Summer Interlude

July humidity is a uniquely oppressive phenomenon for those who are economically committed to all-urban summers.  Nothing-- animal or material-- escapes its wilting inertia; we slow, perceptibly, like a musical command... and offer an opportunity for things to penetrate. If we took a personal inventory,  I think summer memories would dominate.

After the massive Nersesian novel (thank you, Arthur, who individually thanks an impressive litany of his East Village neighbors at the end), I took up some late Roberto Bolaño who never lets me down, even at his least luminous.  A summer vacation diary-- with deaths and mysteries and World War gaming minutiae... but the heat... the damp, the summer rain.  It stuck to me like my clothing.

And then Soldier's Pay-- to cleanse my literary palate, so to speak-- with early Faulkner.  So many of us read Faulkner in school-- before we were able to absorb his language facility-- well, it's worth going back after all this time.  One wonders where Cormac McCarthy would have been without him.  The imminent summer is palpable... and the way he is truly in love with not just words but the way people speak them... and the descriptions drip vocabulary like wet rain.  He over-saturates but it's young and utterly world-shaking. 

It occurs to me that old writers become more sparse and bitter, as though they are slowed and dulled by their own self-critical ghosts. Maybe, as we age, we spin off enthusiasm and joy like coats of paint-- and we are left, in our later years-- wiser but hampered by our own hesitations.  Rarely does one see a senior kick up his heels on the sidewalk. Later novels tend to be more careful.

Evenings I still circle the park; one of the highlights is the 110th Street drum circle.  Africans of several countries meet here and sing and dance-- some in T-shirts and jeans, some in colorful native dress. Beats and chanting fuse with the denser landscape up there into a ceremonial soundtrack.  There is joy in the circle-- camaraderie and affection... but overall there is this pall of homesickness-- of these transported people into the harsh summer reality of Manhattan... and I feel sad for them.  

Among friends, many are crippled with a kind of depression which seems less justifiable in summer, but nevertheless persists.  I speak to them because they know I'm awake at 3 AM when they are haunted.  I empathize, and I refuse to cross their boundary of despair.  Some of them hide in their apartments-- I, too, am a little guilty of anti-sociability-- but they assume these Facebook Fred personas-- they post and converse on social media... it's an anodyne, I suppose.  Many of them describe and display their surgeries and illnesses-- their recoveries and badges.  It's wonderful-- but what about those of us who toughed it out-- no  addictions, no drugs, no 12-step programs? We changed diapers and bailed kids out of jail.. we did the daily penance with no one but a vague Jesus beside us to listen to our prayers. No award.

Some of us cannot see what we have become.  Some of us work hard at filling in wrinkles and lifting saggy jowls-- at coloring our hair and camouflaging reality.  The depressed and vocal do not see how they have become narcissistic-- a black hole into which they draw their friends and anyone who will listen.  It's like a kind of emotional quicksand.  

As we add more and more to our life scoreboard, the losses ironically mount disproportionately.  Some of the losses are more memorable than the wins, although in this Olympic season, we barely remember even the medalists.  We love doing some things in life... others we dread, but we are glad that we did them.  I thought much about that couple who set out to sail the world and were found dead in a lifeboat.  Even they would not have had regrets; somehow we know this.

At a certain point we begin to give things away-- we realize what we got is not really what we wanted, and conversely, what we wanted is not what we got.  Some things happen to us... and they are not good, but I also often wonder that life has not been even more tragic-- that the good has outweighed the bad, that five mediocre novels do not change the one brilliant one; it is only the writer who suffers.

Tuesday at 5 AM I watched part of Bergman's Island... the original documentary which is Bergman at 80-something speaking about his life, filmed on his beloved Fårö.  He is consciously at his productive end and has always been clear about his films-- their meaning, the brilliant intertwining of his life's personal narrative with his work. But it seemed so simple-- the landscape, the genius himself in his fleece slippers, sitting on his fireplace, looking and explaining.  He was so utterly candid-- so honest.  His fear of death, his failures, his memories. It's extraordinary-- what he accomplished and how he of all people was able to see himself.

Dawn seems to come quickly in summer.  Evenings are slow... I feel certain, on the cusp of August, I will sense the season being sucked from the room.  It's another goodbye.  Whatever the summer has brought, whatever it has meant,  I hate goodbyes.  I will miss my sticky fingers on the keyboard in my unairconditioned apartment.  I will log my summer reading and console myself with the knowledge that these months are a smaller and smaller fraction of my lifespan. But I also think, after all these changes, I do know who I am.  And despite the relentless over-saturated cloud of grief no one measures with daily weather and air quality statistics, I belong here.

A WORLD APART

I was recently notified that due to offensive language in one of these 406 blogposts, I was going to be suspended from this platform. Fortunately the 'offending' words (a quotation) were identified, adjusted, and I was reinstated.  There's a fine line between honesty and insult, I often caution my friends, and I have crossed it both ways like a Double-Dutch rope-jumper.  I still err broadly on the side of truth, though it has cost me friendships (temporarily, for the most part) and nearly the online archive of 406 essays posted here with nominal censorship over the past 16 years. 

My daily reading this month includes Gustaw Herling's acclaimed account of his experience in a Russian prison camp in a time and place where a slipped word or gesture resulted in years of forced labor which made death seem a kind of paradise. Nothing like prison literature or diaries to make one rejoice in the small liberties and joys of summer's cusp. But sarcasm aside, there are millions of people living under non-humane conditions-- without freedom of speech or thought, without adequate nutrition, without safety.  

While most of us fret about our summer wardrobe, our hair products and cold-brews, right here on our streets the underserved are unavoidable.  Some are here by choice, but most by circumstance. The charitable among us bring food, blankets... but most of these gestures have the effect of watering a diseased plant... we do little good.  Last week's air pollution episode reminded us how small this world is-- how close we are to other's suffering and tragedy.  For a day, the charred scent that permeated through even closed windows brought another dimension to the accidents and deaths that punctuate the media. The whole city was declared 'unsafe'.  

When I bought my apartment years ago, I'd been robbed, mugged, stalked; as a young mother, I wanted to feel safe.  I wanted to come home at night and know everything was as I'd left it.  We changed locks, installed bars on accessible windows, did what we could to protect instruments and possessions.  I am in utter awe at men who sleep face-up on the street.  Some keep dogs, some huddle together... but for the most part, they are the poster-people of vulnerability.  On June 7th when air quality rose to an all-time hazardous rating, I tried to question one about going to a shelter. Lighting up a cigarette, he squinted a watery eye and swore he didn't smell a thing.

On the way home that night I ran into a man with his hair molded into devil horns, carrying a baseball bat.  What time is it, he asked me... as I nervously showed him my watch-- it was 7:05.  It's a good thing, he remarked... I'm gonna hit someone but it won't be you.  I felt blessed. Relieved for my friends who've been burdened with more recent deaths and losses than they can bear.  

When I moved here, the building history resonated.  Below me the old apartment floor had a hole dug into the wood planks where Pablo Casals had placed his cello-pin while he practiced.  My own apartment had been inhabited in the 1930's by a Russian composer and I feel her ghost often-- welcoming me, patronizing me or taunting me to do some serious work. My neighbor, a great writer and editor, welcomed me with books by Cormac McCarthy.  I was a little stuck in earlier literature-- Faulkner, Baldwin, Dostoyevsky, Mann... but one by one I went through the McCarthy novels, beginning with Blood Meridian, then reading back.  Don't bother with the trilogy, he cautioned, and I still have not.  But somehow the 'nesting' process here was accompanied by my rapture with McCarthy's writing.

His obituary this week was somehow inevitable; The Passenger and Stella Maris seemed to give us this message, grappling with death and in a way making it feel just a little safer.  It's personally sad that his body of work has become finite... the way David Bowie's death marked a finality of oeuvre.  

I can't imagine how 'safe' he must have felt knowing he will be read and revered by generations to come, that he emerged from the Faulknerian aura of his early work to become a fully developed and internationally awarded writer.  And besides a few corny one-liners in The Passenger,  one felt safely drawn into the world of yet another character whose heroism fell beneath conventional radar... and one learned things-- important things that made one feel a part of McCarthy's understated and inquisitive world.  

So we grieve not only for our friends and family, but for these people whose product we keep on our shelves, who have taken the time to share their oeuvre with us, who have become part of our own history or intellectual architecture.  We live with their characters for a few days or weeks, and we carry a torch for some of them. I often wonder how a human brain can separate the fictional acquaintances from real ones who live somewhere buried in our pasts.  Many of the men and women living on the street are unable to separate these things.  They tell remarkable tales and see the world with a different set of parameters.  Tonight through my open window I hear one of them howling like a coyote. 

There's a man I often see uptown who brings his foraged meals into a parked Citibike basket. He sits on the bicycle seat, sometimes unsteady if he's been able to buy himself enough malt liquor, and tucks a napkin into his throat, as though he's fine-dining somewhere. So he called me over last night and asked me to bring him some strawberry Häagen Dazs.  It was an unreasonable request for the likes of me, living on foodstamps. I gave him the frayed dollar I've been carrying around for emergencies and he seemed pacified.  But tonight, on the final chapters of my Gustaw Herling, I'm thinking I missed an opportunity here.  Who am I to judge what a man on the street needs and doesn't need?  

My neighbor no longer gives me books... it was a kind of literary flirting, I think, looking back.  He and Cormac were exactly the same age; they were friends at a time and he must be personally mourning. Thinking back, the last time I had Häagen Dazs ice cream was in his immaculate kitchen, one sweltering July night in his un-airconditioned 8-room apartment on the 10th floor.  Synchronicity. And death the final punctuation, in the McCarthy world where grief was ubiquitous. Unlike me, he hated the semi-colon; but regret, he said somewhere with characteristic wisdom, is a prison. 

RIP.  

Dreamtime

I never thought I'd care about football... but raising a sports-minded son, as a single parent, I had to indulge in his passions.  For a boy without a father, athletes are family-- role-models, personal legends. The recent near-tragedy of Damar Hamlin was world news.  As a family friend told me years ago, part of the appeal of sport is that it is among the few things in life with a clear winner and loser; games are black and white.  

Politics used to be similar, but no longer.  Election results have become arguable and not absolute.  Plus I am learning from Shadi Hamid's recent book that democracy is not the guarantee of human rights and freedoms, but just a majority vote which we all know can be manipulated, debated, miscounted.  The obscene number of voters who do not go to polls guarantees that winning candidates do not necessarily even reflect popular preference. And of course, our electoral college system allows that the winner does not necessarily have the popular majority.

Yes, there were some bad calls and replays tonight, but the Chiefs outplayed the Bengals.  The margin does not count.  There will be one winner in the end. Billions of dollars will be spent on this; Super Bowl Sunday is close to being an American holiday.  The morning after, there is a letdown... some of us watch the Grammys and others dive back into March Madness basketball. And there are statistics. Unlike other realms of entertainment, record-breakers keep their status.  We all remember Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, Michael Jordan.  

Fame and celebrity is a tough business.  There is not always a statistic or a hierarchy.  Musicians-- even award-winning ones-- do not always stay current.  We watch documentaries, discover and rediscover, but in this instantaneous minute-culture, we have short memories.  Song-plays are often interrupted and brief; gone are the days of album-listening, lying on window seats and reading liner notes, absorbing into our being these landmark creations which linked with our personal history.

No sooner have we swept up the confetti of New Year's Eve, than the deaths begin to accumulate.  January always seems the cruelest month.  The litany goes on and on.  Jeff Beck was a wound... Lisa Marie Presley a shock... people like Gina Lollobrigida, hardly known by my son's generation, passes and is compared to Marilyn Monroe. We listen and listen to the Yardbirds, to every Beck performance on album and YouTube-- there are millions.  We mourn and celebrate, celebrate and mourn.  Lisa Marie-- well, I'd scarcely listened to her music, but now I have. Sadly, in a culture where things are quickly processed and discarded, death is like a second chance. It makes one relevant.

The horrific and culture-shaking death of Tyre Nichols eclipsed all others.  For us mothers of boys who have misbehaved and wandered, who have been misapprehended and misunderstood, this is the most terrible of all griefs.  Heartbreaking were his mother's words that her son assured her he would be famous. Murder makes one not just relevant but unforgettable.  The victim of a brutal inhuman event is historic.  People will wear his face and name on their shirts; they will take these into the streets and try to reckon with justice.  It's all wrong.  All we want is to wake up and have our sons beside us, spilling their food on the sofa, trekking mud on our floors... smashing up the car... giving us a birthday bear-hug.

On top of the book on democracy, and Miss MacIntosh, My Darling which will be the slow/constant literary under-accompaniment of winter-spring 2023, I have borrowed the new Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger.  I get only a week with this, so I am binge-reading. The hallucinatory passages entwine with the Marguerite Young in a unique way-- like an opium dream or an ectoplasmic swim in an alternate reality.  But the death theme is relentless.  The longing for family... the absence or presence of God, or his alternate-- Quantum Physics, the esoteric explanations of reality-- it is another McCarthy expedition through a nostalgic geography and endless descriptions. Empty people, sad people.  People with souls who are alone, people who are legendary and forgotten, people who are brilliant and suffering, tough and heroic and poignant and terse.  

The death of Tom Verlaine wove itself into my insomniac literary hallucination yesterday in a way he might have appreciated.  He was mysterious and evasive, shunning the spotlight but often haunting the same stacks of books as I.  I worshipped his playing; I have every vinyl... saw every performance I could, back in the 70's.  His personal exploration of guitar was gutting and somehow familiar.  It was tasteful and edgy, deeply musical and poetic.  For years I fantasized about his collaborative blessing to my songwriting, but never approached.  I think he did have one or two of my poetry volumes, not that he might have cared.  Once or twice I shared a cigarette with him, exploring the dirty piles of books outside the Strand.  We brushed shoulders often in the 90's, Friday nights in the Proofs section, in the Strand basement.  My son was small and liked making piles of things.  It was dusty and mice often appeared behind the shelves. We almost never spoke but occasionally Tom would make a small stack of things for me on a Friday... once or twice there was even a note.  I've kept them all.

I've brought his name up with some young guitarists-- the kind that know about Hendrix but not that much... his recent occasional personal appearances in Chelsea were unremarkable.  He had lost his relevance to the current generation.  He was probably glad of that. His death, as he might have known, brought a certain celebrity he'd never enjoyed.  The name-dropping of other more conspicuous peers and admirers piqued interest with those who had perhaps forgotten his music.  His assumed name rings a bell, of course... there are those who went back and looked at the poetry.  Once he left me a book--   

So I wept all night-- as we do, sometimes, for ourselves, at the loss of someone.  Dreamtime-- that album-- it is not yet bearable for me to listen.  But I stayed awake reading... thinking perhaps being the reader he was, that he'd taken the same recent trip through the McCarthy.  I know he knew about Marguerite Young... few people have read this one; he might have.  I'm sure it is there among the piles and piles of books in his place.  When music is unbearably emotional and difficult, books are less painful.  

There was a quotation I read this morning-- something about having read a quantity of books in common with someone creates a bond stronger than blood.  There is a certain generational commonality in the literary requisites of the old New York music scene... I was less obsessed, post-college, with the French poets and more into the New York School-- like Frank O'Hara, whose personal charisma maybe helped cement his literary legend.  These people haunt my rooms at night-- their words, the memory of the ringing guitar of Tom Verlaine, the person he created to protect the fragile musical soul he was.  His death was shattering... but it occurs that his absence was well-anticipated.  He prepared us, with his elusive presence... and as I wander still down the dark hallways of the literature we had in common, his melodies accompany my dreams like living ghosts.