Dollars and Scents

I'm reading 2666.. the mammoth Bolaño which is divided into sections. Currently I'm in the hellish panoramic depths of a chaotic and distinctly Mexican criminal investigation into the serial killings of young women.  In these times, there was no electronic trail to follow and these women-- some of them actually girls-- go missing and turn up mutilated, raped, abused.  It's compelling and disturbing reading. Somehow it mixes in my brain with the Nancy Guthrie mystery. But the relentless sequence of bodies.. it takes days for their absence to be logged, and since most of them are poor working women in the dubious culture of Santa Teresa, the news is neither reliable nor nationally remarkable.

So I'm not yet sure how I will process the whole of this novel.  His writing is luminous and his narratives are compelling and readable. I miss Bolaño with a personal sense of loss and grief.  These dark people who have left us a world that is both startling and comforting... the characters remain with us, are us.  My intimate friends have become the ones in these books... the authors a kind of paternal presence.  They are there for me-- they do not change. By their means, I see through myself--' As Though Through Glass', my 2015 collection was titled (followed by the (implied) denouement phrase 'I watched you shatter').

In a dark place today, I feel as though I am witnessing the crumbling of a dynasty, of a civilization... the crooked mistakes of what one once saw as progress undermining us like massive fissures and portentous seismic adjustments.  I am seeing Jeffrey Epstein as the ultimate modern Superhero or Villain.. it doesn't seem to matter anymore.  With the seven sins as his private constitution, he manipulated the world, preying on contemporary addictions to greed, false senses of power-- massive money, schemes and games.  I am relying on this story to bring down the great web which seems to have entangled and entrapped our better intentions. I also realize there is too much at stake here... and not everyone implicated is as simple as the Prince Andrew fall-from-grace. But something like the financial crisis feels as though it's unraveling in a dark background. Pay great attention to the man/men behind the curtain. For way too long we've had our heads in the sands of the internet and phone-distractions

Lately at 4 AM I pick up a guitar and try to remember who I am. Songs come like prayers-- so many of them commemorated old friends or times.  Occasionally my old torch-lamp flickers-- the one I picked up on a corner dump in Trenton in 1972-- it still belongs, the way some things don't...and blinks as though the spirits of Alan and others long-gone are my audience.  When I was studying art I had to give a talk on the Giacometti sculpture at MOMA-- The Palace at 4 AM... I remember I went a little too deeply into the psychological space... it still resonates, these empty personal rooms of an artist's vision.  Like so many things from an analogue past it became part of my private architecture, my iconography.

Among the ever-increasing numbers of disposable emails today was one advertising a new 'pale pink' apartment complex somewhere in Brooklyn.  I once lived in a pale pink building which seemed to be the unintentional outcome of some kind of concrete facing of an old factory on the East Side of Manhattan. Pink is not an enticing attribute for an urban building. I was never 'that girl' who wore pink-- not even the rock-and-roll kind. Maybe for some lost character from a Sex in the City episode or a Barbie fan... but today... perhaps the color of diluted blood. 

From out of some blue, today, came the opening line of a William Gaddis novel... 'Money?, in a voice that rustled'.. something like that. Written today, it occurred, there would be no question mark. How innocent the days of The Bonfire of the Vanities seem.  The enormity of instant wealth-- mergers and venture capital...cryptocurrency fortunes... the bloated corporate banks... the new American economy of tilt. The whitewashing of money, the normalization of evil. 

Often I walk down the street and identify the smells of luxury... well-dressed women with pricey perfumes that have become part of a compulsory culture of scent.... and then there is the cheap cologne of debt which hovers... sometimes indistinguishable, but loud.  I don't know how these people perceive their own flesh... we have become so accustomed to customizing what we are given... with money one can dispense with unmentionables, or acquire newer versions-- teeth, hair, skin... we can ski on broken limbs. There is progress here, but for whom? 

In the 1970's my friend worked for Halston.  She used to give me samples and gift me their uniquely scented bath talc.. it was subtle and a little earthy.  I loved it. Obsolete now, a nostalgic friend found a container on eBay, from Canada... gifted it to me.  It's not the same... it is like an AI version of the stuff, we both agreed, after a month-long wait, paperwork, and an import tariff of more than the cost of the box. A contemporary disappointment.. a vintage fraud. Besides, talc is now an illegal substance, I think. 

I will go back to Bolaño who understood women although he did not live to see a decent Mexican President and the political perversion of the American dream.  The scents of death and rotting corpses in a hot climate not quite as bad as the stench of a rotting America. As an oddity and closet rebel, it was maybe never my dream, but it is currently becoming my nightmare.