The New After-Math

I am approaching another of those age milestones which prompts assessment-inventory mode.  In one sense I have exactly the life I want—no apparent routine, no apparent ‘boss’ or structure except the pressure of time itself-- plenty of creative ceiling.  The fact that I have very little income, cannot master that Wall Street math that makes millions out of air, and spend inordinate amounts of time devising Rube-Goldberg-worthy schemes to manage, is quite a challenge, some days.  I concede this life of spontaneity, as one gets older, is comprised of myriads of loose ends—things I collect, daily-- thoughts, projects, ideas, inspiration.  Then there are the stray people I take on, the fact that I give time to the insane unemployed physicist in Starbucks, the Holocaust survivor who nags me to at least hear her memoirs because there is neither time nor sufficient megabytes to write it out;  to the blogger with no blog, the dog-savers and ex-junkie poets, and to my friends--- few as they are, now, the good ones.  Not to mention kids, who wouldn’t even know my birthday without facebook, and they are too busy or too guilty or whatever. 

I know now that no one will ever pay me back, and that as I begin to melt more into the fabric of what is the forgotten class of people--- the has-beens and middle-aged-- no one really wants to listen.  I am succumbing to the alarming fact that I go to the library and besides the re-packaged classics whose recent translations are often offensive and colloquial and wrong, the new books—even the New York Times top 10 of the year--- well, they are generally a literary disappointment.  Do these authors feel like failures?  Do they realize that the Housewives of Atlanta are winning?  That Warholian fame has become cheapened beyond his prediction and 15 digital nano-minutes might be all there is.  That the old has been shoveled up and piled on dumpsters not because it is useless and obsolete but because it was real and had a shelf-life, and value has become something the hedge funds determine to accommodate their maximum bonus pyramid.  

My life has resonance, I try to console myself, as I leave the grocery store practically empty-handed.  I attend few gallery openings--- not because I don’t have suitable clothing, but because most shows are just an idea—of course, some are executed with enormous gestures and presented with unprecedented chic décor-ready props, but although they ‘look’ good--- as fashion on the runway often does, it is unabashedly deja-deja-vu for me, and the models, lovely as they are, ‘wear’ the idea, but do not give it real content.

I recently was really taken by photographs of an art-piece done years ago by a window-dresser who actually went a little ‘outside the box’.  They were from the 1970’s—she’d actually created pulp-fiction-type drama within the store display windows--- with guns, intrusive characters… even a plaster hand that protruded from the actual store window---‘Help’ it was saying…’I am crossing the line between reality and advertisement, of theatre and solicitation.’  The artist then placed the mannequins in real situations--- dressed and still—in cafes, one even on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum where she sat—all dressed up and nowhere to go… alone, in the wind, among the then-small crowds who went to museums which were still, in the 1970’s, for art and not spectacle.  I remember the windows.  They were important.  But now I realize they were a sort of foreshadowing. 

Even the 1970’s still had some credibility, some sense.  There were still typewriters and land phones.  The people who brought the news on TV had side-parts and narrow ties and dark suits and spoke extemporaneously with unadorned style and used words properly.  They had something to say-- and when they didn't speak--- well, that was a statement in itself.   How many Anderson Cooper reports would it take to weigh in with Walter Cronkite removing his glasses in 1963?  The old journalists weren’t reading prompters and chatting about pop-stars who can’t sing and football stars with fake girlfriends because none of that was invented and people with no talent stayed home or worked in a cupcake factory and hummed to themselves while they wrapped their kids’ lunch sandwiches in waxed paper.   Some of them even smoked while they did this. 

So now, maybe the mannequins are the art… the clothing--- well,  the packaging--- the ‘carrot’… another public company on the stockmarket because commodities are no longer wheat and corn and coffee—these are altered and manipulated, and futured-out.  Now there are handbags and cellphones which move the markets-- accessories-- and yes, there are worthless ideas--- like facebook--- like Zinga and instagram--- ideas which are mysteriously bankable and which put solid-gold spoons in the mouths of the Goldman Sachs Babies, and the finest sushi on their conference tables, billions of monopoly dollars in every greedy bank account. Web-ideas trying desperately to convince us we are not loose ends--- we are connected, we are touching… we are blogging and we can see Beyonce from our desk, we can tweet her and we can tweet Carmelo Anthony and Ashton Kutscher and we can see what jacket they are wearing, and we can see their baby pictures and their girlfriend’s bikini butt and her spray tan.

I am realizing today that fringe is what happens to the loose ends—when they are gathered.  At the edge of the fabric.  I am not even sure my loose-ends of books and poems and songs are that cohesive.  Maybe I am not even fringe-worthy.  After all there is a fringe-festival and although I attended one or two events years back, I now process it as the ‘cringe’ festival.  I am not speaking virtual or tongue-in-cheek fringe, I am speaking threads and knots and speaker-wire and guitar-chords and lyrics—lyrics that float and haunt and define me, first lines of books I can still remember—these things did exist, these things made me the disorganized and obsolete person I am, on the verge of extinction, without a human-loving society to protect us and find us and tag us and make sure we are not being stoned to death or slightly abused by our neighbors who shop online for their Jimmy Choos and live in glass houses with no books and speak too loud on their phones in Starbucks and misuse the word ‘of’ even in newscasts.  We, the real-time newly unpublishable, who type and write and think and refuse to lipsynch… who hear the sound of one hand clapping and the still-silent voice in some loose-ended non-linear universe with far more resonance.  We are listening, we are counting...

Black Christmas

I have been dreading this moment, afraid of oversentimentalizing this shooting, this massacre, wondering why that word begins with a sacred prefix—it doesn’t look so evil in print… and how names change everything--- the way we’ll startle now when we hear these—Sandy Hook, Lanza, even Connecticut.  

We have listened to Anderson Cooper skipping over the few unpronounceable last names, refusing to repeat that of the shooter;  we have watched the CNN guy drawing diagrams on the screen.  We have not seen the chalk outlines and the blood, we have not seen parents beating their heads on the ground,  on walls, wanting to hold the corpses of their children before they are cold.  We have heard no screams.  We have imprinted the streets and landmarks of Newtown like a summer memory, we have tried to compare and contrast one horror with another; we have imagined our own phone call, the unbearable moment between the siren and the scream. 

We are all avoiding one another in the grocery store--- we do not look; we are guilty because our children are safe, we are buying food for our dinner, counting money--- things that are unthinkable for fresh grief.  We go home and turn on our televisions, some of us wondering why the image of the Palestinian father waving the corpse of his child several days ago at the Gaza border did not bring tears to our president.   Those New Yorkers still homeless and cold from the hurricane may feel more neglected and sad.   Bon Jovi and Bruce have spoken too many times now; they are silent.  This is not climate change or retribution of Mother Nature or even a drunk driver.  Maybe the shooter watched the concert on television.  It’s fairly likely that he did.  He may even have watched with his mother, shared popcorn or her home-baked Christmas cookies, no matter how much he hated it. 

I have gone over the seven sins tonight.  I am guilty of most of them, at some time or another.  I walked in the cold rain at midnight; it felt like some kind of punishment.  I passed the dogwalkers talking to illicit lovers on their phones, the secret ice cream eaters,  the possibility junkies—exchanging cards and sharing cigars with their neighbor.  I can rattle off all seven, although I often leave one out.  I mean--- I commit at least one every day—lust (passion--is this not good?), sloth, anger with frequency.   Gluttony I cannot afford, nor greed—and envy—well, I leave that to my neighbors when they compare their husbands’ end-of-year bonuses.  Pride—well, are we not supposed to be proud of our children when they are good, when they are brave?

I am mostly angry today.  None of this makes sense.  I try to feel empathy for the shooter, who apparently had none.  It is unbearable to empathize with the parents; any of us who has lost a child, who has even had one of those middle-of-the-night phone calls which years later has scarred over but still feels like a wound.   Where the fear is a noose and sometimes we hear the word ‘hospital’ or ‘jail’ and we breathe.   But we know the odds are against us, somehow.  And whether our own or our neighbor’s, we will have to bear some day the unbearable.  

My own was so young I have no photograph.  She had no favorite toy animal or song; there was so little to say.  I have only the reality that nothing rhymes with heartbreak or even with Christmas.   And on cold rainy nights when we try to grace someone else’s grief with our own, there are used condoms on the street, and on some blocks there are needles and half-empty coke bottles, and people sleeping, in old blankets and cardboard boxes, on church steps.

I am walking with the ghosts, glad my own drivers license has expired and who can ever afford a car anyway, because I’d be the one picking up hitchhikers, hoping I’ll come across someone I am missing, or their double, hoping I’ll make it across some bridge and maybe change someone’s life so when they get home they’ll put on their black clothes and pick up a rifle and decide not to load it—to go out for a walk in the rain or a drive, maybe, and sit on someone’s grave in some churchyard cemetery with a few cans of beer, and it will be enough.   

But the sirens will never stop, the scream is always there, within or out-of-earshot.  The dread is part of the prayer, the whisper is part of the message, the blood is on the inside or the outside.  For some of us God is inside the church; for others He is in the graveyard.  For some He is the stuff inside a needle, or in a glass, for some He is a rifle, or the madness inside our head.  For some He is the space between the siren and the scream:  the quiet space, the dead space, this silent night where you have to know about stars to believe they are behind the foggy mist.  And where you just might pretend for a few dreamless hours, in some light-years-distant non-lonely universe, that yes, there are sins and there are even maybe guns, but there is no ammunition-- that they forgot to invent that-- only blanks, and some fear, yes... but it is night and  things are as they were, and as they will be, same as it ever was…