The Sound and the Fury

I'm up to The Sound and the Fury in my Faulkner project... maybe it's the precursive reading, but I'm not struggling with the narrative the way I recall in high school. Maybe also it's the consequence of election season... the fact that I've somehow immersed myself in southern politics and culture, trying to comprehend the swing-state psychology and the way a crass New Yorker with a crooked script could appeal to it.  Rather than being dated, the Compson family seems a little familiar-- something for everyone.  In fact, poor promiscuous Caddie reminds me of my older sister who managed to smooth over her many-layered indiscretions with a colossal and expensive wedding cake which only fooled a few. The marriage was pretty much done before the cake went stale. 

Every dysfunctional family has its parallels... there are the bad eggs, the mean alphas, the deflated father-symbols, the fallen daughters... the alcoholics, the narcissists, the mentally defective and the failures.  The unforgiven.  Many of these have a nanny-figure-- maybe a nurse or housekeeper-- a paid parental figure who heroically loves at least one member, and holds them together for at least a time. Then there are the funerals-- the disgraces, the suicides. As literature, the subject doesn't get old.  We are the Family of Man. 

The thing about being over 65 is that few really fault you for being outspoken... or else they don't bother retorting. I'm subtly motivated by the residue of resentments for the petty injustices I've swallowed during my lifetime; truth outweighs courtesy when time is limited.  I am so very willing to offer comfort to the sweet and fragile who are suffering, but less so to the others who have caused as much pain as they have absorbed. You know who you are, I want to say... but 'you' don't.  These people rarely take accountability. 

The best literature shows us ourselves... it doesn't blame or moralize, it describes and shines a light on the shadows.  It observes, where there are no witnesses.  We have all done things, unseen, that have consequences. Writers take the opportunity of talent to expose their own past sins and injustices.  And we all get to a certain age... the demons and villains of our childhood are long dead... it seems almost safe to write the stories, to point our fingers.  This, we reason, is why I am this way-- why a marriage failed, or why another never had children... why success evaded us or our ambition consumed our capacity for empathy.

There are not many clear heroes in modern literature. We have plenty of those in the classics... and the more complex life becomes, the more we seem to turn to heroics and fantasy in our cinematic entertainment.  It's a little absurd-- the apparently simple thematic formulae of these blockbuster extravaganzas. 

Friday night, late, I watched that Chantal Akerman film where 95% of the action is a bourgeois woman in her little flat performing her daily chores in a sort of domestic claustrophobia.  It's long-- it feels like the day passes in real time-- but it's hypnotic and, for me, mesmerizing.  At a certain point in the afternoon, this woman who puts on a prim housecoat to do dishes turns tricks.  You can't judge a book by its cover.  But I can't imagine my son or any of his friends having the patience to screen this movie; they prefer Marvel or Scorcese... fantasy and extreme violence and gangster culture-- some horror thrown in.  This is entertainment.  

On the political front, I am too nervous to be entertained by any of the Town Halls or celebrity endorsements.  We are immune to the pleading, sick to death of the accusatory and aggressive advertising... we are manipulated and lied to by the very same device that shows us drama-- movies, comedy, sports... it is altogether processed as a form of entertainment rather than our political future. The media describes Beyonce's simple dress and Michelle Obama's suit.  Sure, their words reach some ears, but it is what they represent that remains like an afterimage... and then they are gone.

How can this be happening, I ask myself daily... a buffoon of a man convicted of both tax fraud and multiple sexual offenses,  running neck-in-neck with a seasoned and reasonable politician who stands for American democratic values?  What universe is this that there is even an argument?  The election is not a TV show... it's a major event in our history and will shape not just the next four years but could damage and distort our national trajectory for decades, if we even survive the critical transition. 

Among my friends there are those that threaten to leave the country. I did, too, after Bush, Jr was elected. But I came back.  Then there was Obama... and here we are again, at some kind of brink which feels even more worrying to me now. 

In my own city, today, Madison Square Garden.. where I saw my first Knicks game, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon... was turned into a kind of theatre of the extreme grotesque.  Hideous soundbites were used like ammunition. Some of them went home with audience members, and stayed on their tongue.  We are reduced to two opposing teams here, like a Sunday football match; there will be one winner. 

The villains in our families either pass away, grow old and defused, vanish into cemeteries and old scrapbooks. My sister hurt a number of people by her manipulative behavior and changed my destiny, perhaps. We are forced to lie for these people whose blood we share, even while it changes and destroys people. We are punished by the Jason Compsons who dominate the softer among us. Families, even when we leave home at seventeen, have a kind of co-dependent effect.  We share shadows and genetics and we all have a different take on the central narrative.  It's complicated.  No matter how good we think we are, there is residual guilt and pain in our past.  

In an election, we cast our ballot alone. We get a clean sheet--no one supposedly knows our individual mind and some of us still believe we can change the narrative by a vote. Let us hope that, pen in hand, we put aside the entertainment factor-- the contest, the game... and consider carefully not just our personal but our civic responsibility. 

A-women.

Grey Flannel

As part of my adaptive reading program, I just finished Mosquitoes-- a much criticized early Faulkner novel which, while flawed, still rewards with unpolished and sometimes erratic youthful exuberance of description. Another claustrophobic August narrative for me-- dank, humid and overripe with the disappointment of human relations. But well worth the effort.

Late last night after a day or two of uncharted sleep-deprivation, I made the mistake of flipping television channels.  Besides my go-to film stations, there is quite a bizarre array of lameness across the board: flimsily-premised game-shows, re-treaded bad 'reality'... it's as though everything has been done... and redone, or the interesting actors have taken a hiatus and left us with the dregs of low-level celebrity who for the likes me are not just unremarkable but unrecognizable.  

Friends of mine are visiting New York, and ask me for suggestions. I'm not in the least tourist-ready, as I once was-- brimming with passion and lists of competing activities and shows... primed for inspiration and  ripe to be dazzled by some fantastic band or gallery exhibition.  It's not just seasonal malaise but a general thing. I mean, my books, most of whose authors are dead, do not fail me.  They also remind of my creative mediocrity and the distance between where I am and where I might have been.

And there are those among my Facebook acquaintances who still post and gush and selfie at myriads of openings and gigs and events-- dress up and do their hair and socialize.  It is a reminder of why the Stones are still touring... for those of us who have found little else to replace what used to be a common and easily-accessed quality music scene. 

Around 2 AM, there was a Nashville songwriting hour program, featuring three young artists.  One had guitar skills, but the songs were utterly cliche'd... another I recognized from the club scene here twenty years back... here he was on television, with his talent yet to sprout... and a third-- the daughter of an old and extremely good songwriter... she-- whom I'd met as a baby-- seemed exhausted by life; her songs, too, were old and not memorable.  I felt a kind of pity for her performance, especially conjuring her father whose genius was undeniable despite extreme stage-fright in his early days which he battled by facing away from the audience.  It was charming because he was brilliant and undeniable. But where am I, I was thinking?

I happened on a brief clip of a Townes Van Zandt memorial songwriter's circle-- with all the best Nashville celebrities from the 1990's... with each performance of a song more heartbreaking than the previous.  I watched and I wept.  Townes was an occasional visitor to New York and the sheer pleasure of having once spent an evening with his humble sense of humor and utter boy-charm was thrilling.  He was a consummate and sad artist.

There are of course a few lights in the August tunnel-- the Os Gemeos murals on West 14th Street, not minding the occasional soaking of a passing rainstorm... the pale moon, translucent over the twilight river sky.... the perfect pitch of a little morning dove who visits my bedroom windowsill nearly every day... just inches away behind the glass.  And what I call the 'grey flannel' days- those occasional weather-anomalies of chilly rain, reminders of the autumn to come, and of those homesick summer camp mornings when we were forced to pull these scratchy uniform components from the bottom of our steamer trunks and wait out the sun dressed like soldiers.  These days make me grateful to be an adult-- to have freedom of time and wardrobe and activity-- privileges we aging seniors take much-too-much for granted.

This morning I woke up with one of those vivid memories one occasionally pulls out of a deep subconcious hat... of a late August trip with an ex to the Jersey Shore.  Difficult to get away without children in those days, but we managed to rent a car and have a couple of unpremeditated days exploring roads I knew from college and he knew from songs.  We were surely at the end of some journey as a couple, although we had some fun... including a night in a cheap depressing motel in Neptune we booked out of desperation-- in the days when one had to drive from place to place to inquire about vacancies: it was after midnight and the desk attendant was annoyed and smelled of cheap whiskey. We swam in a small, sort of fetid pool and then slept poorly in a damp ground-floor room where the air conditioner was ineffective and one felt like a mushroom. 

Anyway, at least the ex got a decent song out of the trip.  I came home with the desolation of another failed relationship, and that deep sorrowful mix of nostalgia and regret and impending loneliness that comes when one distinctly chooses to put something precious behind a line which marks past from present.  There was some love there, or had been... and surely it was I who destroyed it-- I was very good at that.  Although now, so many years hence, I suppose the song still exists, and between us, the thing that replaces everything in the end-- what we had, what we had not, a kind of distance through which we see things both less and more clearly as we log yet another season.

Paulbearers

Another funeral yesterday.  They seem to come in waves.  For the wife--- the kids, the mother--- this is a life-shaping devastation.   For the rest of us, the mourners--- it is more temporary. We go out into the spring sunlight, return to our lives, speak a little less that day.  I try to dress badly for funerals.  Okay, I admit-- these days I don't really have to try--- this seems to be my mode of default.  It just feels so inappropriate to put on make-up and a nice dress.  I'm sure someone processes this as disrespect, but for me-- observing the blow-dried fashionistas--- it just seems wrong.  People forgive you-- -the rock and roller, etc.  It is okay to be 'odd'.  These people have been your audience.

I've been re-reading Faulkner-- Absalom, Absalom.  I was processing the tough version of mourning in the Civil War-ravaged South where the women were violently widowed, and the tragic figure of Judith,
in a primitive dress sewn from whatever re-cycled cloth was available--  betrothed in innocence to her half-brother, becomes a widow and a pallbearer within hours.  I would want to walk forever, feeling the unbearable weight of that rough wooden box on my shoulder until I dropped.  No drama in those times-- life was hard and death in the ravaged south seems so cruel it is almost bloodless.

I'd been to funerals at this Church before…the minister is a woman with a sort of monotonal voice that always sounds priestly--- comforting, in a way.  On this occasion she forgot the Lord's Prayer… right in the middle… I was reciting, without thinking-- feeling the coffin on my shoulder, the discomfort of unbleached ropey shirting-- and she was silent.  Deliver us from evil, she did not say.  Maybe the Episcopal version no longer acknowledges evil--- they are afraid it will frighten away their congregation, in this time where hellish greed fuels the ambitions of our new heroes.  Where a 19-year-old basketball player's salary could feed an entire continent.  But it doesn't.  The developers continue to develop, the digital ching of each accumulated million continues to be the preferred soundtrack of businessmen, the random incredulous accident of beauty is now available for anyone with a fat wallet,  physical imperfections are cause for self-hatred and social disgust, and fashion is not a choice but a pre-requisite.

There has been evil since man was born-- evil and death--- pain and suffering, sorrow and joy.  These days people seem to think joy is a birthright.  Rich people eradicate pain, ugliness.  They live way up high in this city-- -where there is a magnificent view but they see nothing-- no hustlers on the street, no-one shoving or pushing, no-one robbing or stabbing or killing.  They demand things… even people in the projects--- they demand foodstamps and better housing and expensive sneakers.  They demand that there are 2000 versions of E-news now, so we can listen to as many versions of why Beyonce's sister punched Jay-Z (who undoubtedly deserves it and who else could get close enough to do it but an 'inside' woman?  I would have paid her to do this, except I don't have any money).  And the rest of the world news is a tiny postage stamp on the oversized envelope of their daily information intake, if that.

Two nights ago I'd walked up to my usual grocery store in Harlem--- 112th and Lenox.  And I heard that familiar pop-pop-pop like toy caps--- like a transistor-radio version of gunshot…. but it was real.. someone was robbing the store, had sprayed bullets… no groceries for me… the luck of the Irish that my amnesiac Mom had kept me on the phone too long, asking endless questions, worrying about things she can no longer identify, or I could have been the occupant of that box on the altar yesterday.

It is Harlem… no one gave it much attention.  The blue tape came out, the sirens… the guys on the corner put out their joints.  The cops rerouted me to St. Nicholas, another supermarket further uptown where my cashier gave me just a tiny side-smirk when I told him their sister store was shut down for the night.

They are calm, these people.  They accept things.  For the most part, they have given up on ambition-- they are provided for--- they have virtually free accommodation in Manhattan-- their new white neighbors are paying 4 and 5 figures for rent, but they have foodstamps, family--- a 'hood…friends… they greet one another with warmth and cool handshakes.  If they get sick and need a wheelchair-- an amputation-- they accept it.  They don't seem to worry.  Many of them go to church; some of them don't.  The women wait long minutes for buses to go just a few blocks.  It seems there is always a funeral going on, always an ambulance--- police cars, people outside, the smell of marijuana, incense, and music… boom boxes, open car doors.  It is a kind of life in my city where neighborhoods have been renovated ad mortem, ad anonymity.  We who remember--- maybe we are the pallbearers of our former city.  We remember, we find the carved facades of the Louis Sullivan buildings even though their storefronts have been transformed into fashionista modernity.

Waiting for the crosstown last night, one of the Broadway homeless regulars was being placed onto a stretcher.  There were all kinds of secretions and body fluids on the sidewalk.  Two women cops were smirking and keeping their distance.  A water bug was running toward some of the puddles of waste, and they jumped back.  Probably some bad garbage he'd eaten.  Some kind of thick yellow snot was hanging out of his nose.  He looked bewildered or spooked--- but he always looked like that, with his wild matted dreads every which way and his leathery old face with the child's eyes.  On the sidewalk was his friend… he cried, this man-- audible weeping…. like a solo tragic Greek chorus-- he reminds me.  He had his pants rolled up to show off the oozing sores on his legs.  He was barefoot-- as always--even in winter.  He actually generates little income, because people are reluctant to approach him.  It is that disturbing… unless, of course, you have your earbuds in.  I gestured to the cops, who were way more comfortable here than at the burglary scene where they were surrounded by resentful neighbors… Yeah, he's next, one of them smirked at me… like we were sharing some kind of joke.

Maybe they are next.  Maybe I am next.  On the train downtown from the funeral, a beautifully-dressed black man made room for me.  He was coming from a funeral… just like me, he said.  He showed me his Bible, inside a briefcase.  I told him how the minister forgot the Lord's Prayer and he shook his head.  But I'm sure she was thinking-- she was pallbearing in her way…  let's hope so, anyway… let's hope she wasn't planning her lunch menu, or trying to recall her botox appointment-- or realizing suddenly that maybe she and her husband hadn't had sex since Ash Wednesday-- or a worrisome foreshadowing of future dementia.  Or maybe… hopefully….  she was genuinely stricken by the tearful passionate eulogy of this lovely man's son.   At least she apologized, acknowledged the 'unpriestliness' of her lapse.  23rd Street came all too soon.  I realize I can recite many of the Psalms.  They were my earliest poems, along with Rudyard Kipling.  Whatever-- I could have ridden forever with this man who had religion on his tongue and smelled so good.  I could have crawled into his lap and closed my eyes.  His name is Paul, he told me, as he warmly gripped my hand in parting--- like the apostle.  Like the great love of my young life.  I'm exhausted.  I'm tired from caring too much, from worrying about the guy with the rotting feet on the corner who cries.  I'm exhausted from lying in bed listening to my ghosts, from carrying the metaphorical coffin of my dead lovers and those who have no mourners.

And this morning I am especially weary for the NY Times blogger who was singing the pathetic praises of that barometer of low mediocrity, Patricia Lockwood… whose name is far better poetry than anything she has produced...I ask myself:  'What tale shall serve me here among/ Mine angry and defrauded young?'