Not Vegetarian

As a needed literary palette-cleanser I picked up a Murakami novel. I'm beginning to outgrow certain books... or expecting more than I get.  Murakami is always admirable for trying... one often reads for the mystery factor... and he is literate and understands music, art... it's reassuring and good.  This time it was Kafka on the Shore... my expectations were different (the title, lol) but it was okay.

For months I've been waitlisted at NYPL for a couple of Han Kangs... The Vegetarian came last week and I devoured it in an evening. Maybe it was the still-lingering taste of Murakami, but I was underwhelmed. I felt like I'd been there, I'd known these people-- all of them, with their issues and a sort of projected character-narcissism I can't help attributing to the writer?  I am sinning here, I know... but with my limited years of life, diminishing by the moment, I feel annoyed when I am disappointed.  Murakami.. how can one compare (?); but his ambition never fails to impress even when he is less successful. And his characterizations-- well, they are so much less pretentious.  If I had bought this book, I would have felt duped. Apologies to the Nobelist.

A story in the Times today about an eccentric tough professor--  a kind of hoarder... who upon her death left sizable sums of money to selected students.  It felt meaningful, and in the context of recent relentless meditations on death, wills, afterlife... it was a kind of solution. Obviously, being memorialized with a New York Times post-mortem story had its own merit.

The river of death continues to flow past me... the mounting losses among friends, and the utter failure to honor these people who touch us so profoundly... and become a small paragraph-- a post, a broken heart meme... what can one do, without becoming a professional mourner?  Aside from the Pope and former presidents, funeral rituals have become less stringent since Covid.  One adjusted to the idea that a gathering or service would perpetrate more death, and postponed.  Reading history-- whole civilizations were characterized by the way they handled burial and afterlife philosophy.  What one leaves behind has ever-increasing longevity as opposed to the meagre years we are given here.  Not even an eye-blink in the monstrosity of time.

I was forced into a major discussion this week with a teenager who had decided he'd had enough education, and college would be meaningless.  Go ahead, I said... I mean, there are pictures of everything... does one really need to read the captions?  It's useful... and the richness of everyday existence is really measured by the resonance of experience-- how a song reminds us of something.. a piece of melody-- the way some assortment of trees calls up a Monet image or vice versa.  Art-- something not always understood... the process, the pieces.  How will you know about what came before? How will you know what there is to know? Dead writers are not often reviewed in daily media... but they are the foundation.  They are my intellectual family... my teachers. 

Once the actual experience of death is comprehended-- terrifying and unknowable-- it is the eternal obscurity that is depressing.  What we have been, what we have done-- it's just so temporary and unimportant in a culture which deifies the moment-- instant fame. No longer 15 minutes-- it's more like 15 seconds. One wonders that these monstrous people like Sean Diddy Combs are proving evil more memorable than goodness.  They receive enormous media time... and what is goodness?  Pope Francis became a kingpin... we are fascinated, but we go on sinning and wasting time and failing to rescue opportunities.

We cannot save people... The Vegetarian author knows that. I had a longtime best friend who suffered various mental illnesses and I acknowledge I grew tired of being sympathetic. It was exhausting watching her refuse food and company when she was one of the most artistically gifted people I'd ever known.  Part of it-- I was furious at losing my BFF who was better than I was at drawing and maybe singing.  And I adored her. But the option of choosing a kind of death in life seems so selfishly anti-humanitarian.  Not to mention requiring an enormous amount of medical and psychiatric attention. 

Personally I have befriended darkness and process this as a kind of shadow without which there is no light. I have disallowed mental illness but subscribe to psychological variety in the extreme.  I want to see art which explores these channels without shouting about it. Without promotion there is no exposure, I suppose. It is the paradox of this culture which prioritizes marketing above product... which monetizes just about everything... and defines success in amounts. Our heroes are in a way half baked... some of them suffer from the guilty pleasure of fame but many just continue the glam-squad lifestyle and continuous partying.  Maybe it is the new 'B-side' of creativity-- alternating phases of production and then celebration.

I keep returning to the classics-- I am obsessive and worried about my lapses... my failures to discover important things that are no longer popular or even in libraries.  The printed word-- it's so important. Currently I am reading Colm Tóibín's The Magician.. another digression before I start my next difficult 1200 page opus.  It tells the story of Thomas Mann... really just leads one to the writer himself... I wonder if he is read as widely as the Tóibín novel was in this decade.  

Daily obituaries remind... one must memorialize oneself I suppose-- this is the appeal of instagram?  That one's 'legacy' is copious and therefore significant?  And if one is undiscovered, is this worse than death?  There's a universe out there... an infinite, incomprehensible chronology... ever-expanding like the ratio of death to life. Until we have done ourselves in... all of us.  All of the art-- from cave paintings to Stonehenge to the $4 billion-dollars-worth of paintings sold at auction last week.  All of the books... the beautiful buildings-- the Sistine Chapel.  We can all sense goodness... it doesn't necessarily make us famous, but while we are living-- this tiny gift of time-- we can make something, we can leave a mark.  And we can 'not-fail' the ones who came before us, who sit patiently on library shelves, waiting... collecting dust, tottering on being remaindered in the next generation... Eek. Amen. 

Tolite Hostias

When we set out as teenagers to find our so-called path, few of us consider what we will not be, how we will fail at our dreams.  Of course, many of us lack the opportunities of more fortunate friends... and of those, few have the courage to fight the down-winds and up-currents that seem to prevent any version of success as we imagine it.  Fewer still have the genuine nugget of talent that blossoms into valued accomplishment, and the vision and stamina to break new ground.

I could never stand my own writing.  The gap between what I could do and what my 'heroes' did was just too broad.  Be true to yourself, my mentors advised, and like so many, one winds up consciously or unconsciously mining one's own life for material.  This is both our truth, and our betrayal.  While a few ex-boyfriends and husbands might relish finding themselves written into a song, I am one of those people who cringes at old photographs.  Facebook has always been the bitter pill I wash down with joyful memories of actually making music.

While I doubt posterity will be deciphering the messages in my songs and poems, I keep at it.  A few of my friends are urging me to write memoirs; it seems I look back on things with a particular kind of telescopic/microscopic viewfinder that entertains them.  Whether or not my narratives would appeal to a general public is ambiguous; it's hard enough enough to find sufficient audience to support my poetry projects.  Few of us sell many cds, in my circle. I chose this path; like crime, it doesn't pay much.

My parents died several years ago, so I can no longer offend them. My friends-- well, I could flatter them, but I rarely flatter myself, and while I can show up badly dressed and confessional, it's hard to be truthful and not betray people in the process.  Eulogies are kind to me... grief is my companion of late, and the songs I sing in memoriam are uncontested.  

I grew up with a circle of girlfriends who were joined at the hip, at that age when intimacy is easy and secrets are passed like a shared lunchbox.  One especially-- I met her in middle school-- at age eleven? She was sweet and beautiful in my eyes, although my mother described her as 'chubby'.  She was terrible at sports, which was critical among the criteria for mean-girl popularity.  She was not a mean girl.  I defended her to that crowd... I held her hand and chose her. For me her talent-- her intelligence, and her artistic genius... well.. she had the natural ability of a da Vinci... she won the national Carnegie Mellon scholarship... I mean, her draughtsmanship was extraordinary.  She made me things-- she drew me, my dogs.  And we sang-- in choir, at school, in church-- on the way to school... she the alto, I the soprano... it was perfect.  

She and I loved the Kinks, The Who, the Beatles, the Stones.  She had this habit of buying multiple copies of whatever she loved.  Albums in duplicate... Hendrix, Cream... The Who, Traffic.. the 60's... we loved most everything.. we sang.  She introduced me to jazz... we listened to Beethoven, Miles, Ian and Sylvia, Tim Hardin, Simon and Garfunkel, Donovan, Dylan.  A new release was a major event; we lay around at night reading album-cover notes like sacred texts... memorizing lyrics. I played guitar... she drew, I drew, but nothing like what she produced.  It was like love... we slept in the same room most of the time... we roller-skated to school, we did our homework together... we crushed and suffered... she had an old red Valiant she called Red Devil... she picked me up and we had adventures... I was too young to drive. 

Anyway, all through college we wrote, we visited one another... she met all my boyfriends; she married young, some someone with a kind of title who cheated on her with a teenager... and I think it devastated her.  She was never quite the same... immersed herself in Buddhism, with work in a bakery, lived in a sort of ashram for a time. Nevertheless she faithfully attended gigs, exuded great love and support... had a strange new group of people but still came to my Thanksgiving, showed up at my rock and roll impromptu wedding with a home-baked cake, was thrilled when my son was born, etc. Never bitter, never competitive.. always sisterly and loving as my own sister was not.  

So she suffered some terrible griefs and losses, began to shift focus to pathological resentment of her father.  All our fathers post-war were fucked up.  The war, their disappointments and responsibilities... PTSD, their drinking and their quiet suffering wives. I left mine at sixteen and tried not to let his mistakes become mine... but we are never sure about these things.  We share our truths, their lies and deceits. 

Anyway, my beloved friend ended up in and out of various hospitals with serious medical issues, then ensuing emotional problems.. eating disorders and syndromes.. it was relentless.  She was on all kinds of meds... none seemed to help. Me-- I selfishly missed my beloved talented genius companion.  I wanted to shake her out of her emotional quicksand, to get her on the track of extraordinary greatness she deserved, and could not.  

There was an early Elvis Costello song in her name... we loved it. Her highschool boyfriend was a singer/songwriter and wrote one for her.  I had this dream that I would become famous and call her up on stage to sing 'Tolite Hostias' or 'When Life Begins to Fail Me' a-cappella in two-part impeccable harmony.  Her voice was pure and true. Like so many artists, she could see through music; she had a perfect ear. 

At a point in middle age we parted ways.  She refuses to speak to me although I have reached out to her many times.  The tough-love approach I used with my son did not work with her.  I am sure she found me harsh and uncompassionate... mean.   Looking back, all these years later, trying to swim against some time-current, I remember she had encephalitis as a girl-- was so ill; perhaps this altered her brain environment.  It was not all self-indulgence and metaphoric illness but a legitimate diagnosis.  

Some of my old friends will recognize her here.  I doubt she follows me; she unfriended me long ago and shuns me.  Parts of life are unforgiving.  I am surely betraying her here, although I have spared the devil in the details. In writing memoir, one discovers the devil is the details.  I insist here (a perfect word for a proverbial sibling), the loveliness of her remains like a visual afterimage behind closed eyes.

Organizing a life, rather than milestone to milestone, we often skip from betrayal to betrayal.  This is maybe the true value of autobiography; no one knows us like we know/reveal ourselves, at least the writers among us-- outside of a few of maybe our oldest companions-- the ones who propped themselves on the bed beside us at the windowsill, sketched us as we sketched them, harmonized, exchanged clothes, sang to us, read, memorized, cried, ached and longed with the innocent shared honesty of adolescence.  It was not my job to keep her on some path to acknowledgement; it was her choice to veer off. 

I miss her-- her large sedentary cat we called Brick, her red Valiant, her roller skates and her record collection-- our special created language only we spoke, her grace and beauty which like mine has wizened and aged into something unrecognizable.  She is still mentioned in my nightly prayers-- along, tonight, with the request that she forgive me for this and other betrayals. 

Guns and Noses

The great thing about New York is the diversity, the fact that we're all thrown in together-- the haves and the have-nots.  I mean, there are a few neighborhoods that seem exclusive, but that doesn't mean there aren't homeless people and panhandlers and mixed street traffic in those zip codes.  The garbage is maybe higher priority for scavenging; there are 2 or 3 'teams' who go through the Park Ave. bags at night, gathering bottles and cans; some of the doormen and porters actually expect these people and make their job easier…  a kind of symbiotic thing happening.  Besides, the bottle collectors work incredibly hard; this is their sole source of income, they have large immigrant families who don't qualify for assistance, and they put in long hours in the heat, in the rain and snow and frigid weather.  They deserve a kind of medal or uniform.  Benefits.

I live in a mixed building; there are older tenants with very limited incomes and the new hedge-fund generation owners who require high-maintenance services and raise the cost of living here.  For these people, monthly increases are meaningless; for the rest of us, it means going without what many people find essential.  Most of us in Manhattan embrace the diversity. Of course, I don't see many of my more fortunate neighbors at the Harlem grocers' trying to save pennies--  they don't even go to stores; they order.  I do see them occasionally up at Chez Lucienne or the Red Rooster when they have tourist visitors who are curious, but mostly they frequent the same 'hoods that are comfortable for them.  Harlem is Harlem.  However gentrified it gets, you can always walk a block or two and find some funk, some hustling and street preaching.  This comforts me.

But what I don't get is how these long-standing residents of Harlem can't resent the extreme fortune of some of their new neighbors.  I mean, just today, one of the fat hedge-fund guys from across the street was walking his dog (not a common practice-- they have 'staff' to do this).  He has many times run down his classic rock nostalgia rap, just to let me know how cool he was or is-- after all, who else buys up the charity concert tickets at the Garden which cost more than my annual food allowance?  So just today-- I've been struggling with some plumbing issues, my kitchen lights are flickering-- the usual repairs that will erase my Christmas budget-- and the guy asks me how I'm doing as I pass.  How am I doing?  I'm fantastic, I answer, and under my breath find myself muttering 'you fat philandering fuck'.  Ouch.  Bitter am I?  This guy once had me bring one of my starving artist friends to hang work all over his hedge fund offices, then failed to pay for it.  After the crash in 2008,  his office was shut down, his billion dollar fund went belly up, and I had to get a state marshall to accompany us to retrieve the art which was dog-eared and ruined.  And today?  Has the guy paid back his investors?  Of course not.  He has another fat job which enables him to buy his kids apartments and pay some obscene rent for his own massive residence.  His Lexus SUV shuttles them back and forth to the Hamptons and they are spending Christmas skiing in the Alps.  Whatever. The guy has never even apologized.  His wife spent more at Barney's this afternoon than I will earn for the rest of my life.  Are they better than I am?  Smarter? Luckier? They are a kind of lowlife, in my estimation, with good table manners and pretentious foodie preferences.  They talk a kind of talk I understand, and they operate within the enormous margin of what I would like to call the outsider economy:  the staggering sums which do not exist in every single bank, mutual fund, most corporations, hedge funds--- the 95% or so fictional percent which is loaned, invested, inflated--- but which gives them the audacious collateral and income to live the way they do, without regard for you and me, without values.  Jamie Dimon is another one of my neighbors… has he ever paid back the money that bailed him out?  I don't think so.  His financial profile is so fat it would eat up a whole zip code.  What does he get?  A little bit of early stage cancer that will be cured painlessly?  A huge Christmas bonus that would solve the world's hunger problem many times over.  Go smoke your fat cigars in your cork-lined room, Jamie.  I'll bet you don't even pay ATM fees.

This Christmas what I've always known seems to be getting some exposure: the myriads of charitable organizations and not-for-profits which collect millions and millions from us bleeding hearts have been a little busted-- and lo and behold, an average of something like 6% of intake actually goes to the needy.  The CEOs and directors, the 'event planners' and fundraising directives receive not just the lion's share but the pig's as well.  I am not a violent person, but I begin to see how, for those of us who aren't getting high and watching cable shows until we pass out, there is an amount of anger and deep-seated bitterness welling up.  The murder rate is spiking in New York City.  Mass killings are at an all-time high.  The gun culture is obscene and people will apparently use whatever is at hand to vent.  Peaceable negotiation doesn't seem to be an option.  Rich people have everything, and they also have prescription power--- pain killers, anti-depressants, anti-anxieties-- you name it-- access to spas and entertainment events--- good food, expensive wine-- it takes the edge off.  The poor and not-quite-brain-dead-- some are angry.  Values don't seem to be taught, and religion seems to be another tool that is used to manipulate political goals.  Guns seem effective and they are cheap.

Politicians don't have the limited health-care options we do.  They don't even have college loans.  Who is looking out for their fellow man when the average millennial knows very little about the world beyond entertainment and their start-up culture?  I worry about my old neighbors, about the homeless fucked-over  veterans I see hanging out in East Harlem at the methadone clinics.  Some of these guys go all the way back to Vietnam.  What is going on?   People lose their homes because they cannot make a payment-- and then our entire economy and the whole obese banking system is based on the very business of debt.

A friend of a friend put a gun in his mouth and shot himself 2 weeks ago.  Why?  He left no note.  Of course, he had a gun and at least he didn't use it on someone else.  But maybe if his neighbor had thought to look in on him that night, he would have felt okay.  He was a good person.  Scott Weiland died yesterday--- his issues were complicated… but was he not the product of the whole music business?  The pressure of becoming an icon and being simply a person?  Having the adoration of everyone and the true love of no one?  Not that his behaviors helped elicit sympathy.  I'm a little angry today… angry and frustrated, and if I weren't educated and humanistic and psychologically astute,  it might occur to me to take it out on someone else.

Yesterday I visited a mental health facility where some of the patients and participants were exhibiting their artwork.  It was extraordinary and honest.  They were forthcoming about their issues and brave and creative.  They were swimming against a brutal current and doing something valuable in this culture which places a 9-figure price tag on a piece of crap made by an employed staff of a fake like Jeff Koons in the name of art.  Their work made the mainstream art market look sad and pathetic.  But who will see this? Certainly Van Gogh needed no bodyguard in his lifetime.  Nor even a bank in which to keep his money.  Who among us has not been insane or mad, at least temporarily?  I felt much more compassion and connection with their work than I have felt in a Barnes & Noble or the new Whitney for that matter.

The forward momentum of any great culture requires rebels and punks and visionaries.  Without mental health facilities like these, special people might not have access to their own talents-- they might become self-destructive or violent.  Here they are saving not just themselves, but others.  This is incredibly empowering.  They saved me yesterday from my own emotional black hole.  Their hope and painted dreams and failure to conform to a society that is sick was a kind of rescue.

The Sex Pistols had guitars; they might just as well have had guns, but they didn't.  I feel a bit useless picking up my pen, playing my songs, carrying a bowl of soup to the homeless guy on the corner, having a conversation with the crazy lady who howls outside the grocery store in East Harlem.   Stuff builds up in people, and when it becomes unbearable, they use whatever tool or weapon they have for relief.  Life is meaningless if we don't show compassion for one another, if we don't appreciate people and what they do.  Dogs become mean if mistreated; and why are we all so uber-sympathetic to animals?  It seems so possible to rehabilitate a dog, but not a person?  Dogs are cute--even the old ones.  Humans are not always so cute… especially the old and angry ones who spit and curse and disturb.

I've been seeing the same 'Happiness' statistics recently  over and over-- a scientific study was conducted which concluded that 50% of happiness is genetic, 10% circumstantial, and 40% is changeable-- diet, behavior, exercise, social participation, etc. Why in this world of threatened chemical and biological warfare can we not start an epidemic of kindness and compassion?  Statisticians are obsessed with population growth, ethnicity--- nose counts and data--- can they not poll people about their emotional status and consider this?  Let's at least begin with some human honesty because besides our 10% economic and geographical difference, we are all very, very similar.  And for God's or pity's sake, let's take the guns out of Walmart; no one ever really won a competition of any skill by destroying his opponent.  Amen.

The Elephant In My Apartment

Okay…I’m emotionally glued to my TV tonight, listening and not watching, as is my habit...waiting for North Korea to fire off their alleged missile....waiting to see if this is a WMD or a sort of cartoon popsicle-thing as I imagine it, arcing comically into the midst of a PSY video set, gangnam style.  The massive uber-success of that video is weapon enough to piss Kim Jong-un off.  I’m waiting for Time Warner to use this as yet another excuse for my crappy service, waiting for the next hurricane season, the financial jolt that shakes the money-hoarders into another market meltdown, for bird-flu to visit New York City, for the next urban coyote attack, manhole explosion, pipeline meltdown, crane malfunction, police freakout, bank heist--- whatever.  Anything to get our minds off of Kim Kardashian’s pregnancy and Jay-Zee’s trip to Havana.  The fiscal cliff is now just another chronic rash, the NCAA playoffs have left a small vacuum in my household; I hate baseball, and have an entire summer of non-air-conditioned nights in which to contemplate suspending my cable so that my son will finally get his own place, if only to watch the Mets.   

My new favorite television song is ‘Elephant’ which has gone from indie obscurity to rockstar jillion download-status because the Blackberry z-10 ads have touched this little band with a magic techno-wand.   It’s kind of primitive and stupid but the way the lyrics are squeezed into that descending chromatic figure--- is a stroke of awkward brilliance. 

Do I want a Blackberry z-10?  I do not; but I’ll bet the members of Tame Impala got some stock options…I’m not sure that they were even aware of what makes us like them… except the title of their new album, Lonerism, was once the designated religious affiliation of Writerless… (a write-in, on my old school applications)…so we are related in some emotional/intellectual parallel universe. 

The sun did a seasonal warming thing yesterday—enough to remind me that summer is not really going to melt the grey ice that seems to have settled into the crevices of my cerebellum like cancerous mold; the Knopf poem-a-day morning email does little but convince me that indeed April can be a cruel month.  And one of my girlfriends, last night, between rounds of intense relationship drama with a narcissistic Broadway actor, confessed that she’s bored.

Bored, I thought—having postponed maybe 4 decades of aspirations while I raised kids and played in everyone’s band but my own-- is not really a state of mind, but being too lazy to fight off the terminally Boring.  What I am beginning to face is despite all of this futureshock and hyper-acceleration of technology… the actual practical urban universe (not to mention several of the Knopf daily selections) is becoming an insipid kind of virtual amusement park. 

My son looks in the mirror when he speaks to me.  I thought maybe this was a symptom of some new syndrome--- tri-polarity, schizophrenic narcissism… but I also realize there is little actual face-to-face dialogue in his world; with all the people absorbed in their phones, walking and texting, driving and scrolling, etc… maybe this is the closest thing to a relationship.  Besides, I am trying not to worry about things.  Pick your battles, my Mom always advised me… I’d sooner complain about the broken door and the wet towels on the bathroom floor.  Mental illness is going to be his problem, going forward.  My parental obligations are winding down.  I’m pretty sure I’ll eventually get grandchildren and his wife will be too busy texting to notice that her husband talks to mirrors.   It could be a Lee Strasberg thing, anyway. 

‘Remember when we had to do all our telephoning before we left the house?’ one of the newscasters just asked, snickering… I still do not have a cellphone, I couldn’t care less who wants to reach me most of the time.  I have been noticing that I do get fewer calls--- my friends are so used to immediate phone gratification that having to wait until I pick up their voicemail is annoying.  Boring.  My mother has forgotten how to use her phone, and travels only in her mind, so she is constantly thrilled when I call.  I’m not sure she knows who I am, but she is happy to hear her name. 

I read on trains—novels, poetry… I find myself gravitating toward thrift shops and miscellaneous estate auctions where there is an absence of marketing and I have to rely on my own brain and eyes to filter searches.  My clothing style is unclassifiable.  My library is unlike those of my neighbors.  My visual memory still works; in fact, I’ve noticed that without labels and tags, even some art experts have trouble identifying anything more than 25 years old.  Google pre-prioritizes image searches; paintings done by formerly real people without websites…get lost in the shuffle. 

Spring is tough for me; I’m a bit of a perennial hibernator now--- a recluse.  I’m practicing Lonerism like a kind of emotional celibacy and it suits me.  It’s not that I’m unloved; I’ve become so accustomed to not being nurtured or coddled, that any extended hand gives me the creeps.  Maybe I was deprived of this kind of relationship, this kind of marriage; I admit to having rejected it, down the line.  It bored me, it threatened me with complacency and mediocrity.  With settling. 

So here I sit, listening to the Babel of my overnight television, preparing myself for a project--- for a subtle creative earthquake, for my summer storm of productivity…

I believe it will arrive…hopefully before the North Koreans scramble our power grid, and before the first serious heatwave drives me into Starbucks, before Kim and Kanye’s  baby, and before I need a cellphone to swipe myself into the subway.  But I can almost feel it now--- a pinch of anxiety… a breakfast visual-- with milk-white linens, pastry…an evaporating blood-scent mixed with blue air…medium rare moons…

And here it is again--- right on cue-- my little Australian trio with their late-night Elephant-in-the-TV refrain…‘too bad your chances are slim’… words of Lonerist encouragement.  We the anarchists of boredom will get what we need.  It is not unwritten.