A WORLD APART

I was recently notified that due to offensive language in one of these 406 blogposts, I was going to be suspended from this platform. Fortunately the 'offending' words (a quotation) were identified, adjusted, and I was reinstated.  There's a fine line between honesty and insult, I often caution my friends, and I have crossed it both ways like a Double-Dutch rope-jumper.  I still err broadly on the side of truth, though it has cost me friendships (temporarily, for the most part) and nearly the online archive of 406 essays posted here with nominal censorship over the past 16 years. 

My daily reading this month includes Gustaw Herling's acclaimed account of his experience in a Russian prison camp in a time and place where a slipped word or gesture resulted in years of forced labor which made death seem a kind of paradise. Nothing like prison literature or diaries to make one rejoice in the small liberties and joys of summer's cusp. But sarcasm aside, there are millions of people living under non-humane conditions-- without freedom of speech or thought, without adequate nutrition, without safety.  

While most of us fret about our summer wardrobe, our hair products and cold-brews, right here on our streets the underserved are unavoidable.  Some are here by choice, but most by circumstance. The charitable among us bring food, blankets... but most of these gestures have the effect of watering a diseased plant... we do little good.  Last week's air pollution episode reminded us how small this world is-- how close we are to other's suffering and tragedy.  For a day, the charred scent that permeated through even closed windows brought another dimension to the accidents and deaths that punctuate the media. The whole city was declared 'unsafe'.  

When I bought my apartment years ago, I'd been robbed, mugged, stalked; as a young mother, I wanted to feel safe.  I wanted to come home at night and know everything was as I'd left it.  We changed locks, installed bars on accessible windows, did what we could to protect instruments and possessions.  I am in utter awe at men who sleep face-up on the street.  Some keep dogs, some huddle together... but for the most part, they are the poster-people of vulnerability.  On June 7th when air quality rose to an all-time hazardous rating, I tried to question one about going to a shelter. Lighting up a cigarette, he squinted a watery eye and swore he didn't smell a thing.

On the way home that night I ran into a man with his hair molded into devil horns, carrying a baseball bat.  What time is it, he asked me... as I nervously showed him my watch-- it was 7:05.  It's a good thing, he remarked... I'm gonna hit someone but it won't be you.  I felt blessed. Relieved for my friends who've been burdened with more recent deaths and losses than they can bear.  

When I moved here, the building history resonated.  Below me the old apartment floor had a hole dug into the wood planks where Pablo Casals had placed his cello-pin while he practiced.  My own apartment had been inhabited in the 1930's by a Russian composer and I feel her ghost often-- welcoming me, patronizing me or taunting me to do some serious work. My neighbor, a great writer and editor, welcomed me with books by Cormac McCarthy.  I was a little stuck in earlier literature-- Faulkner, Baldwin, Dostoyevsky, Mann... but one by one I went through the McCarthy novels, beginning with Blood Meridian, then reading back.  Don't bother with the trilogy, he cautioned, and I still have not.  But somehow the 'nesting' process here was accompanied by my rapture with McCarthy's writing.

His obituary this week was somehow inevitable; The Passenger and Stella Maris seemed to give us this message, grappling with death and in a way making it feel just a little safer.  It's personally sad that his body of work has become finite... the way David Bowie's death marked a finality of oeuvre.  

I can't imagine how 'safe' he must have felt knowing he will be read and revered by generations to come, that he emerged from the Faulknerian aura of his early work to become a fully developed and internationally awarded writer.  And besides a few corny one-liners in The Passenger,  one felt safely drawn into the world of yet another character whose heroism fell beneath conventional radar... and one learned things-- important things that made one feel a part of McCarthy's understated and inquisitive world.  

So we grieve not only for our friends and family, but for these people whose product we keep on our shelves, who have taken the time to share their oeuvre with us, who have become part of our own history or intellectual architecture.  We live with their characters for a few days or weeks, and we carry a torch for some of them. I often wonder how a human brain can separate the fictional acquaintances from real ones who live somewhere buried in our pasts.  Many of the men and women living on the street are unable to separate these things.  They tell remarkable tales and see the world with a different set of parameters.  Tonight through my open window I hear one of them howling like a coyote. 

There's a man I often see uptown who brings his foraged meals into a parked Citibike basket. He sits on the bicycle seat, sometimes unsteady if he's been able to buy himself enough malt liquor, and tucks a napkin into his throat, as though he's fine-dining somewhere. So he called me over last night and asked me to bring him some strawberry Häagen Dazs.  It was an unreasonable request for the likes of me, living on foodstamps. I gave him the frayed dollar I've been carrying around for emergencies and he seemed pacified.  But tonight, on the final chapters of my Gustaw Herling, I'm thinking I missed an opportunity here.  Who am I to judge what a man on the street needs and doesn't need?  

My neighbor no longer gives me books... it was a kind of literary flirting, I think, looking back.  He and Cormac were exactly the same age; they were friends at a time and he must be personally mourning. Thinking back, the last time I had Häagen Dazs ice cream was in his immaculate kitchen, one sweltering July night in his un-airconditioned 8-room apartment on the 10th floor.  Synchronicity. And death the final punctuation, in the McCarthy world where grief was ubiquitous. Unlike me, he hated the semi-colon; but regret, he said somewhere with characteristic wisdom, is a prison. 

RIP.