Reel Fiction

A friend and I were reminiscing about our first records... not the ones we shared with our parents, not our adolescent rock-obsessions but our very own early-childhood albums.  Mine was Funnybone Alley.  I played it over and over on my machine-- with the switch and the heavy rotating disc covered in some kind of wool or felt-- the metal bullet in the center. There were silly songs and dreamy songs-- marches and sad ballads. Just for children. I inhaled these... memorized every melody, every lyric. One step more sophisticated than the little colored plastic sing-along rhyming discs, it sang to me, this album.  It changed me.

My first book-- the one that was really mine.. was A Fly Went By.  I was already a pretty good reader at 5, but this was a gift. I devoured it-- over and over.  'A fly went by...he said oh, dear... I saw him shake... he shook with fear...' I could recite the entire text now, 60-something years later. The color blue on the cover was perfect.  The little freckled boy-- unlike the drab boys in my pre-school-- he was adventurous and independent; he was there for me, whenever I picked it up. He was my friend.  The boy.  No names, these books. Likewise A Hole is to Dig...  A Hat for Amy-Jean... these were my companions, my confidantes-- my familiars.  They never abandoned me.

Lately I've regained the habit I once had of reading.  I've been through Dostoevsky, Murakami, Eliot, Musil.  The depth of my library never ceases to thrill; I will never finish. I also frequent the library for discovery.  Coincidentally, I live on a street rich with writers.  My neighbor's son recently wrote a novel.  It was pretty decent... but I couldn't stop looking at his picture on the back sleeve;  I knew him. The book won an award, and now he wrote another one.  Again, the photo.  You feel close, like you have shared some intimacy... this time he divulges his masturbation fantasies, he dissects his father's flaws.  It's fiction but you know better.  He passes you occasionally on the sidewalk... for you it's like seeing an old lover.  He has no clue, of course, that you applaud him for craving his father's approval while giving him the finger.

In college there was a famous Physics professor.  Or maybe it was Philosophy.  There were rumors... he'd written a bestseller and his boyish profile with the shock of hair on the backcover-- the loosened tie and open collar... sold books.  Not long after I graduated he let my college advisor know that he'd had a little crush on me. Flattered, I agreed to go on a date-- intimidated but somehow reassured by the familiarity of that image on the book-cover.  I knew him... the way his fingers absentmindedly held the piece of chalk-- the way he gestured with his hands, and pushed the shock of hair off his forehead. When he came to pick me up, he told me he'd often thought I had the legs of an extinct running animal.  I'm sure I wore a very short skirt; we all did in those times. As we walked he calculated the number of shades between the whiteness of my skin and the black of my hair.  I was a little speechless... out of my element.  He took me to the movies-- something almost embarrassingly pedestrian like Rocky.  The smell of popcorn and urban movie-theatre didn't quite fit in with that disheveled young professorial silhouette.  I wanted him on the cover. That version. Somehow I felt humiliated when he left me at my door, as though he had put me back in some inferior student slot.  I thought about the comments he made... Liar, liar, pants on fire I said to myself over and over in my apartment, like a 5-year-old, to console my ego.  

Since the pandemic has completely disintegrated whatever skewed temporal reality I once had, I often stay up and watch films-- great ones: Godard, Almodovar, Fassbinder, Kurosawa. I am transformed by the better of them-- the way I was when I took my first course in film in boarding school, and was shown Truffaut and Fellini and Bergman. They seep into the cracks of me-- the ones that haven't been filled by novels and text.  They haunt my dreams and my strange daily existence which is at least five degrees more separated than it once was.  Sometimes I feel as though I've been transferred into another human form.  I am married to my solitude; I have said this many times, and it has been a wonderful and attentive husband.  

Tonight I ventured out to witness the Philharmonic on the Great Lawn-- this annual event I'd attended so many times-- with husbands, boyfriends, schoolmates, babies... I stayed on the outskirts like an eavesdropper, with a book to fill the intermissions.  At the end I wandered back along the reservoir-- my daily habit... and pausing to watch the post-concert fireworks... I was nearly alone-- not even the ducks were awake-- waiting, except for two large dogs who are normally prohibited there, but it was late.  Suddenly I began to sense there was a couple embracing in the shadows... it was awkward; the dogs eventually forced them to address me. The girl was familiar-- I'd seen her on the way to the park with her dog...  beautiful like a younger, prettier Natalie Portman... and sweet;  she smiles at me often with true kindness.  The man was older--- boyish and familiar... I recognized him hours later... an actor... anyway, it became apparent that I was somehow inserted into their story-- or film.  We made a little smalltalk.. and then the actor came over to me and began speaking-- nervously-- soliloquizing... mentioning his little sons.. how one of them was terrified by fireworks, their sleep habits, etc., etc...  It was a moment of intimacy he opened and I suddenly realized they were meeting illicitly there... he, perhaps, had a family-- a wife.. but the two of them were so magnetically attached, there on the path-- watching their dogs play... touching, waiting to touch... and there I was, the unanticipated witness... maybe the only witness. I am safe, I did not say... you are safe. 

Once the fireworks ended, I took off down the steps of Engineer's Gate... they waved from the wall, and recalled the dogs who followed me for a bit.  The night could not have been more perfect... one day past the Strawberry Moon.  I have plenty to grieve this year-- the loss of friends, relatives-- the absence of my former habitual performance schedule-- the closing of so many beloved shops and venues.  I am a shabby aging writer/musician... a dying bohemian breed with barely enough income to cover the most basic expenses. Apologies to my late mother, I pay little attention to my wardrobe and appearance; she who was proud and always groomed would surely pass me by on the street, the way she publicly ignored me when I was going through my grunge phase.   

And yet I am still in love with New York-- the silhouette, the stones and sidewalks, bricks and facades... the graves and plaques and benches which memorialize so many vanished writers and artists and composers and heroes. The faded narratives and unseen films-- the diaries and heartbreaks. I will be gone one day but tonight I participated in one of those random urban tales of intrigue and passion and some kind of longing... and it felt like closure. My own little movie-- no wardrobe, no lines... just me, the intruder and the witness, who altered the narrative just that bit-- left my tiny mark on the city. 

Crimea and Punishment

A friend of mine bought me a Murakami novel a couple of weeks ago. He came by to deliver it but I so rarely hear the bell downstairs or even answer the phone in my post-pandemic insulation.  It will take me a while to adjust to spontaneous door-knocking and full-frontal facial nudity.  While he didn't leave the book, in his honor I took another one from the good old NYPL.  I liked it-- until the end, that is.  Many writers have this issue with endings... like they fall in love with their characters and can't bear to leave... or they have multiple finishings... like a sort of round table discussion in their head, with the characters in triplicate, discussing.  And it hurts the book; a good story already has an ending. 

In this case, the characters sort of split off-- like they could see another version of their own reality... death and life coexisted-- the ending and the plot.    One of the women even had white hair and black hair, not that this is so unusual in our cosmetically facile culture.  After all of the credible reality and details Murakami set up, it just seemed like a cop-out.  A space ship comes down and airlifts someone... or you simply disappear, like one of those strange mysteries.  In our society, missing people haunt us; for the most part, like milk-carton children or even that Gabby Petito-- there is evil in the explanation. 

It was especially disappointing because I identified with the character. Hard to imagine Japanese girls being messy and badly groomed... on my visit there they were spectacularly put together... but it was part of her charm.  Murakami protagonists-- and narrators-- are often disarmingly direct and candid.  It seemed obvious to me that her disappearance was out of character and engineered by the author.  I prefer when the characters tell us writers what to do, lol.  Literary fate.

I am resisting the temptation to go off on one of my academically ingrained analysis-tangents.  Murakami can inspire this sort of thing... and every so often, despite the omnipresence of detail, there are these blurred adventures which step out into a sort of unlikely dream, or alternate reality.  For the realists and sleuths among us, this can be challenging and annoying.  But lately I have had these overpopulated dreams-- with plots and armies and characters and weather and animals;  they last for what seems like hours and bring me into a morning-after mental hangover.  Not unlike these novels. Waking I find some of the tragedies and losses of my imagination quite real.   

Even more than that, it forced me to think about perceived and actual realities, as manifested in the narrative of this horrid Ukranian war.  I don't pretend to understand the complexities of the disagreements and the difficult history of Crimea and its affiliation. As often in these territorial wars, the people inside the borders are not as cleanly delineated as the political boundaries.  But the main issue is the humanitarian crisis that has emerged.  And the manipulated distributed journalism in Russia is disturbing, unless we are misunderstanding entirely.  Lack of transparency, personal threats, imprisonment for opinions-- these are all qualities of a bullying and paranoid government.  While a solution seems near-impossible, it is unacceptable that innocent civilians pay the price of despotism and aggression.

Mysteries abound; people are missing, lost.  Families are divided and things have been left behind.  I have read Russian stories claiming they are rescuing Ukraine from Nazi forces.... they are liberating and protecting the people.  The POW soldiers insist a similar fiction has been their motivation.  Another story today accused the Ukrainians of inventing casualty statistics-- of  'staging' these photographs of the dead and wounded for effect.  How can these realities co-exist?  

Fake news... we are all-too well-acquainted with the term and the meaning.  The UK poet laureate used the term in his new official poem decrying the war.  'False news is news with the pity edited out,' he says, with maybe  a little intentional clumsiness... but I choose to continue to see it as news with the truth removed, and reality skewed or divided or manipulated.  Rather than 'Resistance' the poem seems to convey a sort of impotent spectator-ly dismay.  

Maybe acceptable in fiction, this lassitude of conviction and failure to convict... but with the reality of a war, the threat of annihilating a country... well, not nearly enough.  I'm not sure what is demanded of us here... perhaps if the theatre of conflict was closer to us, we'd be more active, more alarmed.  It seems discussion and talk have been dismissed;  how did we end up here, watching a hideous version of political failure become bloody and tragic history?  Why is war the chronic destroyer of peace?  Are there not enough problems without these absurd man-vs.-man killings in the name of some propagandistic principle?  

I think it's time we name a few additional sins.  The seven seem not nearly sufficient for what ails not just Eastern Europe but the global geo-political pandemic of greed.  I wonder how long it's been since Putin read Dostoevsky... a writer who understood endings.  And sin. At this moment in time repentance may seem a lot more appealing than conciliation.