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.

View from the Bridge

I grew up pledging allegiance to my country’s flag every morning in nursery school where few of us even understood the words we mostly mispronounced.  We put our hands on our hearts and swore things and then we sang about God and other things.  These repetitions were part of our daily ritual, like a mantra.  At sleepaway camp I sang the Doxology at lunch; another repetition.  I liked recitations; I liked music.  I liked the sound of girls' and boys' voices in unison, like a choir.

Later on we questioned things, we refused to repeat words we didn’t believe in, we found the exceptions to every rule and that became a temporary raison d’etre.  By the time I was an adult, no one was mouthing things in school anymore; no one was pledging-by-rote or reciting things about God except in church.

I traveled out of the country for the first time as a young teenager; I was an exchange student in a totally rural village in Mexico which was an education in itself.  But it was the first time I became aware of being American, with all the advantages—and of the envy and the bitterness of people in a poor culture where plumbing was a luxury and electricity a rarity; where they’d experienced the well-meaning efforts of things like the Peace Corps which too often came off like smug imperialist elitism. Bleeding heart US liberals, rich kids wearing their overalls and charitable deeds like badges of honor.  My Mexican family had seen them digging ditches in their backyards with their transistor radios and their rock-band messaged T-shirts and didn’t much care for them.

This month I’ve been to 4 countries in a short space.  On the trip to Oslo I realized it was the first time I’d left the US since the election.  My SAS plane was packed with Norwegians; they didn’t even bother making announcements in English.  They handed out the required boarding cards the US began issuing after 9/11 because they wanted to know where you were traveling and on what plane in case of some incident.  But this time no one collected them at Passport control.  Maybe it was an oversight, but I felt as if we were downgraded to second-rate status and our priorities no longer have respect or meaning.  Besides, Donald Trump couldn’t give a shit about me or anyone else who is not going to line his gilded pockets.

My friends here in Stockholm have visited New York as often as they could; they’ve always been interested in tracing the origins of contemporary pop culture, like a pilgrimage.  They come to see where Bob Dylan lived, where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death, where Nancy stabbed Sid and where Thomas Wolfe came to produce his thick volumes of prose. I’ve always had a certain ‘currency’, being a native New Yorker; I witnessed things they read about and brushed shoulders with their idols before they were famous.  My love for Stockholm is known; it’s my ‘holm away from home.  I’ve played and sang here, recorded music, been loved, appreciated and entertained.  It is maybe the most beautiful city in the world… and still, I’ve always still had the underlying longing to return to my New York.

Today there’s a photo of not-my-president on the front of one of the daily Swedish papers; this is a social democracy—it’s a liberal and fair society; in the place I’m staying, owned by a middle-class older couple, a sticker on the washing machine shows Michael Moore’s face with the caption ‘Take Back the White House!’  Stockholm suffered a terrorist attack recently but they go on as the free society they are.  I realize I don't feel quite the same as an American… I'm sick of apologizing for a massive political error and an incompetent administration.  I'm tired of the jokes; they're wearing thin.

One of the things I love most about Stockholm is its geography.  The islands all have their own character and are navigable by foot.  Crossing the various bridges is not just breathtaking but gives a unique sense of perspective on the city.  I have always loved bridges; in New York, my son and I walked the 59th Street, the Brooklyn—even the Hell Gate Bridge.  There is always a moment—half way maybe, where you feel ungrounded…suspended… free, in a way, but with that crossroads thing in your head—knowing on every bridge, everywhere, someone has stood and thought about the jump.  It adds another dimension to my bridge-crossing metaphor.

Today I was on an especially high crossing, where I could see the water beneath my feet—the blackish, still-wintry, restless current.  I thought about going home—the end of my stay coming up.. and suddenly I realized going back to my country at this moment of political chaos, shame… provided no comfort.  The gap between going and coming home is significant; this time I feel I’m returning, but not to a place of belonging or security.  It’s like the national rug has been pulled out from under us and replaced with a blanket of golf-course turf.  For the first time in my life, I feel vaguely homeless.  I can only imagine how our US immigrants are suffering—standing on their bridge, with nowhere to return to, nowhere to enter… ‘Send these, the homeless tempest- tossed to me…’ the poem says… but no longer.  I will go home, in name only, like an immigrant, hoping to find my old dream in a place where the symptoms of greed and selfish Titanism are consuming the heart of my city.  Not the world that produced me; not the world of any godly version of society.  Holding the return portion of my roundtrip ticket, I feel duped and stranded rather than safe and welcome.  Fortunately I still have a day to two to contemplate my view from the bridge.  Not so for everyone.

Angst-giving

Does anyone else have one of those friends who is always lecturing about something or other?  This week it's  'New York is the next target-- do you have your emergency water kit and your cash stash and your canned foods and gas mask and LED flashlights all prepared?'  Or it's physical fitness tips-- the superiority of kettle bells, the uselessness of cardio-- dietary guidelines, health warnings.  One of those people who lives from sound byte to sound byte, who reads one mediocre article and is suddenly an expert, who wants to convert you when he is going to be a defaulting believer within weeks-- ?….On to the next trend...

These are the same people who take offense if you reply or contradict or discuss or point out (useless-- they cannot 'listen') whatever-- and despite their enthusiastic advice, they are miserable and lost-- jumping from bandwagon to bandwagon, feeling renewed and reborn for a day or two before they realize or do not realize that they are the same clueless, unhappy, physically unfit mess they were before, during, and after, but somehow convincing you of their superior wisdom seems tantamount to having it.

If they happen to show up for your Thanksgiving dinner, they are always delivering food-channel-worthy monologues and recipes even though your other guests are busy eating and drinking and enjoying despite the annoying analysis by this person who of course doesn't contribute to your meal, or if they do, it's something completely incompatible and odd which they defend and promote by elaborating on its historic and religious and nutritional value, and how it's gluten-free and vegan and futuristic and essential, even though it looks and smells awful and remains undisturbed on every single plate at the end of the meal.  Does the maker notice?  He does not.

Every Thanksgiving I've become a little more skilled at heading these people off in advance by pleading a gig or an entire NBA team coming to pioneer a city-home holiday which I'd won in a charity auction-- spending the day at the food kitchen, a chicken pox epidemic, a broken stove, or all of the above.  I stop answering the phone a week before the holiday and tilt my head sympathetically when one sobs to me that they have no invitation, failing to consider the reason for this, and of course failing to consider hosting their own meal, because they are not a chef, but a professional and skilled guest/food-critic. Not to mention an eater.

I'm committed to the role of host, because as a musician I rarely have the time or resources to give home parties, and I do it for my son, remembering how much I hated childhood Thanksgivings at an aunt's home where I hated the food, the folding chairs at the overcrowded children's table, my uncomfortable sashed dresses and mary-janes, and the abominably unfamiliar dishes emerging course after course relentlessly from my aunt's staffed kitchen.  Not to mention the sideward parental glares admonishing me to sit up, stop whispering and playing with food, etc.

My son is allowed to binge on football, come and go as he pleases, invite whomever to our table, eat without reprimand and with joy, because he loves to eat.  No surprises ever on the menu-- food is traditional, the way he likes it, and it's a happy family day, despite the exhausting and elaborate preparation it requires.  It's a ritual in our household where there are few-- a tradition in a non-traditional family.  Our 'Grace', on the other hand, is democratic, spontaneous and loose.  There is no guilt, hopefully… just food and no rules.

This year, on each of my numerous trips to various shops and stands for ingredients, there were more than the usual number of panhandlers--- not just the calculating ones who know they get extra sympathy on the holiday, although the warm weather didn't help their plight.  But there was one man I'd not seen before who'd been sleeping by the 96th Street subway for days-- no sign, no cup, except the one I placed.  His skin was blackened as though he'd been sleeping on the subway tracks in a fire, his face was leathery and wrinkled and impossible to date with accuracy.  He smelled of stale alcohol-breath and tobacco and unwashed skin.  I watched my neighbors getting their wine and champagne deliveries in cases, their neatly boxed food orders arriving, their kitchen staff running up and down, unpacking brand new Williams and Sonoma appliances and kitchen aids… then I'd go back down the road and pass my subway sleeper… and the whole scenario began to seem to me like a bad living cartoon version of America or New York at the moment-- the have-so-muches and the have-nothings.

As I broiled and basted my turkey-- not from Pathmark this year, because my old store-- part of the Thanksgiving ritual-- the Harlem institution I attended regularly-- has been bought by the same people who have built that hideous too-thin-to-be-phallic building at 57th and Park.  What will become of the overnight shufflers with shopping carts who roll up and down the aisles until dawn, chattering and keeping warm until the sun comes up in winter?  Will 125th Street become the next billionaire's row?  I put out my food, lit my thrift shop candles, put on some cds for guests and enjoyed my warm home, which seems palatial when I considered the cardboard roof of my sleeper.

One of my neighbors this year invited herself to my meal-- she has a new puppy and it requires sooo much work, she explained, with her other dogs and her horses… but she can't leave it for more than an hour at a time… she'll be over at 7, she promised… even though my dinner is scheduled at 8-- but NO, she exclaimed! She has to be in bed at 9!  She also happens to be a Psychotherapist-- one of those people who cannot 'see' themselves because they are so busy analyzing?  I asked her if she'd bring the subway sleeper… she could use her psychoanalytic skills maybe to convince him to stop using drugs and drinking and to seek help?  Anyway, only then did she decide to forego Thanksgiving.

As I listened to various versions of 'Grace'… I thought about how this year I was a little less thankful, a little more bitter, and a little more inclined to try to focus on the 'giving'.  I served the food, tried to pacify the vegans and vegetarians, tried not to inject any moralism into a meal, but I don't feel like doing my 'leftover' Saturday dinner for my lecturer and my second round eaters.  Neither did I bring a plate to my sleeper, like a guilty Christian, because I have noticed the food kitchens are overflowing with helpers at this holiday who are all too willing to fulfill their charitable quota in this civilized way.  Then they forget.  His issue is more complex-- he is not willing to communicate or move; he does not smile.  He does not receive; he does not complain or speak or ingratiate or beg.  He certainly does not lecture, but he is teaching me something, here.

The streets seemed clean, yesterday-- the can and bottle-collectors had a worrisome day off; hopefully the overflow of extra Friday garbage would get them through the weekend.  At one UES church meal, they charged $35 to keep the homeless away.  At the annual AA marathon meal, the homeless had begun to invade… the recovering attendees were complaining… Another of my fortunate friends spent her Wednesday night at a soup kitchen, before flying off on holiday, and in the photo she emailed, with her plastic shower cap, serving the smiling needy, I swear I recognized one of my neighbors in the bread line, pointing at the creamed corn-- the one with the 12-room apartment overlooking Central Park whom I've encountered haggling with the fruit vendor on the corner.  I've zoomed in and blown up the photo several times, and I can almost swear it is this man, taking and not giving, failing to say Grace, demanding his due side dishes, lecturing.

The Letter

Priorities shift on rainy nights.  People drop money with more frequency.  They are rushing and careless and the sound of the rain masks the sound of things falling.  Fewer people show up at their gym.  They park cars carelessly, they drink more; they eat more.  It is a bad time to make a lasting decision; especially an emotional decision.

The sound of passing cars on a rainy night always reminds me of waiting.  I was glad tonight to get home early; I walked back not caring what the rain did to my hair or my shoes.  I took my time, picked up a few coins from the sidewalk, petted a few miserable neighborhood dogs who leaned sheepishly against their walkers, regretting that they asked to be taken out.  At a Madison Avenue corner, a coat and hat was draped over a mailbox.  As I got closer, I realized there was a body inside.  It moved, and I asked if I could help.  The man, who was not more than 35, waved me on-- reeked of whiskey.  Sick, maybe--- or just too drunk to walk.   Waiting, maybe.  For a text, for a car, for a bus… for someone who wasn't coming.  I stood under an awning and watched; he nearly fell into the road a couple of times, and managed to hoist himself up onto the steel curve of the box, like a human back.  The Federal Government helping someone in ways they never intended.  I couldn't leave; I was writing all versions of his sad story-- the diagnosis,  the long and unbearable last days of his terminally ill wife; maybe he'd just come from the hospital-- -the final night.  Or he'd lost his job, his girlfriend had had enough-- his kids told him he's a loser-- his boss caught him in an insider trading scheme…

When I was young and newly married in London, it rained for all 30 days of my first month.  The quiet of our flat, compared to the constant sounds of New York City, was oppressive and strange for me.  My husband was a journalist and worked late; I found myself cooking and waiting like a doll-wife in a doll-house.  I had no friends and even the telephone felt awkward in my hand.  I knew I'd never stay-- it all felt so unreal for me-- and yet I was determined to stay and learn how to play the wife.  It was both sad and happy when my husband came home; he always felt like a stranger.  I could never have married anyone more familiar because my whole concept of marriage was so outside anything that felt like 'me'.   And yet, I loved the way he looked, the way he spoke, and treated me-- like a television sitcom newlywed.  He would have a drink and tell me about his day.  We would go to bed and make love, and he would sleep while I lay awake listening to the rain and the quiet, trying to 'place' myself in the strangeness of the new city.

Of course I eventually realized we were both playing house, and despite a mutual passion, we never really 'crossed over'.  I missed my life.  I missed laughing with my New York friends.  I felt like a foreigner in the city where everyone spoke my language but no one seemed to understand me.  I missed my husband-- even though he was there, and was attentive and perfect, outside of a few drinks too many.  He felt my discomfort and began to panic-- to worry, to agonize, and then to stray.  I was relieved.  It gave me a reason to leave, even though I was already pregnant with his son.

I came back to New York with my huge stomach and the terrifying prospect of motherhood, and then I missed him even more.  I began to realize there was nowhere, ever, from that point on, where I would ever feel 'right';  that the clarity of the distant past is maybe elusive-- and maybe it was never there, although we are all sure of our first loves, and maybe even our second-- of our first heartbreak, and the pure joy of winning something.  But I still couldn't stay,  and whatever tragic consequences I've suffered-- the misgivings, the regrets, the bad dreams and the missing-- all the missing--- well, I am responsible, at least partially.

Tonight there are more sirens than usual; this is a rain-related phenomenon, too, I think.  I am tempted to go back out and see if one of these is for my mailbox man, but I stop and convince myself that a person who couldn't manage to face her own fairytale when it was there cannot possibly unravel the unhappy ending of someone else's.

I was born during hard winter.  I was always relieved that I wouldn't have to face a rainy birthday; it was either cold and sunny or snowing, which is a soft blessing, and not a disappointment.  I feel safe here at the moment; even the early morning birds are not singing, not warning me that I should have slept and I haven't.

So maybe the mailbox guy had to to vomit and needed an anchor.  Maybe he needed a short nap.  Maybe he just couldn't face his nagging wife and kids after a long day, and her resentment that he'd taken the time to have a few when she had slaved over a meal and bla bla bla.  I never stuck around long enough to get there; I feared someone looking at me the way the mailbox man looked at me when I asked if I could help-- with that screwed up crooked face asking silently who the fuck I thought I was to insert myself in his rainy night.

There's a woman on the 6th floor with a bulgy eye who is hostile and a little crazy.  She is bitter and has persecution fantasies and calls the police on her neighbors.  She doesn't pay her rent and defends herself in court and win or lose costs our building thousands.   I am kind to her but tonight in the elevator she accused me of conspiring with the members of the Coop Board.  The rain is affecting her.  I start thinking she could audition for a zombie B-film.  I want to ask her to mail a letter for me.  That makes me smile, and she turns up the volume until I get out on my floor.

Maybe the mailbox guy was one of those visiting angels who will vanish.  Maybe I wasn't supposed to see him; maybe it was a mirage-- a cartoon character who shouldn't have crossed over.  I am home now, getting messages from a booking agent who wants Blues.  Blues, he says.  Yeah, that works for me.  So we'll give him blues.  John Lee Hooker used to sing something about a letter.  He never learned to read or write.  I know I'll never look at that mailbox the same way.  It's become a symbol, the way that most things in our lives become when we just have had enough of what is real or what we want to be real, and we are tired of waiting and tired of missing, and all we have is the slithery sound of wet tires on asphalt and a pair of old boots drying like tired dogs in the dawn half-light.