writers have to say about writing interesting, sometimes the top of their game. Hemingway, for instance, was fascinated with the subject. He shares his opinions, experience, wisdom and his secrets all through his writing. He valued writing about writing as much as writing fiction, both an achievement.
A writer is someone who never knows quite what to do with himself. A writer is someone who questions, who hardly finds anything justified. He has an overactive mind, prone to anxiety, to careful consideration, a sorrowful two-sidedness to just about everything. It is in a way an awful talent to have, and yet one natural to the human being. A writer is an agreement, as it were, with the Taoist notion of polarity, in that a particular attribute may be the source of good one day and ill the next.
Worrying, anxiousness, nervousness and confusion and things of the like, even as they be the cause of suffering, are natural to go through, not necessarily a sign of a lack of confidence. The mind must wander and wonder aloud at things, or it will feel disconnected within.
Shakespeare was brilliant with capturing this array of thought. “Nothing is, but thinking makes it so,” Prince Hamlet tells us. The combining of good and ill, the mistaken impression, the false conclusion, the correct assessments and proper readings of people and matters, the confusion, all placed within the dramatic setting. Shakespeare is particularly fine at rendering a character’s realization of neglectfulness, as Lear realizes his neglect of Cordelia, as if to indicate that a sense of guilt over just about everything is the primary characteristic of personality.
Writing is a lasting therapy to outline the faceted nature of all we go through.
A writer has a chance to discover the false assumptions and other fallacies hidden beneath the treatment of life and ideas.
The marketplace for the literary is so burdened with marketing dumbocracies that few can save us from the onslaught of puerile stupidity of architecture that we can see, that we feel comfortable with, the McMansion taking up increasingly its dreadful space next to its clones, that the only thing to save ourselves is, like you have done, remembering how to read, remembering that we all have our own tastes and choices, and that we need not to have to be told that the latest piece of admissions and crap is fine literature, as literature breathes quietly, like that bird on a branch up in a tree, a natural creature, with its own motions and habits peculiar to it. No need for mechanical versions of it. The live thing is better.
Some form of deregulation and greed has eased its common way into the publishing world, and anyone taking ideas seriously, fond of the natural richness of culture, would be concerned.
Shyness is not an attribute we might typically assign to Dostoevsky. (He was a nervous man, we are told, and an epileptic.) We know that he was, more or less, a participant in a radical student group, at least a follower of its intrigues. He knew them personally, well enough to get himself hauled in front of a firing squad for revolutionary activities, then marched off to a penal colony in Siberia.
He had written earlier a sketch of peasant life, making clear his sympathies, in literary form. But it is his Notes From the House of the Dead, his record of prison life that sends him on his way, a first bloom of the literary breadth we know him for. Had it taken such a shocking experience for him to move with a literary confidence new and fresh for him? The Gambler would be next for him, taken from his experience as an addictive gambler set in Baden-Baden.
Moving to the end of his career, he crystallizes his experience as a writer in the character of Alyosha Karamazov. While he is giving us a kind of religious propaganda in this figure of a young monk, rendered with the apparent intention of aiding the Russian nation undergo a spiritual rebirth, Dostoevsky leaves in his portrait of the young monk a fossil record of his own literary career. The book shimmers with the free prose and a bustle of defining moments that took a normal person involved in the discussions of the day and made him a fiction writer. The spiritual rebirth, cloaked in terms of joining in with the First Miracle, is a rendering of the emotional boldness through which the writer claims self-expression.
Get over your shyness; come to the human joy offered by God’s love, as God loves human joy, thus the wine of the First Miracle, the wedding of the poor in Cana. The old High Monk Father Zosima has been laid out for the faithful to keep a vigil over, and Alyosha, his young disciple, exhausted, falls into a dreaming sleep. Within his dream, along with the old monk, he sees that First Miracle scene laid out before him. It’s almost like we have the Giotto fresco laid out before us. We see, through the dream in which the old monk is speaking to Alyosha, Mary encouraging Jesus, and a shy reluctance on the part of Christ; we get the banquet manager, puzzled, then imbibing the new stuff, the essential rendered with familiarity. At the end of the dream Dostoevsky gives us Alyosha leaving the monastery, falling to the ground beneath the stars, and rising the fighter that he will be the rest of his life.
To Dostoevsky, it was all something that sounded familiar, enough so that we get a comfortable twinge of comic humor along with the sacred seriousness. Along with the almost tongue-in-cheek propaganda, we get an almost telegraphic message home of plot, theme and ending that only the bravest, boldest, stupidest, most foolish and schlocky, and yet most clever writer would allow himself. The reader has a sense of the master laying down a theme he will encompass and embellish in great virtuosity, as only the confident writer could. We are drawn along, through the seriousness and oceanic depths with which Dostoevsky treats a writer breaking free to find his voice. (Good to claim our own human oceans, to report on their health.) We see the same urge, finally, in every character of his, yet without the slightest monotony, each an individual with different eyes, a different voice, a different situation, this breadth and diversity no small part of the great virtuosity one might allude to concerning him. As if to say, all, atheist, sinner, sensualist, monk, all have the same struggle. Which is different from a topical political message.
Yes, we can imagine Dostoevsky as a shy very nervous man who rose at one in the afternoon and wrote at night at his desk by candlelight, disliking the glow of electric lamps, when all was quiet, when the claim of the conversations he would fastidiously record as an observer in notebooks had quieted down, reverberating in the perspective brought by the silence of night.
I’ve always found the things writers have to say about writing interesting, sometimes the top of their game. Hemingway, for instance, was fascinated with the subject. He shares his opinions, experience, wisdom and his secrets all through his writing. He valued writing about writing as much as writing fiction, both an achievement.
A writer is someone who never knows quite what to do with himself. A writer is someone who questions, who hardly finds anything justified. He has an overactive mind, prone to anxiety, to careful consideration, a sorrowful two-sidedness to just about everything. It is in a way an awful talent to have, and yet one natural to the human being. A writer is an agreement, as it were, with the Taoist notion of polarity, in that a particular attribute may be the source of good one day and ill the next.
Worrying, anxiousness, nervousness and confusion and things of the like, even as they be the cause of suffering, are natural to go through, not necessarily a sign of a lack of confidence. The mind must wander and wonder aloud at things, or it will feel disconnected within.
Shakespeare was brilliant with capturing this array of thought. “Nothing is, but thinking makes it so,” Prince Hamlet tells us. The combining of good and ill, the mistaken impression, the false conclusion, the correct assessments and proper readings of people and matters, the confusion, all placed within the dramatic setting. Shakespeare is particularly fine at rendering a character’s realization of neglectfulness, as Lear realizes his neglect of Cordelia, as if to indicate that a sense of guilt over just about everything is the primary characteristic of personality.
Writing is a lasting therapy to outline the faceted nature of all we go through.
A writer has a chance to discover the false assumptions and other fallacies hidden beneath the treatment of life and ideas.
Saturday, July 5, 2008
Tolstoy's Anna
She was his belle ideal. A fuck-up, just like he was. Fallen, prodigal. His book-end match. Through her he could admit what he could not about his own life with standing in society. She started as a sinner, and her husband a saint, but in the architecture of Tolstoy's arches, she stands in relationship to Levin, representing his innermost thoughts and experience.
The story of the individual, however, is not complete without the judgment of society. Few things, short of Jesus, can stop the train. It is the writer's task to observe the ways of judgment, cultural and individual, negative as well as positive. Thus the off-set focus of Levin's story, the last hours in the life of Anna Karenina.
The story of the individual, however, is not complete without the judgment of society. Few things, short of Jesus, can stop the train. It is the writer's task to observe the ways of judgment, cultural and individual, negative as well as positive. Thus the off-set focus of Levin's story, the last hours in the life of Anna Karenina.
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Beyond words, the successes of Shakespeare
Shakespeare excelled in this area of word's meaninglessness, or rather, the inability of words to form a solid and lasting logic by which a character could assess, describe and compute his or her or a situation. The words are so apt and so well-put together because they cannot touch, with any accuracy, what a person is thinking, feeling or trying to achieve. The person, the character, is himself confused, because he is acting not on word and logic but on dreams and deeper impulses. Shakespeare's characters are speaking in the moment. They are who they are. Thinking without the ability to think clearly, because words aren't the best logic or science, but of course, there's nothing any better.
Only when we realize we cannot judge Lear, Othello, Iago, anyone else, does the matter of our brains become clear. Shakespeare, therefore, did a wonderful service for us in showing that our brains are runs of nerve, passion, electricity, animal urges, basic needs. The wonder of the words of the Elizabethan play such as he, Shakespeare, gives us, are worthy by showing us the animal reaction, the gut feeling, the human being in his animal cloak. "A sight for sore eyes," is one recording of humanity's personal needs, for instance.
Hamlet comes with a whirlwind, properly, fitting, of energy. A gentle touch, a kindness, an emphatic intellectual scholarliness beyond the scholastics of Horatio (most admirably broad), as if we were to see some of the trade routes of thoughts that run in the considered life, Beethoven accessing Eastern thinking concerning the illusion of self, being a recent example. Hamlet turns his mind everywhere, brilliantly, and yet, he does not claim any precise understanding. He does not claim a worded response (and this same thing was Kennedy's great moment in the Missile Crisis, saying the few things one knew and not making more of them, keeping the thoughts clean, unencumbered. Kennedy, of course, went on to say some other things with a clarity beyond words, and after him, his brother did the same, in a way to show the world, as if for once and for all, how to take thought back to the very basics. And how odd that the younger brother too... as if the individuals who comprise the public, prior to reading the great political thoughts of natural rights John Locke, don't tread on me, don't tread on you, etc., cannot handle this stripped-down basic clean math of thought, as if the public member would rather spend an excess hour prevaricating upon the complications and possibility for argument, then thereby enact them, rather than boil something back down to the clarity someone like a Lincoln had his awful and beautifully clear access to.)
Shakespeare gives us his characters through the limitations of careful considered thought. The poetry comes from the mouths of confused persons, of persons brilliant and thoughtful enough to accept the possibility of not understanding something clearly enough to be able to take any action but further thought and consideration and talk. (A good review in the NY Times of an actor bringing us Polonius better than we've had him of late.) The best, as in a Donne poem, are when the speaker throws up his hands, or is left to state clearly what his obviously unrealistic thoughts might be clearly, so that they are ready to be opened.
Tonight we, at the wine bar, tasted two wines, both from the Graves appellation of Bordeaux. Organic wine-making. The white, sauvignon blanc, semillon, and a small but immediately noticeable percentage of muscadelle, no oak, resulting in white flowers closest in our palates to acacia, and the red, half and half, no need to guess the grapes, some oak, but not new oak. The red, an '05, and nothing to complain about for the price and the name. The white to sip for a red drinker who's tired of puffed headaches and a dry mouth and an inability to sleep and wake well.
It is right that those who speak the cleanest and most well thought-out thoughts are the grave diggers, the fools at the edge, who, by some happenstance of wit, seem to speak for the crowds gathered at the foot of the stage. Hamlet: a brilliant thinker, as he is able to encompass digestively the thoughts of the grave digger, the body of the normal rank and file person that grows increasingly rare even as the very same exists in abundance, selfishness and a lack of art de vivre coming between.
Clarity, if we are to have any meaningful discussion, is at odds with clarifying words. We can't speak of anything really without trying poetically and gently touch upon an animal situation far beyond any policy and fiscal math. We'd be better off reading aloud Eliot's Preludes at the beginning sessions of our democracy.
This is why it is never tiresome to read a good writer, like Shakespeare, while the seemingly necessary gritty details of a current issue, dreadful as the issue can be, are not understood by shades and contours of detail, but by the basic understandings all, by being live creatures, have within, easily brought forth to good effect, were one to have faith in them.
Shakespeare had the trick. It's why we still listen to him today.
Only when we realize we cannot judge Lear, Othello, Iago, anyone else, does the matter of our brains become clear. Shakespeare, therefore, did a wonderful service for us in showing that our brains are runs of nerve, passion, electricity, animal urges, basic needs. The wonder of the words of the Elizabethan play such as he, Shakespeare, gives us, are worthy by showing us the animal reaction, the gut feeling, the human being in his animal cloak. "A sight for sore eyes," is one recording of humanity's personal needs, for instance.
Hamlet comes with a whirlwind, properly, fitting, of energy. A gentle touch, a kindness, an emphatic intellectual scholarliness beyond the scholastics of Horatio (most admirably broad), as if we were to see some of the trade routes of thoughts that run in the considered life, Beethoven accessing Eastern thinking concerning the illusion of self, being a recent example. Hamlet turns his mind everywhere, brilliantly, and yet, he does not claim any precise understanding. He does not claim a worded response (and this same thing was Kennedy's great moment in the Missile Crisis, saying the few things one knew and not making more of them, keeping the thoughts clean, unencumbered. Kennedy, of course, went on to say some other things with a clarity beyond words, and after him, his brother did the same, in a way to show the world, as if for once and for all, how to take thought back to the very basics. And how odd that the younger brother too... as if the individuals who comprise the public, prior to reading the great political thoughts of natural rights John Locke, don't tread on me, don't tread on you, etc., cannot handle this stripped-down basic clean math of thought, as if the public member would rather spend an excess hour prevaricating upon the complications and possibility for argument, then thereby enact them, rather than boil something back down to the clarity someone like a Lincoln had his awful and beautifully clear access to.)
Shakespeare gives us his characters through the limitations of careful considered thought. The poetry comes from the mouths of confused persons, of persons brilliant and thoughtful enough to accept the possibility of not understanding something clearly enough to be able to take any action but further thought and consideration and talk. (A good review in the NY Times of an actor bringing us Polonius better than we've had him of late.) The best, as in a Donne poem, are when the speaker throws up his hands, or is left to state clearly what his obviously unrealistic thoughts might be clearly, so that they are ready to be opened.
Tonight we, at the wine bar, tasted two wines, both from the Graves appellation of Bordeaux. Organic wine-making. The white, sauvignon blanc, semillon, and a small but immediately noticeable percentage of muscadelle, no oak, resulting in white flowers closest in our palates to acacia, and the red, half and half, no need to guess the grapes, some oak, but not new oak. The red, an '05, and nothing to complain about for the price and the name. The white to sip for a red drinker who's tired of puffed headaches and a dry mouth and an inability to sleep and wake well.
It is right that those who speak the cleanest and most well thought-out thoughts are the grave diggers, the fools at the edge, who, by some happenstance of wit, seem to speak for the crowds gathered at the foot of the stage. Hamlet: a brilliant thinker, as he is able to encompass digestively the thoughts of the grave digger, the body of the normal rank and file person that grows increasingly rare even as the very same exists in abundance, selfishness and a lack of art de vivre coming between.
Clarity, if we are to have any meaningful discussion, is at odds with clarifying words. We can't speak of anything really without trying poetically and gently touch upon an animal situation far beyond any policy and fiscal math. We'd be better off reading aloud Eliot's Preludes at the beginning sessions of our democracy.
This is why it is never tiresome to read a good writer, like Shakespeare, while the seemingly necessary gritty details of a current issue, dreadful as the issue can be, are not understood by shades and contours of detail, but by the basic understandings all, by being live creatures, have within, easily brought forth to good effect, were one to have faith in them.
Shakespeare had the trick. It's why we still listen to him today.
Friday, June 27, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, June 5, 2008
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.
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.
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