What We Miss

To distract myself this week, I'm reading Annie Ernaux.  Turns out it's neither distracting nor particularly shattering.  It does remind me of this nagging voice begging for my own solution to memoir.  We're on a kind of cusp, at this age, where things surface like 8-ball messages, and one fears this will be the last appearance in the cranial integuum. The palimpsest sensation, Annie calls it, conjuring Proust-- uncontested master of the medium-- who never won a Nobel prize. 

I want to go home, my mom repeated over and over in the depths of her dementia.  I am beginning to understand this more as I adapt and re-adapt to a culture which increasingly relies on media for memory. One neither remembers nor forgets; it's all on Instagram. My older friends often post their small accomplishments, as if soliciting accolades they are no longer winning... musicians craving applause from their home studios and bedrooms. I try to be amused.  Like memoir, there is a boundary between resonance and sentimentality.  I still demand a certain level of creativity from myself and fear falling short. 

Thinking back over years with a predominant audio/visual memory, I separate personal eras by rooms-- by apartments, the series of homes we have as an urbanite.  I can still 'see' the nursery where I spent my first two years in a city apartment.  My psychiatrist friend finds this extraordinary; most of the 'frame' is attached to a moment of frustration-- wanting to climb out of my crib to join my family in the hallway. So it's primarily an emotional memory; the visual is something I reconstruct from looking around me, as though it's a photograph.

For some reason today I remembered the first weeks with my son; I'd come back from London, expecting to return, but ended up stuck here with no money, no job... shocked and unprepared for motherhood in a moment when post-natal syndromes were not discussed. On my own, I found a decent job, toured the day-care options.  On the upper east side there was a well-reviewed sort of nursery-- with kind women, clean facilities. Rows of hospital-style cribs held sleeping infants in their little happy pajamas... it was cheerful and peaceful. But suddenly I became maternal... I panicked. The idea of dropping my tiny son every morning to this strange 'home' seemed just wrong.

So I left... I cried, sat in a church pew asking Jesus what I should do-- temporarily living on a dollar bag of yesterday's doughnuts or rolls I picked up at the local Genovese store (how I miss it)-- to support my little family. Somehow I managed... wheeling a carriage up and downtown, getting up once a week at 5 AM and taking a commuter train to leave the baby with his Grandma for an 8-hour shift, returning at the end of the day... I was a little like that TV commercial with the waitress apologizing to her boss for her child, promising it would not happen again. And I was exhausted.  At night I did bass gigs to keep my sanity. Occasionally I dragged him to songwriting sessions and even studios.  Not ideal but we survived. 

I imagine not just my own childhood memories but his... where would they have been had he spent the first two years in a sterile room with twenty other infants?  Would he have become a basketball player? I doubt his little brain would have been the impressive street-smart product of extensive itineraries around the city. 

It occurs to me, watching the constant parade of young parents with their prams and strollers, how the technology has changed everything.  It is simpler to 'watch' one's infant with a caretaker, to access help in an emergency... and also to yield to the temptation to use the phone-- to chat, to respond-- to shop... order food, watch a movie... anything.  In my time I had only the baby for conversation-- I talked, sang to him-- I read Proust, incidentally, out loud.  It was the language-- the sounds... it didn't matter what I said-- it mattered that it was the two of us... a kind of dialogue. We bonded emotionally... we were stuck with one another. We went to the park and played. As he grew he followed our travels on the subway map and learned to read by navigating station signs. He was extraordinary and I loved every minute of those trying and sleep-deprived years. There was a phrase Annie used (trans.) referencing the use of 'life' in her writing: 'we drained reality dry'.

In this era of autism diagnoses, of blame games for learning disabilities, etc... we rarely look at our technology habits as a culprit. To me, there is an epidemic attention deficit; I rarely feel that conversational palpable intimacy... people are texting or receiving or making notes or looking at something. I don't see how children have not adapted to that by becoming less responsive, less investigative.  Babies too often hold tablets and phones and amuse themselves with a screen rather than a sandbox.  Maybe it's an urban thing... but I see it everywhere.  And I talk to babies; I love them. But society is chronically distracted. 

Dementia seems the complement to autism... the denouement of awareness and focus.  As a precursor, I am noticing adults failing to 'see' things... sensitive to being criticized but rarely able to access their own self-perception.  We are visually hyperconscious but socially a little myopic.  We miss things... how can one possibly sustain this statistically staggering screen time and the emotional connections daily life used to present as normalcy?  Random conversations, meetings, discoveries.  Meditations and daydreams. Unanticipated moonrises and spontaneous sunsets... that feeling one has lived a lifetime in a single spectacular unpredictable analogue day.  Where have they gone? 

I rue the time I spend texting on the phone my son makes me carry for safety... but it is mostly turned off. Some of my friends get annoyed that I do not answer calls unless I'm home on my landline and it's a genuine 'call', a conversational visit. Texts are deceptively two sides of an actually one-sided dialogue... I can't shake the feeling that increasing phone-use equates to missing life.  Thinking of giving it up altogether.  Digital memory is not the same, and forgetting is all too allowable when we feel the false security of instagram and Facebook records of moments.  The meaning and quality of memoir will surely change; I feel the urgency to transcribe what I recall; whether or not there will be audience is another quandary.

Sowing Oates

It occurs to me today that this is the quintessentially perfect Sunday... the relentless comfort of nonending rain, like a kind of temporary seascape, because we all seem to inherently believe the blue-sky reassurance will resume-- the status quo. Weather optimism doesn't exist for me; I prefer the grey interludes, wish that they would extend.  There's a fishing port in Vestland, Norway where precipitation is near-constant; the mere thought comforts me. 

My neighbor who hates discarding things has been leaving her New Yorker issues outside my door.  While it's hard for me to turn down reading opportunities, I generally avoid magazines-- just so many books here wagging their paper fingers, reminding me of countdowns and lost hours.  So this morning I read the recent Joyce Carol Oates profile.  I can't seem to get enough of JCO biographical although I suspect she might have disliked this one-- at least the ending.  She is the single most prolific writer in a present which seems unprecedentedly chocked with distraction. 

JCO is an odd, quasi-Goth personification of the dark and odd and not pretty.  And yet, she has had a life of rarely paralleled literary productivity and not one but two enviable marriages. I'm never sure which of these accomplishments I admire more, although a statistic was mentioned-- that one needs to write two pages daily to rack up a lifetime total of 100 novels. Remarkable the time one wastes.

One tends to compare one's life to that of these exemplary people. While JCO is a sort of flawed human, I have always admired her for what I assumed was her frank self-assessment and her lack of self-pity.  So much of excessive compassion and charity is time-consuming.  I am not just guilty, but guilty of the guilt-- one of those bleeding-heart characters who cannot sleep after a global tragedy, who absorbs the suffering of others and cannot turn away from a depressed friend. It is a choice, I know, and it has affected my output, although this, too, is a human choice. I try to dispense with regret the way JCO seems to have little patience for practicing empathy, except maybe with respect to her cats.  And children-- well, not in the equation.

Of course I am not qualified to judge.  Her novels are excellent, although, admittedly, I have never granted her the status of literary genius.  She has her critics-- Truman Capote was harsh, Michiko Kakutani as well, and personally I have found myself arguing both for and against her talents.  I am also not sure whether acknowledgment helps those few who have their own standards of excellence.  We see them rarely in this polluted sea of celebrity and fame where social media followers fill virtual stadiums for performances that would otherwise remain where they belong-- inside a phone. 

I have known some famous writers... through dates, acquaintances... I even babysat for one or two.  When I moved to this apartment I was quietly stalked by one who lived on my block.  He showed interest in my work; I was flattered.  He even came to a couple of my solo gigs, wrote me literary postcards and gifted me small stacks of books and proofs for discovery.  Years later, I realize he probably just wanted to mark me off as one of his many conquests, but I felt 'considered' sitting in his library, listening to his startling confessionals, being called late at night for an opinion on an essay he was writing.  

It also occurs to me that I could have written a profile of this writer; others have done so, and the time we spent was more than any random interviewer might have received. Journalists craved his dialogue, and he seemed to shun publicity at a time when the act of doing so only solicited more curiosity. And yet while I coveted and collected our time together, I feared his disfavor more.

As happens so often with one's mentors, his 'disciples' were distinguishable by the stylistic choices on which he insisted.  The women often slept with him; one stalked him noticeably, kept a jealous eye out.  He openly spoke of his sexual encounters and the preferences and oddities of his writers.  Not wanting to become one of his anecdotes, I kept a distance.  After a while I began to tire of his editorial preferences; I could predict where his crossouts would come, how he would leave maybe three lines untouched in a long poem. 

One day I wrote a sort of nasty piece which obviously featured my writer-neighbor in an unflattering character.  He never again spoke to me.  All our intimacies, our 'back-and-forths'-- the postcards, the gifts, the phone-calls-- they stopped.  Dead.  I went on to continue writing in my own way, without the critical 'eye' of my neighbor's editorial penmarks.  It felt freeing. After a year or so, I apologized.  I still deliver copies of my books; he does not reply. 

I saw him on the street yesterday; he's old, but still commanding in a way.  He's rich and a little powerful and has plenty of help and the kind of academic reverence an old writer merits.  He doesn't like the work of Joyce Carol Oates; I know this. I'm not sure he likes his own work, at this point.  He dislikes biographical pieces and yet collects them. He has written his own-- some as literature, and they are fairly brutal and quite good. I have a shelf of them-- most inscribed to me from several years ago, when I seemed to matter in his life, and it mattered to me that I did. 

On these days when my reading matters more than any writing I produce, I conclude that an artist, in the end, is considered so when his output exceeds input in significance.  By sheer number, Joyce Carol Oates has set in stone her reputation. Whether or not she will receive her Nobel prize, or be considered worthy by her peers, might matter or not. My neighbor will be written about, I suspect. As for me,  I will never know whether it was my poetry, my bass-playing or the length of my legs that engaged him and deceived me into believing, for a time, in my own merit. And I suppose two pages a day is manageable. 

Getting There...

Last night as I made my counter-clockwise lap around the reservoir, the southern view of the city-- the dense lego-disneyworld that is midtown in 2022-- had disappeared in the mist.   Like a reverse mirage, an inverted city in the clouds... everything above the 5th floor had vanished. The other views were intact... but midtown was gone.  Eclipsed.  A kind of spell.

A few years ago I wrote the story of my secret college romance-- how we sawed the padlocks and doorbolts off of a condemned historic campus building stairwell, climbed our way to the top and made a little nest there in the tower.  There were very few objects to be discovered-- mostly dust and must and dried leaves... but there were odd pages scattered everywhere-- from those useless desk calendars that show nothing but a number in huge font you tear off daily.  As though this was a requisite student dorm provision.  

Anyway, it took us weeks to clean out and create our little haven, sneaking up after midnight, climbing the creaking stairs with care, using candles not flashlights. In the end, we stupidly built a little fire because it was freezing... and the draughts somehow stirred up the thin calendar pages and they flew around like ghosts. It was a little haunted by reputation, the turret of Witherspoon Hall, but the effect from outside, had any one looked, was like one of those snow-globes, with the relics of time, of students past and gone, blowing around us. Of course we were seen-- the fire-- busted, even arrested for trespassing (I crossed out the word on my paper court summons and wrote in  'Housekeeping' which elicited a smirk from the school Dean).

I'm reading Jean Christophe.  He was a musician... a composer-- often misunderstood, often misunderstanding-- impatient, bitter, loving, frustrated, callous, sensitive... all at once, like most of us.  It's uncanny to read something more than one hundred years old that speaks so deeply to my conflicts of creativity vs. recognition... to be who you are and be overlooked or underseen, or misunderstood... to witness the celebrity of mediocrity and go on-- to be who you are meant to be.  The pages of my Jean Christophe-- all 1700 of them-- are thin and fragile... I don't know if they could withstand another read. But they remind me, as I turn (I'm about 1000 in) carefully, of those calendar squares in that room nearly 50 years ago now.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, I make a habit of looping the reservoir nearly every evening.  It was a way of marking time, or the lack thereof-- of managing my terrible grief at the loss of Alan.. and subsequent griefs, as they come, with acceleration.  I have always been afflicted with a kind of homesickness... maybe it's just an inherited vulnerability to nostalgia.  Even when I travel or tour, I miss my home.  I belong here.  But I've noticed some of my friends developing a kind of homesickness that keeps them from leaving their place.  They are not just stuck but sad.  It's as though the pandemic gave them a lethal dose of nostalgia-- of regret, of time-anxiety.  Of all the terrible relentless phenomena of existence-- pain, the inevitability of death, disease, the exhaustion of men striving to achieve the unachievable... there is only one that truly never relents, and that is time.  It waits for no one, as they say... and when we are captive, imprisoned or quarantined- it scalds, it scars.  

My mother would be turning 98 this week, had she lived.  I count her among my losses as I embrace the four horizons of my city... I see young mothers on the street now again... the way they touch their newborns-- with such incredible tenderness and wonder and empathy-- and as life goes on... well we try but we lose that capacity in our person-to-person communication.  At the north end of the park so many homeless men and women trying to create a little nest out of found things-- trash and uncollectibles-- no one will ever touch them with that tenderness.  They are the wounded, the ruined, the unfortunates.  

Don't look back, Lot warned his wife.  Nostalgia can be lethal.  Among the misunderstood, the missed, the overlooked and under-recognized.  Great writers have written these books--- like Jean Christophe which is surely under-read although well rewarded in its time.  Not dark yet, wrote Bob Dylan, so many years ago, when it was already getting there.  He persists... in the grey, knowing as he did, way back... that time was a bitch... he is more honored and rewarded than ever.  Ironic that he and Romain Rolland received the same prize, a century apart. 

We are creatures of memory.  Things disappear, but we see them.  If I looked back I could see that tower room with the warmth and the discovery and the papers flying around like warnings.  My boyfriend was to die young.  We didn't look back... who does, at that age? There are days when I don't know why I continue-- to write, to sing, to play a little.  The fate of non-recognition, in the context of time, seems less harsh.  Still, I wish I could say, like the (slightly altered) Robert Johnson lyric, 'I know my reader if I see her in the dark,' but I can't. There are days I feel Sisyphean or like Penelope. I love these images.  

My mother in the end was incapable of understanding.  I showed her my poetry books and she looked with the same blank eyes that came to be hers. I belong here... I have the comfort of Jean Christophe today and the assurance that the four skyline views from the reservoir will reappear.  We must do what we can with what we have. What worries me most today are the friends that have chosen to become salt. 

Veterans Are Us

The day after.  Election night was a bad dream, I prayed.  But it wasn't.  Wednesday was a wash-out; I barely left the house, was tired of answering calls, got no comfort in commiserating or listening to pundits on television.  Exit polls are disturbing; our own exit from this country is maybe the only relief.  By Thursday I had to re-enter the world.  The weather was near-perfect, and I tried hard to manage my affairs, to face again the senseless near-death agony of my friend who is using all her strength to tolerate my pathetic words of sympathy and hope.  She did manage to quip that dying in a Republican regime doesn't seem quite so bad.  For some, like the woman who suicided on 69th street last month,  it will be a choice; for others, it will be a cruel reality.  For my friend, I am praying there will be some kindness in dying-- that it will feel as though some blanketing arms are reaching out to take her to a place where good mothers exist,  'they will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem'.

The Sisters of Mercy is the first song I truly fell in love with.  I lay on my floor and listened-- over and over-- first to the Judy Collins record my Mom had bought.  With the sunshine and yellow flowers on the cover, these songs gave me hope that somewhere there were things worth discovering that were not just in books and in museums.  Sisters of Mercy was a musical church for me.  More than the folk songs I'd loved-- and the rock and roll-- it was a hymn I could carry inside me and recite.  The lyrics were not just magical but holy.  I researched the writer, Leonard Cohen, rode my bike to the record store and found his album.  His voice was strange, but all poets on recordings had sounded strange to me-- the audio Dylan Thomas had been a shock.   These songs were an alternate world of sad comfort.  I could read their address by the moon.  My Bob Dylan was a troubadour, but this man was my patron saint.  I forgave him everything and drank daily at his well in the solitude of my young teenage room.

The fact of Leonard Cohen has not always lived up to the myth of the music.  He was flawed and womanizing; insecure and egotistical at once.  His search for spiritual truth seemed pretentious in a way; his sadness is epic, but who among us is able to tame these demons?  I only know these songs became part of my canon.  His poems and novels disappointed me, but the songs-- especially these early ones-- allowed me to become who I am with a little more confidence.

I've been reading a compilation of interviews with Roberto Bolaño… a few essays and remembrances interspersed ...He, too, is among the choir of voices who have sweetened my life.  The martyrs of art and poetry who have given everything to take us on a journey of 'core', who were not afraid to open curtains and break windows.  They are not all for the weak of heart-- or maybe they are.  Artistic pioneers are brave people.  They explore psychological caves and alienate others.  They sacrifice much to become who they are.  In our culture today, these people have groupies-- lovers, fans, followers.  Does this matter?  I suppose so.  Bob Dylan is about to receive the Nobel Prize-- not that he doesn't deserve accolades, but this one seems misplaced. Then again there is Leonard.  Comparing him to Irving Berlin, as Dylan did in that prescient article in The New Yorker last month, seems a little too 'surface' for my Sisters of Mercy.  Leonard takes us into our own inner church, provides the personal hymns that play alongside our sorrows and joys.  He is the bed on which we lie and know there are deeper things still, and that our tiny human tragedies can be woven into some beautiful fabric of meaning, if only we were up to the task.

I miss Bowie; I miss Prince; I miss Roberto Bolaño and Lorca and I thank God for their brand of bravery on this Veteran's Day where I salute my Dad who was a true wounded hero of the 101st Airborne (the military alma-mater of Hendrix, I informed him once, which provoked a scowl) and was duly decorated and honored.  He, too, was a poet, although his modest lyrics were recorded only in tattered war-letters to my Mom.  He ridiculed my music and my heroes-- Leonard Cohen was an anomaly for him-- and yet I maybe inherited some passion he possessed.  My record albums helped me cope with my teenage years.  Music was listening to me, even if I could never reach my Dad.

So, blinded as we were by the hideous 'sunrise' of day 2 and 3 of the Trump victory-world, that sun was reverse-mercifully eclipsed by the passing of Leonard Cohen.  Yes, mercifully he left the world before our elections; from the David Remnick interview,  I suspect he was not thinking too much of American politics, dwelling perhaps on the spiritual, trying in his way to promote or accept his new album-- to share this with his son, to try to allow himself pride in a project that was thankfully completed, like Bowie's, before his death, and which will allow us-- like Bowie's-- to glimpse a little of his transition, his process-- to share the end with a great man.  We even were privileged to read his final email to the immortalized Marianne who pre-deceased Leonard, but not by much-- a kind of closing of some circle, in a way.  He seemed resigned and peaceful; after all, he accomplished so much.  A prize seems somehow cheap and silly for this man.

My friend is nominally comforted by the number of lovely souls who have crossed over this year-- who have paved the road to the next world with music and understanding and have had to leave this one in which they thrived.  They leave us  mourning and devastated-- not wanting to go on without these people who for some of us seem more a family than our own.  Not so with my friend; she has no visitors aside from me and a few paid medicaid nurses and aides who are sent to ensure that the apparatuses and tubes do not malfunction, to investigate the next hideous indignity of this process of agonized dying which merits no medals or awards.  She rarely has the energy to even listen to music; her enthusiastic support for her candidate was limited and her dismay is palpable.  And she managed, heroically, to vote.

This morning I awoke after only a few cheap hours of sleep-- with that heaviness of mourning.  I experienced this recently with my father's passing, and with the death of David Bowie which came at such a cold and light-deprived time of year.  The leaves have just turned; they burn with fiery radiance in the sunlight around the reservoir in Central Park.  In a few days they will be gone.  Soon I Will Be Gone, says my favorite Free song-- over and over.

Some of us cry for ourselves, for our  lost and missing years when we were beautiful and well loved.  Most of us, unfortunately, face older years with challenges and heartbreak.  Life is fraught with loss and pain; even joy, in these years, has a shadow and is lovely with a kind of regret.  We older people feel a bit exiled; we are emigres of our own youth, of maybe the core of our lives; we are missing so much and so many at this moment, and each day brings the end nearer.  The four years of this regime are precious years for Baby Boomers; how much productive life will we have left?  Must we drag around the weight of this national shame, this arrow in the heart of our young passion and the liberalism we thought we invented in the 1960's?

Yesterday I stopped into several churches.  Some were closed;  one West Indian church was not just open, but had set out bottles of seltzer for the thirsty-- crayons and paper for children.  I was alone in a pew, listening to someone clumsily practicing Bach on the pipe organ as the sun streamed through the stained glass.  It was warm and homey.  Some of their parishioners are bound to be illegal immigrants and the idea that a congregation who welcomed me in their absence would be threatened-- well, this, too, was another stab.

I cannot bear to play the Sisters of Mercy today.  There is not a line in that song that doesn't resonate with every small and larger tragedy I've witnessed.  Like a new lover or a prism-- it endlessly fascinates and touches me everywhere.  It's all too raw, too sad.  Reciting it to my heart reminds me that sorrows are relentless-- the machine of life moves on, planets turn, storms happen, death is inevitable for the good as well as the ugly; beauty is transitory, but music is a path-- from God to man and back again, from life to death-- from lover to lover, from mouth to heart-- it fills the Cathedral of our loneliness if we will only enter and listen.  It is and always was waiting for you when you thought that you just can't go on.  Let us listen and learn -- really listen, and open our hearts.  Healing is impossible-- we are truly the walking wounded, but maybe that is okay.  The disappointed and the ones left behind… especially for us, and those who've been traveling so long.

We Can Be Heroes

I'm not sure if anyone else saw the article by Max Blumenthal essentially shooting holes in the legacy of nobel prize-winner Elie Wiesel.  His bitterness was maybe poorly timed, and no matter how valid his points, we are all flawed and human and we make mistakes, and fame not only does not assure protection but maybe leaves us more vulnerable to poor choices and insecurities.  The bloggers who obsess about Mr. Wiesel's disappearing tattoo… well, I'm not sure their vendetta is worth the energy… his death seems to have made this all a bit moot.  

I had a personal interest in the death of Mr. Wiesel.  Thirty years ago,  for some time, our telephone land lines were one digit apart.  In the days of answering machines, I often got messages for him; one day I looked him up (he was listed) and called to tell him I'd received some of his medical test results in error.  We had a friendly little New York City exchange, and that was that.  Several months later I ran into him at a huge NYPL dinner honoring local authors… and I introduced myself.  I was pretty then--- dating a well-known writer, and Elie was charming and warm.  He called me several times when he'd got voicemail he was certain was intended for me… we talked a little, laughed a little… a New York connection.  I left that apartment, and the landline, 19 years ago.

Recently someone offered to take me to a restaurant-- they mentioned the name of a well-reviewed bistro in my neighborhood.  I rarely go out these days.  I've dispensed with everything but the barest supplies; I walk and drink my coffee black.  A little bit of hunger is good for imagination.  But the name of the place brought back an association. Years ago, a Goldman Sachs young wunderkind asked me to help him buy some art--- he needed me to see his new Park Avenue apartment-- unusual in those days for a young bachelor-- and of course he insisted on taking me to dinner first.  I cared little for these suitors back then, when I was a marketable human commodity…  but he was a friend of someone I liked, and I repped artists in those days, and was thrilled to help place their work.  So of course he was a little interesting and ivy-league smart, even though he would never have been my 'type'...and we drank some expensive wine, etc.  The bistro closed.. and our errand began.  Minutes after entering his massive apartment, the guy literally attacked me-- the term date-rape hadn't been invented. Yes, he professed his eternal love among other expletives… I can remember the way he smelled and his custom shirt…. the beautiful cotton… things like this cross your mind in these moments of extreme observation… like magnifications.  I had on a black Norma Kamali dress-- he was pulling at it like an animal… and somehow I managed to kick him in his balls and run out.   My dress was never the same, and that restaurant which remarkably has thrived over the years--  a personal taboo.  In my suede purse was a copy of 'Night'.  I lost it in his apartment, when my things dumped out… and I bought myself a 48-cent copy at the Strand ( they were common)-- my reading copy which I pulled out to look at after I heard about Mr. Wiesel's death.  And I recalled the incident.

In the context of life, this was nothing.  Children are abused and raped and beaten by relatives, parents and kind people.  Politicians profess benevolence and tip badly, yell at staff, have little compassion for neighbors.  And we are all so guilty of ignoring people in need.  Then again-- what good can we do? I spend days trying to help women who refuse and sabotage and self-pity and destroy and use me up.  Brilliant musicians and young guitarists make me cry with their talent-- and drink my sympathy down with their habits.  Does it bother me that this Goldman guy is one of the Masters of the Universe now?  Does his massive fortune make me crave revenge?  Not really.  I left his house that night and discarded the incident like a cigarette butt.  He has a paid army of lawyers on staff because he needs them.  These people commit petty sins and have them erased or charge and convict a dead pedestrian in a hit-and-run.  I have my pride and maybe he has the memory.  It hadn't crossed my radar until the mention of that restaurant triggered.  And then the Elie Wiesel connection.  I'd thought about his hideous tale of survival, the historic retelling, the way he became a sort of hero or symbol of this episode, and used his life to spread the memory-- the lesson.  At the time it had put things into a kind of perspective and helped me process my little violation.  Do I have a physical scar, a tattoo?  I don't.

It is well known that Elie Wiesel's foundation and personal fortune were decimated by the Madoff scandal.  Having built a sort of personal citadel based on his platform of survival, he was economically hijacked… suffered a late-life personal tragedy not of holocaustic proportion, but the irony of these Jewish charities being the worst-fated victims of the Ponzi scheme is double-edged.  So whatever Elie Wiesel did that may have been less than stellar in his final chapter of comeback seems less heinous to me.  He was old, he was tough-- had made some shocking choices in his youth in the camps, and confessed in his account.  His death was acknowledged by political leaders and dignitaries everywhere.  His moral status in history is assured.  The book will remain in its place of honor.  It will be read as a document, as a memoir, as a testimony of bravery and courage and survival.

The third irony occurred at the funeral-- a private ceremony on Fifth Avenue when mourners were startled by the sound of an explosion, attributed to a stray July 4th device or celebration.  Later on it was revealed that this was the sound of a 'random' mixture of chemicals in a container left in a plastic bag-- just yards away--  literally blowing the foot off of a young strong boy who minutes before was innocently exploring the park, enjoying a holiday with friends… when some hideous design of fate caused him to be in the right place at exactly the wrong moment-- one false step and his life was radically altered.

As Elie Wiesel was laid to rest in a civilized world, his coffin driven away in a hearse before rows of celebrities and famous men and women… it was a reminder that there is no guarantee of peace-- not anywhere, not for any of us.   No matter how good or evil we may be,  we are not safe… we can tiptoe through our lives or we can forcefully march through streets laughing and shouting… there are attackers and people with guns, and predators, and bitter victims seeking revenge… and there are accidents-- careless acts of preoccupied phone-texters or sleepy truckers or drunk distracted motorists who get behind their wheels thinking about their bed and end up in a line-up of coffins.  But there is no clear path for any of us and we can only try to kiss the dawn when we wake up, and cross ourselves when we step off a curb and a cab just misses us.  We marked another Independence Day and fireworks were displayed in peace… despite a few weekend gunshots and a poor ill-fated boy in the Park who will go on to win races with a prosthetic foot, I predict.  Catapulted into some version of forced heroism--  like Mr. Wiesel, in a way, he is forever changed.

The Poet Winks (ogonblicken)

The death of Tomas Transtromer last week felt sad for me.  My Swedish friends had gifted me all of his books, and although I could never summon the passion he seemed to elicit from his countrymen, I also recognize that poetry suffers from translation.  He seemed an underdog for the Nobel prize, though a Scandinavian frontrunner for years, and beloved by a certain cult of New York musicians like Tom Verlaine.  His interviews were charming, and while I was living in Sweden I learned a stroke had left him without speech, but still writing poetry.  Perhaps this informed his work; he was also unable to use his right hand, but continued to play piano, which he'd loved, with his left.  My image of him, from what I've read,  is that he became weightless and papery at his end, and dissolved into the mystical landscape he evoked.  We mourn not the man, but the fact that there will be no more poems.  Yet the ones we have will grow;  the Nobel prize assures this.  I dreamed of him-- of my Swedish ex-boyfriend singing a song I think I wrote for him, in my dream… but of course all of this disappeared in the morning.

I've always been obsessed with bed art.  Paintings of beds, sleeping women… people at their most vulnerable and most 'open'.  The way you must trust, in order to sleep--- trust your partner, trust your surroundings, yourself.  You must not fear being apprehended in the act of dreaming, when you are most naked, when you are maybe most beautiful.  The intimacy of sleeping with someone the first time is much more difficult than the sex.  Passion crosses over into love while you sleep and dream.  It is like fresh, wet paint that becomes a painting.

Of course people like Tracey Emin choose to throw this in our face, to blow it up, as artists do-- because the act of betrayal, of abandonment, is maybe most flagrant in the context of beds… of coverings and uncoverings, of couplings and uncouplings.    I swear to f---ng God I never slept with that woman,  one of my drummers used to assure his wife, because he'd only had sex with some woman in a bed.  But it calmed his wife.

Lately I find myself more passionate about art than about men.  I seem to have outgrown my expectations of people, and find myself drawn to art like a kind of religion.  The pursuit of paintings obsesses me in my non--working moments.  At night I scroll through auction after auction, looking for my mate,  the way maybe some people are searching match.com and OKcupid for human completion.  At an art fair this weekend, I was browsing the wares in some booth and one of the senior gallery staff kept trying to start up a conversation.  Finally, as I left, he asked to see my necklace.  I'm trying to flirt with you, he explained.  But I very seriously told him the brief story of my simple jewelry.  I didn't answer that I was trying to meet the art.

Something I learned from running an art gallery years ago-- is how to make a decision.  Because nothing in my life was ever really clear cut--- except these paintings.  There was a budget, there was a price; there were things that were possible or not quite possible, and I had to deal with the boundary of impossible.  I learned how to trust myself to make a selection.  I learned how to separate things that were superficially beautiful from things that would grow on me, that would reveal themselves to me, with time.  It is a lesson that informs my life, and one I cherish.

So Friday night I did bring home a painting, after agonizing between mine and another with which it seemed to be having a dialogue on the wall.  I felt like I was interrupting a conversation, a relationship…. but to take both seemed greedy.  And the one I brought home spoke to me.  It somehow had something to do with the Transtromer landscape which I had never quite grasped, but there in its mystical moonlight, I could sense this transition.. between evening and night-- between life and death.  All night I was sleepless-- maybe longing for its companion, even though the artist himself had been present at the sale and seemed emotionless about whichever one I selected.   I awoke many times, went into the next room and turned on the light to see my lovely painting, but felt its solitude, its strangeness.  Saturday I emailed the painter; could I pay him next week, etc. for the other… and late in the day he apologized; it had been sold.  So I felt this terrible sense of betrayal, of disappointment-- that felt disturbingly close to that teenage devastation when some boy you are longing for, who you know, you KNOW loves your soul and your essence, even though you have never spoken-- is dating the girl who sits next to you.

Of course, time is on your side when you are a teenager, and that boy eventually comes around… but the art--it is perhaps lost forever.  I briefly had a fantasy that one of my friends who craves my art had gone to the fair and stealthfully carried it off under their arm… but that was my teenage sense of betrayal, and I am adult and a professional.  I know when to stop bidding at an auction; I know about letting things go; I know that sometimes the dream is better than the possession, and my tiny landscape with the strange evening light and the one stroke of sky in the greenery will remind me of this, will suggest the longing, the unfinished question of solitude and the hidden mystery of Swedish night poetry and the left-hand-only piano melody soundtrack that will make it even more 'mine'.

I Want the Angel

A few of my friends are hoping for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  I heard a radio DJ lamenting the other day the 'slim pickings' of this year's pot.  Somehow the recent nominees (and I am personally guilty for my blues Hall of Fame induction) don't have the 'weight' of Chuck Berry or Elvis or the Stones.  Kurt Cobain.  But they will hang on the wall nevertheless.  There's got to be an internet abbreviation for that.  NTL.

Same with R & B.  Somehow I don't process the Las Vegas-style spectacle of Beyonce as deserving the same category of a Sam Cooke or Otis Redding.  What was it she received at the VMAs?  The Michael Jackson Vanguard award? Entertainer of the Year.   Her husband bestowed this on her, having reserved this title previously for himself.  Awards and accolades have become cheap.  The Halls of Fame should be closed.  Let's skip a Nobel prize year.  I can't see that Patrick Modiano has the resonance of say Neruda or  Eliot or Hemingway.  Tagore.  When I was a student I anticipated this award with the greatest interest.  Now…I can't get through too many Alice Munro stories without craving some 'meat'.  It's literature 'lite'.

The night of the VMAs someone sent me a video of a Nigerian kid playing a funky home-made drum kit.  He was about 11, with true rhythmic brilliance and innovation.  I nominate him for Entertainer of the Year.  He didn't seem to have a TV and the dancers in the dirt didn't give a shit about Beyonce.  Anyway, with the Ebola crisis it would be too difficult to bring his family and friends over here.  That kid definitely has some kind of fever.  The good kind.

I met this painter at my gym.  The self-designated kind, who claims great success.  He's a health freak, so already he doesn't make it in my book where chain-smoking, self-destructive behaviors and utter disregard for dangerous toxins are kind of an industry standard.  He uses acrylics.  No turpentine or oil-based fumes for him.  Artists are dumb, he tells me.  They have no broad vision.  Isn't that the very definition of an artist?  Do we really think those Nobel laureates set out to win a Nobel Prize?  They wrote because they were compelled to write, because their demons kept them awake at night stabbing their heart and informing their lovemaking and wrecking their homelife.  Do I have any need to see this guy's paintings?  I do not.  I have already seen them, about a million times over.

How often have you read that we only use ten percent of our brains, and that is surely twice the national average? I vouch for the fact that I use one percent of my computer, but my keyboards wear out way before the cpu.  I have become 21st-century co-dependent partly because I am often unable to read the lyrics I ink-scrawl in the dark.  But have you ever watched one of those 1970's prison-escape movies?  Those guys used at least twenty percent of their brain figuring out how to make tools, and strategizing their one-shot-of-a-life.  It knocks me out.  Or when you love someone-- really, really crave and long for to the exclusion of all normal human need…what part of our brain is that testing?  Or those dogs that make it back across country, to their rightful family?  I want that GPS.

Just because some random genius existed who warranted the invention of some award category--- it doesn't mean that this is going to become an annual red-carpet event around which the media can create another fashion extravaganza.  This is what art was meant to be.  The rest of us are just hacks in an industry.  A Babe Ruth or Lou Gehrig didn't have personal trainers and coaches but they hit the proverbial ball out of the park.

When I was really small, my Mom took me to see The Music Man with Robert Preston on Broadway.  I was absolutely hypnotized.  This was of course a kind of prototype of the now-standard music industry hoax.  But as I get older, I begin to see the truth in his 'think method'.  I'm essentially just a blue-collar bassist… I learned to play not from Juilliard or Berklee… but by belief.   I still play once a week in one of those NYC jams… and I hear plenty of musicians struggling with their egos--- some hacking away at some kind of mediocrity which still evades them-- some ineptly executing some idea which has validity.  But most of them are up there because they think they can play.  They watch these award shows, and they hear the non-auto-corrected performances on late-night TV and they wonder why they have a day job.  Why no one calls them for a gig.

Go to Chelsea on any Saturday.  Galleries are filled with gapers and collectors.  Prices are rarely on the wall because it is a kind of financial obscenity.  People used to ally themselves with a particular dealer or POV because they loved art and needed to understand, needed to see.  Now it is cheap and overabundant, like crude oil, and seems to have outlived its own purpose.  There is too much of it, there are no filters… like music… and we are seeing the visual version of the youtube and American Idol phenomena.  The rich artists have become whores and jump from gallery to gallery because they are a brand not a genius.

There is a kind of artist's heaven.  I believe this.  Not a hall of fame, and you will be brought there if you have created something worthy and new-- if you have had the patience and strength in this culture to have nurtured your 'egg' until a tiny creation pecked its way out…. no matter if it croaked or sang or flew or was bought or recorded or adopted by anyone.  You will be judged naked and without make-up.  An angel will be sitting on a kind of carved throne with a parchment book and will write your name with a quill and celestial blue ink.  Not gold.  Even if you have made mistakes and injected drugs and are guilty of all seven sins simultaneously.  Maybe that will actually be a prerequisite, because we are after all humans, we who 'think' and occasionally envy and then go hungry and alone into our dark cork-lined closet-rooms with the traffic noise and the banging and the ghosts and the party next door  and the perpetual winter ahead.

When my son was 2 years old, we belonged to a church which had an annual Christmas pageant/service.  All the small children dressed up as some character in the manger, and went up to the altar when their character in the story was mentioned.  So my little boy, wearing a home-made star costume, was having nothing to do with the procession… fine.  Suddenly, during the sermon,  he must have toddled up the aisle, and in front of the TV news cameras and the crowd, I see him tugging at the minister's cassock… and the great man (he was 6' 4") bends down, and my little boy who was precociously verbal and referred to himself in the 3rd person--  has suddenly connected some mental or religious dots, and announces … He needs to see the star.  So to everyone's amusement, he is lifted up to the top of the great tree and this is not enough because he says audibly and clearly, with gravity…He needs to TOUCH the star.   And he is lifted up, way up-- to touch the glittery decoration on top of the wonderful tree, after which he matter of factly toddles back to our seat at the rear of the Church to great applause.

My son, who was totally unaware of his congregational '15 minutes'  at the age of two,  became a great athlete.  Aside from the trophy-culture,  and some genuine life-ambition, he never really had the need to do anything audience or award-worthy.  But I like to think about that Christmas Eve every so often, especially watching some faceless starlet in a blingy gown coming up to some over lit stage to receive some cheap moon man.  As for me,  I want the angel.

Re-Joyce

I dressed down for the Joyce Carol Oates reading at Barnes & Noble tonight. Who am I kidding? The only distinction I make these days is ‘clothes I sleep in’ and ‘the rest’. I avoid mirrors, I am the last to know if there is egg or jam or even blood on my face, and I have entered that ambiguous section of the female timeline where men rarely look, and other women, if you are unbuttoned or wearing your lunch, will avoid confrontation. My hair? I plead the 5th.

Despite the fact that my highbrow literati friends think Joyce Carol Oates novels are as prolific and valuable as late-night infomercials, I have a soft spot for her in my Goth girl-heart. Besides, we might have the same stylist: i.e., God. Okay…so I am late and of course any free event in New York City is jam-packed SRO, and that guy with the gray frizzy hair-plug-do who is at every single gallery and gratis museum opening is blocking the view from the back row, so I slink over to a niche on the side and sit on the floor from which vantage point I have a great view of Ms. Oates as she reads deadpan the title story of the new Dear Husband collection.

Q&A. Some numb-brain asks her whether her monotonous delivery was meant as a dramatic device to express the lack of emotion of the main character. I don’t really know how Joyce managed to keep her cool, and I doubt he’s been to any other readings, but she’s not exactly a bellower. Then a few writers asked the obvious questions about productivity, and whether the story was inspired by the actual killings in Texas which even a cursory reading of the jacket blurb could have answered. But these adult children cannot resist the act of publicly ‘engaging’ with a celebrity mentor.

The inevitable signing ritual.. with all the bookdealers hoarding their proofs and cloth bagfuls of novels. I thought of bringing one or 2 vintage books, then thought better. They want you to buy the new one…that’s the point, but all the new covers are so pathetically cheap-novel looking, I’d prefer borrowing from the library.

Actually I brought along a manuscript. Since she teaches at my alma mater, I’d been encouraged to show her one of my small dark poetry epics…. She seemed so accessible…so--- well, badly dressed and anti-celebrity. I asked the Barnes & Noble emcee if she’d give her an envelope and she nodded toward her publicist who was sitting in one of the folding chairs, consulting his Blackberry. He gave me such a lip-curled gay-snot look of slight horror as though I’d vomited and splattered him… I backed off. I know well how much he earns and what he does, the little Filene’s Armani rodent. So I split. Okay, I’ll mail it to her at Princeton. Not. I’d like to have given him a piece of my mind about the packaging of her sinister books in these happy house-wife-friendly pink and dusky rose jackets.

The thing is, I like her. She’s unpretentious and outs her literary money before her mouth, this is for sure. She admitted her deep sympathy for the child-killer, for all imprisoned housewives and claustrophobic warped mothers. And that sexy Elvis poem she wrote early on... she must have been a sort of anorexic Winehouse-esque hottie at some point in the late 50’s. All that damn writing. She even put out poor-quality stuff under different names. Pretty amazing. Well, she doesn’t have kids… they certainly suck out what creative juices they can, especially if you’re poor and starving and get no relief from husbands or babysitters. Jesus, the weather and the economy are getting to me.

Back I go on the train, tossing the pathetic current New Yorker issue which Joyce managed to innocently dis as she mentioned their habit of selectively editing the balls out of her fiction. Guess I can safely sourgrape the rejections of my poetry. Inspired to read some Oates, I suddenly remembered I’d loaned The Falls to my son’s now-ex-girlfriend. She'd asked me for a book on murder. She probably left it at the beach and bought a kindle version of Twilight. She’s an honor student at NYU. Never heard of Proust, Doris Lessing or Joyce. The meek-minded but well-dressed inherit.

Passing another B & N on the way home, I notice they’ve had a Tuesday reading as well: Charles Grodin. Is this an author? According to the roster of upcoming events, most of the readings are actors who write, or chefs, or actors who cook who write, or models who diet who write, desperate housewives who get a reality show who write. Desperate book publishers. After all, it's Barnes & Noble, not 'Nobel'.

Video/Facebook killed the writer. Except Joyce. She was still doing it… still with the old cardigan sweater and the top button closed. On the way out, the music department was playing an old Cult album. Getting warmer. Amy Winehouse wasn’t conceived when they recorded this. And somehow I believe, when all the Twilight novels are forgotten, all the Gossip Boys and Girls have done rerunning and JK Rowling is scratching her head, Joyce might be on a plane to Stockholm. Okay… she’s no Saramago, but among those B&N wallpaper caricatures, she’s got the Oscar Wilde/Virginia Woolf facial credibility; at the least she’s a bad hairday antidote to Candace Bushnell. A Roy Orbison of writers.

So to the publicist: F--- you. But do something about that pathetic packaging. Forget the fashion portrait. Award-winning writers have better looking book-jackets. 50 novels later, she deserves it.