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.