Getting There...

Last night as I made my counter-clockwise lap around the reservoir, the southern view of the city-- the dense lego-disneyworld that is midtown in 2022-- had disappeared in the mist.   Like a reverse mirage, an inverted city in the clouds... everything above the 5th floor had vanished. The other views were intact... but midtown was gone.  Eclipsed.  A kind of spell.

A few years ago I wrote the story of my secret college romance-- how we sawed the padlocks and doorbolts off of a condemned historic campus building stairwell, climbed our way to the top and made a little nest there in the tower.  There were very few objects to be discovered-- mostly dust and must and dried leaves... but there were odd pages scattered everywhere-- from those useless desk calendars that show nothing but a number in huge font you tear off daily.  As though this was a requisite student dorm provision.  

Anyway, it took us weeks to clean out and create our little haven, sneaking up after midnight, climbing the creaking stairs with care, using candles not flashlights. In the end, we stupidly built a little fire because it was freezing... and the draughts somehow stirred up the thin calendar pages and they flew around like ghosts. It was a little haunted by reputation, the turret of Witherspoon Hall, but the effect from outside, had any one looked, was like one of those snow-globes, with the relics of time, of students past and gone, blowing around us. Of course we were seen-- the fire-- busted, even arrested for trespassing (I crossed out the word on my paper court summons and wrote in  'Housekeeping' which elicited a smirk from the school Dean).

I'm reading Jean Christophe.  He was a musician... a composer-- often misunderstood, often misunderstanding-- impatient, bitter, loving, frustrated, callous, sensitive... all at once, like most of us.  It's uncanny to read something more than one hundred years old that speaks so deeply to my conflicts of creativity vs. recognition... to be who you are and be overlooked or underseen, or misunderstood... to witness the celebrity of mediocrity and go on-- to be who you are meant to be.  The pages of my Jean Christophe-- all 1700 of them-- are thin and fragile... I don't know if they could withstand another read. But they remind me, as I turn (I'm about 1000 in) carefully, of those calendar squares in that room nearly 50 years ago now.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, I make a habit of looping the reservoir nearly every evening.  It was a way of marking time, or the lack thereof-- of managing my terrible grief at the loss of Alan.. and subsequent griefs, as they come, with acceleration.  I have always been afflicted with a kind of homesickness... maybe it's just an inherited vulnerability to nostalgia.  Even when I travel or tour, I miss my home.  I belong here.  But I've noticed some of my friends developing a kind of homesickness that keeps them from leaving their place.  They are not just stuck but sad.  It's as though the pandemic gave them a lethal dose of nostalgia-- of regret, of time-anxiety.  Of all the terrible relentless phenomena of existence-- pain, the inevitability of death, disease, the exhaustion of men striving to achieve the unachievable... there is only one that truly never relents, and that is time.  It waits for no one, as they say... and when we are captive, imprisoned or quarantined- it scalds, it scars.  

My mother would be turning 98 this week, had she lived.  I count her among my losses as I embrace the four horizons of my city... I see young mothers on the street now again... the way they touch their newborns-- with such incredible tenderness and wonder and empathy-- and as life goes on... well we try but we lose that capacity in our person-to-person communication.  At the north end of the park so many homeless men and women trying to create a little nest out of found things-- trash and uncollectibles-- no one will ever touch them with that tenderness.  They are the wounded, the ruined, the unfortunates.  

Don't look back, Lot warned his wife.  Nostalgia can be lethal.  Among the misunderstood, the missed, the overlooked and under-recognized.  Great writers have written these books--- like Jean Christophe which is surely under-read although well rewarded in its time.  Not dark yet, wrote Bob Dylan, so many years ago, when it was already getting there.  He persists... in the grey, knowing as he did, way back... that time was a bitch... he is more honored and rewarded than ever.  Ironic that he and Romain Rolland received the same prize, a century apart. 

We are creatures of memory.  Things disappear, but we see them.  If I looked back I could see that tower room with the warmth and the discovery and the papers flying around like warnings.  My boyfriend was to die young.  We didn't look back... who does, at that age? There are days when I don't know why I continue-- to write, to sing, to play a little.  The fate of non-recognition, in the context of time, seems less harsh.  Still, I wish I could say, like the (slightly altered) Robert Johnson lyric, 'I know my reader if I see her in the dark,' but I can't. There are days I feel Sisyphean or like Penelope. I love these images.  

My mother in the end was incapable of understanding.  I showed her my poetry books and she looked with the same blank eyes that came to be hers. I belong here... I have the comfort of Jean Christophe today and the assurance that the four skyline views from the reservoir will reappear.  We must do what we can with what we have. What worries me most today are the friends that have chosen to become salt. 

My Rider In the Dark

I often wake during the night and browse the news on an iPad my son gave me.  Somehow the technology offers a variety of platforms I would not normally see.  Yesterday, among the dismal global disarray and haunting obituaries was an odd story about a horse which had run off with a pack of wild mustangs and returned, 8 years later-- some pounds thinner-- but somehow, like a Jack London novella, he'd made his way back home.  Of course, unlike the novella, we know nothing of his wanderings-- like a teenager kidnapped by a cult or a runaway gang-- he'd had a life... and somehow decided it wasn't for him.

So I had a stray dog, years ago; he passed me on a street in Harlem, and we both looked back at the same instant, like star-crossed lovers.  He followed me; I fed him.  A few days later I had to go 'on the road' for a gig-weekend, left him with a friend who tied him outside the Broome Street bar while he had a beer.  The dog broke loose, returned to my apartment several miles uptown.  It was extraordinary.  He had some strange habits... God only knew from whence he came, and what had formed his canine version of urban-wild. He was unpredictable.  I made up stories and songs... he was moody-- sometimes affectionate and obedient, but most of the time he was wild and callow and kept a perpetual eye on the door or open window. 

My mother's father left her mother, with two children... never to return.  It warped her, surely, and prompted her to marry a strong man with straight edges-- a war-hero with a certain chip on his shoulder-- my father.  She worshipped him, never criticized.  Her Mom, my Grandma, passed away at a very young age, in her so-called prime.  Did she grieve his absence? I never met her, but I think not. In highschool my Mom's estranged father (presumably my Grandfather) phoned- invited her to his 80th birthday.  She'd not seen him for at least 35-40 years, and declined, with a cold edgy voice (I listened in, as you could do in those old days).  Shortly thereafter he died, and while I begged, she would not let me accompany her to the funeral.  It upset her... after all these years, and in those days, when I was 15 or so and she was still a beautiful woman, she occasionally confided in me.  At the service, her obstetrician.. who had delivered her, was there-- took her aside and assured her there was not a drop of her alleged father's blood in her.  She related this to me, confidentially.  I was an imaginative teenager who wrote stories.  I invented all sorts of scenarios... who were we, after all?   

At Christmastime that year this obstetrician phoned and invited her and her daughters (us) to his grand home somewhere upstate.  She declined.  I begged and pleaded...  but in the end she buried this bit of information and never spoke again of her father.  I don't even think I'd seen a photo of him; there were few enough of my beautiful Grandma and they were snatched up by various cousins.  I mean-- he was a bad father... why was it that she refused to abandon the original narrative?  I don't know...

When I was about 17, an English man approached me and told me he was my real Grandfather.  It seemed plausible... and on my roguish post-college discovery path, it was a kind of fairy-tale.  It appealed. I listened and accepted... he took me all sorts of places and introduced me to Chinese literature and writers I'd not known about (William Gaddis, John Gardner).  He painted, spoke all kinds of languages... told me my Grandma had been a great beauty and he was a boy at the time.  It's unlikely but I believed.  I visited him; he affectionately called me his little mouse or his monkey. Unlike my father he praised my little original songs and was first on line at the London Virgin Megastore to buy my album.  You're right in front of Madonna, he rejoiced (alphabetically only).  He felt like a Grandfather.. and besides, it engendered all sorts of identity odysseys.  

I remember once I came home early after school and the gardener's truck was parked in the driveway.  The house was wide open, with the fragrance of freshly-baked pie. My poor oppressed but still beautiful mother, ditto the gardener, were nowhere to be seen.  I started to climb the staircase to the bedrooms, my heart pounding... but turned around and left the house-- came back hours later, loudly announcing my arrival.  My mother's favorite song was Me and Mrs. Jones.  We watched Billy Paul on Soul Train.  She had the record-- we played it over and over and she sang it.  It gave me joy to see her eyes tear up... we sang together.  

But it occurs to me-- especially in the pre and early post-war years-- that there were all kinds of secrets.  Every family has them.  I have them.  My women friends in successful marriages often tell me the secret to this success is precisely in what remains hidden.  Why confound their spouse when they can reminisce with me about old affairs and crushes? You're only as sick as your secrets I learned at an Alanon meeting.  I did not understand what this meant. I did once tell my son-- it's okay to have secrets as long as someone knows each one... you spread them around, you do not harbor them.  It's healthier.  One of my character flaws is I generally preferred the narratives of my affairs and mistakes; they felt familiar and exciting. 

The literary market is flooded with memoir-- some good, some bad, some fictional.  How can one reveal secrets without conscripting unwilling acquaintances? Or like Proust or Kerouac, do we rape our lives for material? Water it down, romanticize it?  Tonight I watched Interview with the Vampire. I don't normally like Vampire stories but I'd read this one on a plane so long ago. During one of the interview sections which punctuate the episodes, the writer asks 'Is this reality or is this performance?' Even vampires have secrets... maybe especially vampires.  Why would we expect truth from an immortal? Why would he be capable of love, or inclined to tell his truth? 

In the Ethicist column of the Times today there was a query from someone wondering whether she should tell her neighbor's child that her husband is his real father (they'd had an affair).  There are days when I wonder whether I am my father's child.  Certainly not by personality or temperament.  Besides, I am the dark daughter. Neither of my parents had the black hair and eyes-- they were fairer. I am taller than my sister who has the curvy body of my father's family.  My mother called me often her dark horse... which brings us back to Mongo the runaway stallion who surely knows more than he reveals.  My hero of the day.  I've been walking around with the Led Zeppelin vision of Traveling Riverside Blues in my head-- every time they or Robert Johnson mention 'my rider' I get a little chill.  It opens me, as music does, sometimes... especially when it cuts right to the chase, and finds those buried horse-hearts.