Pity the Poor Immigrant

I walk the streets with a running monologue in my head; sometimes it's a poetic kind of voice, other times it's a soliloquy-- a kind of rant or commentary.  The barraging urban incidentals feed this, redirect and influence... sometimes it is chastising and harsh, otherwise gushing and passionate. Most of it evaporates... one cannot document or note everything, and inspirations are corrupted like a warping digital file.  It's a wrap, I think, occasionally, as I invent a short story... and then it is lost in the ever-washing tide of temporary memory. Aging brains have less capacity to compartmentalize these things.  One fails to make notes, and then there is nothing... like a dream which disintegrates as one wakes.

It occurs that as one ages, one is shaped by what one forgets, as much as what one selectively recalls. I texted a friend yesterday that my life is defined more by what I have not done than what I have-- the way I consistently avoided opportunities of success or even a kind of minor celebrity... how I felt compromised by this kind of thing, and adhered to this stringent discipline of seeking my true voice rather than an audience. It probably has not served me, I note, as frothy influencers collect more than my annual income for a shallow momentary display of 'meme-dom'.

We musicians circulate periodic youtube fragments of odd under-known geniuses-- gypsy guitarists, random Eastern European instrumentalists whose personal style has developed unaffected by trends and online platforms.  Some take one's breath away... one discovery from last week, on further research, had died several years ago; fortunately he survived into the mobile phone culture enough to have had dazzled witnesses capture a few performance moments for us. It's humbling.

Fast forward to my regular life-- the email, the constant stream of notifications and requests... it's mind boggling, the number of attachments that accumulate-- the statistical impressiveness these marketing tools provide... the spread of mediocrity like bad mayonnaise on packaged white bread which affects not just taste buds but critical faculties.  We are intellectually worn like smooth stones by the incessant traffic.  I feel like variety has suffered... for every celebrity there are easily 5-10 others who look alike.  With cosmetic procedures, each of these changes facially with every appearance.  Maybe I'm just old and losing visual acuity-- but everything seems to be leveling off. The dumbing down of America which produced the current state of affairs... the rounding of corners...the filing of edges, the general whitewashing disguised as red-white-and-bluewashing.

Since I rarely consult a cellphone, I am inclined to talk to human beings like a crazy person.  It's interesting. Many of those willing and anxious to speak are from other countries.  Their trajectory, even in a five-minute conversation-- is often adventurous, and their take on America reminds me of what I used to believe in.  The drum circle on the North end of the park is comforting somehow-- the camaraderie and the colors... the warmth.  My young Senegalese friend who took me to the hospital after my accident last year--  still struggles but his huge smile and sheer ability to find joy are contagious.  

The Philippine farm workers who come weekly to my neighborhood and sell great vegetables for less than half of the pricey city Greenmarkets... I look forward to their Sunday stand, although they speak little English.  And then in East Harlem-- a new grocer-- with piles of exotic rice sacks and slightly damaged produce that is affordable.  On my block they sell Honeydew melons for $13.99.  Not even spelled right.  But here... they were $3.  I asked a very thin Middle eastern worker to help me pick a ripe one; he offered to cut it... if it is not good, he said, you don't have to buy.  So he disappeared and returned with a knife-master's slice... it was heavenly.  Then he wrapped the two halves in plastic.  Where are you from, I asked? I am Palestinian, he replied. Images of emaciated children and clamoring crowds of hungry desperate parents.. I was overcome with tears... we pray, he assured me.  I am the lucky ones... but fear for my family here.

Outside the 96th Street Mosque a man sells fruit from cartons on the sidewalk.  A blind man with a beautiful face and pale eyes sits in a portable chair for long hours.  If one has no money, one can take something.  These small human dioramas comfort me.  The diversity often disguises a kind of goodness... the hidden geniuses in quiet rooms and the generous gifts of the poor who give not for the deduction or reward but because it is inherent.  

Now that the whole city is being sued... one wonders... where is the sanctuary? I am quick to apologize to these people that the American Dream they sought has let us all down lately.  How many amazing souls are being deported with the bathwater?  Encroaching tides from both sides-- it overwhelms.  Like the general pool, a few from desperation turn to crime as a quick fix, but we in our cracking and chipped glass houses, may we see via our hearts' vision.

Women and Men

Heat in New York City-- the extreme unrelenting kind (not to downplay the life-threatening aspect) is a palpable adventure.  For those of us toughing it out without air conditioning, it feels like a matrix-- a kind of intangible airless box.  I can't help being reminded of the 1977 July blackout, when my neighborhood was not only without power for days, but without water. Yes, there was looting and some violence, but for the young, it was a kind of party... restaurants and bars at first giving away the contents of their refrigerators and freezers, drinking and partying in the streets.  By day three, it got old; the city stank of garbage and sewage.  At one point I hopped on a city bus which had its own little air conditioning system and rode all the way uptown.  I was living with a guitar player who continued to do acoustic gigs in clubs by candlelight with people drinking warm beer and soda from cans. It stretched time. 

I'm sweating through Joseph McElroy's Women and Men.. another of those challenging post-modern difficult mammoth novels. It's so large the contemporary reprinting was structurally unsound and retracted. Supposedly there's a two-volume version, but I'm coping with the original 1980's printing.  Difficult to carry around-- larger than my Organic Chemistry textbook all those years ago--  and nearly as dense.  It's also a quintessentially New York novel, written for the most part in the 1970's.  It occurs as I make my way that I'm going to be the last reading generation who will understand the context of these characters and their behaviors.  We read Shakespeare and older authors and there is a glossary at the back to explain words and expressions, but it occurs that in a few more decades, even the geography here-- the recent vintage urban references-- will require footnotes. 

I wonder too, if people in the future will have a reading list, the way many of our pop icons had their own set of icons-- many of whom were relatively well-read and versed.  Why is it that I feel compelled to read, as though I must continue some kind of literary itinerary with its occasional roadside distractions and off-ramps, unpaved paths and mountainous obstacles? As though someone will go hungry because I overlooked some huge tome, or my destiny will not play out as pre-planned?

As recreation, I picked up a Library of America book of stories by Constance Fenimore Woolson.  I love these volumes for their scrupulous attention to original manuscripts, for their notes and explanations-- biographical insights.  I trust them, in a world where printing errors and typos abound, translations fail authors. Admittedly, I had never heard of this Woolson who is described as perhaps the acknowledged second-best woman writer of the 19th century.  Complete oversight.  So they are chaste little tales which at first bored me, but now I am compulsively going through the entire chronology.  They are narrative and informed with setting and geography-- with characters and religion and informed with a kind of old-fashioned social and moral sense which is comforting and rewarding. Real stories... adventures... people... with air and atmosphere.  A slight wind.  Sea-storms, swamps, Italian hills... old churches and clergymen and orphaned seamstresses... mysteries.

As opposed to Women and Men which has the density and realism of a solid polyhedron.  The details and characters-- the tangents and the interwoven relationships-- the non-narrative difficulty.  It is a kind of five-dimensional novel and one must stay present with each page.  I remember reading Pynchon in the 70's; it was a revelation and a challenge. Decades later I'm not sure I'm quite up to a weighty literary task; at page 500, I'm not even halfway through... but I will keep going. 

Two nights ago I rewatched the 1970's version of The Great Gatsby.  It felt stale and dated; the dialogue was flat-- the  characters were silly and the ironies awkward.  Even the Fitzgerald text felt clichéd.  Am I jaded?  Not sure. I am much more apt to appreciate the outdated language of the Woolson stories. 

I spend hours each day scrolling through gallery exhibitions and auction lots.  One sees scads of old-world academic painters-- people who gave their entire life to the study of landscape or still life or portraits, for little reward.  They looked and observed and self-critiqued and produced; they starved. And here are these millionaire contemporary artists with their rolexes and several residences... bringing home the proverbial bacon.  Others work so hard to become financial and critical failures. To be rewarded for simply being oneself is the supreme prize.  Many of these people are locked in their perhaps non-air-conditioned rooms, struggling to give birth to yet another creation, maybe unseen.  This haunts me.. how to find these people who have no instagram or outlet... but their own brand of greatness. 

I imagine them during these oppressive nights-- the ones by candlelight in older times; the heat even in the Gatsby movie was accurately palpable.  Pre-air-conditioned summers, as the older among us recall them.  My mother took us to Belle Harbor (I thought she was a woman) to cool off in the ocean. When my father earned a little more, we went to Cape Cod or summer camp.  Meanwhile my mother read us 'cold' stories like Jack London or The Little Match Girl and ran our little wrists under cool faucets. The days were long and the nights often sleepless and longer. 

This summer will be marked by the imprint of Women and Men-- slipping back into a 1970's city I remember well.  By the time McElroy published this long novel, it was already perhaps outdated.  It was described as ambitious, difficult, perhaps brilliant... the subject does not strike me as much as the urban whole, the layered complicated synchronicitous and unfathomable, while personally a kind of nostalgia he did not intend engages me. It's a relief that none of the characters have quite seeped into my heart, which leaves space for the Woolson tales to enchant me a little more these hot nights.  

Poor Woolson, I've learned, was something of a literary spinster.  She worshipped Henry James and managed a complicated friendship with him, although James never quite acknowledged her talent. At 53 she suicided-- did not make it to the twentieth century. Perhaps I should reconsider and recall this as the summer of Constance.