Leap of Faith

I've always been a 29 sort of person.  After all, it's the first two slashes of my birth date... and if you add up all the digits, including year, it's what you get-- sort of a secret numerical surname.  Plenty of babies were born today... although mothers will celebrate most years on the 1st of March-- a misdeed, in my book.  I mean, technically one is born on the day after 28, but February has a totally unique profile.  And its oddity, its fluidity... well, it's calendar architecture-- like the mistake woven intentionally into Amish quilts, to remind of the fallibility of all things human. 

For those who obsessively wish their Facebook friends a happy birthday, there was a bit of relief; only two names came up in my reminders, neither of which seemed familiar.  My 'Memories' notifications brought back the previous February 29th activities-- gigs with my beloved Alan who just four sun-cycles ago, one leap year, was still vital and singing his damn heart out in the dive bars of downtown.

When I was young, I chose to see the 29th as a sort of holiday-- a temporal snow day-- the gift of extra time we only perceive on the arbitrary fall close of Daylight Saving Time... that odd hour I've always treated with a kind of reverence, even though it's taken back in the spring. 

I spent much of the day returning phone calls, speaking to friends, finishing up a Brassai biography of Henry Miller complete with photos.  For all the nostalgia this generation seems to have for our city in the 70's and 60's... it pales compared with the bohemians of New York in the 1930's.  No one more punk and passionate than our Henry who lived a life on both continents.  The edge.  

Many of my friends seem stuck.  Life since the pandemic has yet to return to normal... but there is no longer 'that' normal.  It occurs to me that 'normal' is a hindsight kind of thing.  I overheard my downstairs neighbor discussing with her 5-year old their 'new normal'.  Like everything in this culture, the moments are shortened-- the eras are temporary, the semesters are eras, fashion is passé nearly before it emerges; the world is reborn in an instagram blink.

And yet I carry with me some sense of solidity... like one of those black-and-white photos of a wiry musician, half-starved, wearing a wifebeater, walking maybe a New Orleans street with his horn tucked under his arm-- no case.  I can almost whistle the music in his head-- no cheap soundtrack: this is the real deal here, and it comforts me like a kind of visual rosary.

My niece is struggling.  We endlessly discuss suicide-- not as an act, but a kind of boundary.  It's bantered around so cheaply these days, and the ease of overdosing has made it constant conversation.  Even Flaco the owl-- who's to say he didn't simply have enough? Tired of being an instagram sensation, tired of having his every move photographed and documented, of being stalked by birders in Central Park.  He couldn't even enjoy a solitary meal.  All things must pass.  Besides, death changes everything. The dead Beatles will always be the more sacred for me. 

Of all the visual poetics in my city, the bridges are perhaps my favorite... all of them... including the Hells Gate whose very name frightens.  I love to walk across the East River and look down, between the slats... and wonder at the engineering challenge of past centuries-- these literal and conceptual linkages.  Yet-- they have become symbols of another kind of leap-- the one without faith, the one of despair.  These jumper dramas-- the narratives--  have become part of the lore... the river, the piles and the girders-- the soaring arcs-- the height, the distance.. the approach... the symbolisms. What we humans make of what we have made...

The way I see things, we all have a sort of room-- our solitary confinement.  We leave, we travel, we love, we mess around-- but the proverbial room is our least common denominator-- our reset.  for some it is the size of a closet, but this is delusion.  Anyway, in one corner is the past-- which begins to hog space, to encroach.  In another are the regrets and hauntings. Maybe another-- for my niece-- the appeal of drugs-- of escape-- the ultimate 'free' but that, too, is another closet-- a dead end, quite literally. And somewhere, when one throws open the curtains, is the window of suicide... the false window, actually, because the light is made of reflection-- not sunlight or even starlight but a kind of thick, stale, smoky yellow. 

And then there is you... you are the room, with the possibilities and tools waiting in the most inviting corner, the one beneath the suicide window you will not use because you prefer risks and fear and passionate love... and a door that opens onto a house of dreams, in a world of your own design, where it matters less that you belong, than that you simply existed, and left your unique footprint, maybe even a multiple of 29.

Crossing Delancey

Convalescence, as frustrating as it is, brings with it a few perks.  No guilt about lying around watching films on occasional nights, and there is something truly innocent about any New York movies made pre-1990's.  Especially the 70's-- the Woody Allens, the Elliot Goulds and Scorceses-- anything that gives us a glimpse of our city before it was 'glammed'.  Apartments were human-scaled, not massive and blingy.  People made phone calls from a booth, or waited home for a message.

At 3 AM the other night I watched Crossing Delancey-- something I'd probably shunned at the time, in my  post-college snobbery.  But there was Amy Irving-- Mrs. Spielberg, at the time, working in a bookshop-- navigating life as a single woman-- relatable, fallible.  It occurred to me I'm now closer to the age of her Bubby, lol.  And how I married the British writer asshole/flirt she was lucky enough to escape.  The LES-- populated by pickle stores and shops in the days before even Dean & DeLuca...  the bars, women waiting at tables... women sitting home eating Chinese take-out watching television. Does anything work out? She was Mrs. Spielberg, and then she wasn't. It must have hurt.  The last time I crossed Delancey I was on my way home from an Alan Merrill gig-- exactly four years ago-- his birthday, I think;  it seems like yesterday.

These associations have become permanent emotional fixtures... the way 2024 will be the year of the Taylor Swift Super Bowl.  She has done much for football, especially among young teenage girls who will not remember the winning touchdown but the color lipstick Taylor wore.  Tonight I remembered going to MOMA as a schoolgirl to look at the Jackson Pollocks.  In those days, museums were fairly uncrowded.  On that afternoon Joni Mitchell came in with Graham Nash.. they were dating, wearing sheepskin coats and furry boots... looking buoyant and in love and the three of us studying the paintings... it stayed with me.  A perfect cultural collision. 

The novel Septology is forever entwined with my January mishap, the way Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ helped me process the post-9/11 sorrow. How I tried hard last week to get into Lucy Ellman's Ducks,Newburyport but realized the voyeurism innate in following her personal associations, however close they are to mine-- was just excessive.  I have my own.  Time is limited and one must weigh carefully available literary projects. 

There was a night I had food poisoning and watched a Tarkovsky film.  I will forever associate the visuals with vomiting; somehow I think Tarkovsky would have approved.  And a boy named Billy who pulled me out of a bathroom at a screening of Warhol's Trash which was a little much for my teenage sensibilities.  He called me a hypocrite and it stuck... I swore I'd fight my failure to accommodate things that were difficult... 

I remember the store where I bought my first Henry James novel-- The American-- 60 cents for which there is no longer a character on my laptop.  But the smell of the place-- the paperback display, the style of the covers... and the feel of the pages as I read.  I was simply entranced.  Professor Lange reading Goethe to us... how sacred these moments... the associations and relationships, in a time now where influencers will link themselves with pretty much anything that will pay them a fortune.   The greed-- the athletes and their branding-- the endless commercials, the ruthless marketing of vaccines and reverse mortgages by familiar faces which may not even be the people they represent.

Trump will surely bail himself out of debt with his golden sneakers... I wonder who made this suggestion-- which of his smarmy children or associates came up with yet another get-rich-quick scheme, and extort from people who can little afford these things.  Contrast the effort it takes for someone like me to sell a single book.. it's just baffling. 

And yet the rest of us-- we seem to spend so much effort running away from ourselves, styling a persona we think is presentable or desirable.. even desperate hipsters painting themselves with signs and attitudes. Are we not enough? 

Navalny.  The closest to a hero in these times-- a true hero who was unafraid and committed... I've been obsessed with the documentaries and the daily reports... there are few epic films, besides the Christ stories.. the martyrs and POWs... to rival his story.  The fact that Taylor Swift has many more followers than Navalny.  

The near future feels a little bleak, and I have come to know the deep comfort of a kind of pain.  Jon Fosse reminds me that the winter is like a lover you know you must leave, that God is somewhere in these February chills. Fuck the groundhog-- we are wrapped in the God of winter, Whose hidden-ness is what we know. The clanking radiators remind me I am here, and perhaps God abandons us because His absence is sacred.  The devil in the details, but God, in His absolute loneliness, in the shadows.  Amen.