The Loop

I've been reading Jacques Roubaud.  It's not simple; he's a mathematician, a poet-- a member of the Oulipo group, along with Queneau and Perec, who use restrictive writing techniques and exercises to create their work.  But he's also an obsessive observer and among the literary labyrinths and obstacles, there is this awareness of life that dazzles.  Walking, he says, decades before cellphones and technology were portable, is a conversation with time.  

My habits of running and distance-walking evolved as a kind of therapy for the grief I experienced in 2020, after the death of Alan. I'd circle the park, cover the half-empty city streets, and count to myself... as though the intimacy of numbers had some message for me... like a non-verbal language.  The way mathematicians think about numbers is beyond my simple comprehension, but there are patterns and colors somehow, that belong to certain sequences... and most poetry has always kept a certain musical count-- its rhythm, its meter.  

Photography, according to Roubaud, is a conversation with light. This, too, obviously way before the massive daily output of digitally cheap images. And also linked with time... the shutter speeds, the slowness, the developing. There were exactly three photographs of my Grandma in our house; only one vague image of her parents, posed formally and sepia-toned with a sort of monogram scratched into the corner of the paper. 

I confess I watched some minutes of the Academy awards... enough to see Billie Eilish whose delivery I have begun to find affected and pretentious.  I don't find her song 'winning' and her effort to avoid a body-image statement has resulted for me in a fashion overload.  It's like a doll with make-up and too many outfits.  I don't get it.  What is amazing is the technology to deliver an audio performance of breath... a far cry from the dive-bar culture where one sang one's throat out over loud guitars-- no earphones or monitors... sometimes nothing but amplifiers as a sound system.  And still, there is nothing I hear on these recent award shows that dazzles my ears like Mama Say Mama Sah Mama Coo Sah... or whatever he meant.  

Competing with the award show was a 60 Minutes piece on Jeff Koons-- a contemporary of mine whose financial success is boggling. Even his eyebrows were so artificially groomed I found it hard to look during the head-shots.  The factory, the Warhol comparisons-- well, simply... not not not.  The complete lack of imagination and the grandiosity of kitsch is no longer funny or amusing or artistic... it's just, especially in the world of today-- of war and violence and disparity-- a hideous lead-balloon tasteless joke. 

Walking rush-hour streets in the rain this week it occurred to me how few people observe the umbrella etiquette one used to find so natural in London... whether it's awkward tourists, or entitled women-- it seems there's little rain-chivalry and plenty of umbrella competition.  I often feel I no longer belong... block after block of shops that display but don't speak my language-- things that are strange and overpriced and even the ordering process of a simple coffee is overwhelming, as is the payment.  The doormen and groomed security guards outside buildings who look at people like me with haughty disdain.  Not the city into which I was born.  

I still circle the reservoir at sunset-- despite the crowds these days, it's still spectacular.  But last week some mediocre violinist set himself up with a loudspeaker that was enough to provoke a duck migration.  That woman who assaulted the subway cellist-- a criminal act, but I suddenly understood her.  Our privileged solitary moments-- our conversations with time--  are difficult enough without intrusions. So little silence in a city... musicians especially should be sensitive to the space between. 

So I guess I prefer to bury myself in a French novel and to sense the time it takes to walk from the West Village to Harlem-- sometimes with Coltrane in my headphones, sometimes Morphine or John Lee or even nothing... to speak occasionally with a man in a wheelchair who sits outside the projects with a boombox playing old R&B and tells me Pain might be his only friend now.  I could cry.  Worthy of an Albert King song.