Hospitality 2

While the Thomas Wolfe title and clichéd aphorism says You Can't Go Home Again, I think you can.  It's not the going-- that's kind of a geographical distance, but the coming that's tough.  'I'm going home', one says, bored at a party, annoyed with a social event-- exhaustion, a literal boundary-- a statement.  But 'I'm coming home' is something you say after time-- to your estranged family, to your ex... to your children, after an absence.  'Come home, baby,' your boyfriend says on the telephone at 3 AM and you cry, because it means a reversal of heart-- a reconciliation, a reunion.  You are not just leaving one place for your own apartment... you are coming 'to' someone-- a safe, familiar reality.

When my mother was in the throes of dementia, she'd phone me and beg me to take her home.  Where are you, I'd ask, and she'd reply she was at 'the apartment'.  Of course she was at her lifetime home, but her altered brain no longer recognized this.  Her heart, however, longed for what she had known and lost. It was poignant and heartbreaking for me who longed only for the mother I had known and lost.

Nearly thirty years ago after renting and resettling many times, I bit the bullet and bought an apartment here.  I searched and investigated and looked at hundreds of candidates... calculated what I could manage and picked a place.  It's old-- it's funky, and for me, living in a studio/loft with my son and sundry stragglers, it seemed palatial. I bought into a coop-- with many wonderful people who wrote for the New York Times, composed music, taught art-- creatives who made this like a sort of communal old home.  There was a live-in Super who'd been born here; single-handed, he kept the building immaculate and repaired things with pride.  It was his home. It was our home.  

As time went on and the city economy evolved, this old economical investment became more of a 'find' for people with money. Lured by modest prices, they bought in, renovated, sold.  The building profile began to change-- the old tenants dying off, and the new electing to have doormen and amenities I would never have preferred.  I realize I am not a homeowner but a shareholder in a corporation whose priorities are no longer mine.  People have combined spaces which were not meant to be combined-- violated wall insulation, installed cooling and heating systems whose noisy apparatus sits outside my courtyard windows. Our monthly costs have nearly exceeded my income.

Sell, my friends and neighbors advise me.  Daily I read real-estate emails listing the various moves of celebrities and investors-- from home to home, from design-space to new design-space.  I look-- I read, I wonder how I will survive.  I have given up most luxuries; I cannot even afford summer air-conditioning bills. My plumbing needs replacement; coop laws require professional insurance certification that is more than I can bear.  So many of my friends have left the city. 

I can remember the first nights I spent here-- the strange sounds in the walls and old radiators... will I ever feel 'at home' here, I wondered?  Gradually I spread out-- I built walls of bookshelves for my library... I hung artwork from friends and acquaintances.  My things occupy niches... furniture has been handed down from various sources.  My son has long ago moved out on his own and more than ever, this place has taken on the shape of me and I have morphed into the shape of this home.  It's old and it's packed with interesting things that inspire me.  I walk the halls at night and look at these things. I have records-- cds, cassettes-- guitars, basses, tools for creating... piles of old fabrics for quilts and small stamp and rock collections. It's a sort of home museum.  People come here-- not frequently the way they used to, but occasionally-- and they marvel at what is sort of my own portrait-- or a mirror of what matters to me.  

For true New Yorkers, we are first of our city, then perhaps Americans.  We love our home town-- huge, complicated, dangerous, overcrowded... endlessly fascinating and thrilling.  It's like a dysfunctional relationship I will never give up; I am married to my city, even in its current love affair with money and the corresponding cultural decline.  I watch the World Cup with interest, but it's the Knicks that have my heart.  The home team. 

The note left by the Iranian soccer team-- thanking America with great sarcasm for 'hospitality' (the lack thereof) was upsetting.  I wonder whether they would have been treated this way in New York City; somehow I think not. It was a complicated issue but in the end this is sports, not politics.  Besides, very few national teams are limited to their own countrymen; players come from everywhere.  I read somewhere that of the many sets of brothers participating in the World Cup, only a few played for the same nation. 

Today in the first real demonstration of dramatic summer heat, I walked from Soho to East Harlem. It was a little brutal... but opening my door-- I felt embraced by the sense of 'coming' home. This has become my family-- the walls, the furnishings, the lights and the old floors-- it's as though we've exchanged DNA. I've absorbed the ghosts and the invented narratives of former tenants from more than one hundred years ago.  There is no one waiting here for me, sadly... and yet there is everything else.

So I began tonight thinking about the Venezuelan earthquake victims... I have had nightmares about these kinds of catastrophes forever.  There is nothing more terrifying than a large-scale natural disaster that erases all safety-- all stability, all sense of home-- of life, family... it is unimaginable and so much worse than tragic. The collapse of buildings... the destruction and death and unspeakable horror of the lost and missing. And yet we still make wars and simulate this kind of destruction.

I guess the graphic news images reminded me of the great blessing of my home-- in the heat, in the absence of luxury, to be able to walk uptown and greet people who sit on stoops in summer evenings... the man with the curved back who sleeps on Madison now and is fed by neighbors... the dreadlocked young man who has built his cardboard castle at the entrance to the Q train-- who has amassed a little library and is writing The Great City Novel in minute ink lines in a tiny notebook.  He gets his morning coffee free from Starbucks and sleeps well these days, he tells me. He would not trade his home, he swears on a dog-eared Bible, accepting into his shopping-cart shelf an old copy of The Count of Monte Cristo which I have no doubt will be well read.

So America has a large birthday coming up.  Here in New York, people are excited about the colossal spectacle of Taylor Swift's wedding.  If one searches history sites, there are several dates for the birth of our city-- typical of its diversity and concurrent narratives.  As for me, I'll catch the fireworks, celebrate as an urban patriot, watch the ships in the harbor.  Somehow after midnight I'll manage the crowded journey back uptown after which I will be (God willing), in the words of Van Morrison, Coming Home.

Into the Mystic

Tuesday evening I went to a lecture on Mysticism. Actually it was sort of a book tour by an author who'd written on the topic.  Guesting on the panel was a well-known scholar and Medievalist who was there to generate a kind of Socratic discussion because the author himself seemed a little quagmired.  The Medievalist was skilled as a teacher-- the way she spoke in clear language, the way she addressed the packed audience-- was masterful and charismatic.  I remembered why I loved school-- the classes, sitting at the feet of professors, receiving information and ideas, and perpetually turning my intellectual world upside down.

So for the first forty-five minutes I was in a kind of familiar heaven... recalling things I'd studied-- old texts, narratives... saints and martyrs.  This had been my post-college major; I'd travelled, kneeled in old churches throughout Europe in search of understanding. The medieval centuries were harsh, punctuated by passionate religious sentiment-- and also by wars, disease, cruelty and torture. Fathoming these times was a challenge... the mystics and visionaries were both celebrated and punished. I also remembered consulting St Gregory... how the Bible stories had four meanings-- the historical, the allegorical, the moral and then the mystical. It was part of study, interpretation.  It was assumed.

The celebrated author speaking was also a 'philosopher', a designation which makes me squirm. These people seem less necessary in the present; they often pontificate on about pop culture-- sports, fashion, football, human weakness and addiction. They manipulate facts and maneuver narratives-- kind of like psychotherapy.  I have a hard time with this.  The issue of feminism crept in, as it does... especially since the larger number of stigmatics were women.  There was a hint of sexualizing... it's trendy... and then this conclusion about the outcome of 17th-century Mysticism being music... Bach. The author began to reference classic rock... at this point I looked at the shelves behind me, tried to plot my escape. 

Maybe I misunderstood-- missed one of the leaps of faith and took a wrong turn.  Maybe after weeks of relentless political rhetoric I am hostile and defensive.  And I've been a musician most of my life-- a passionate devotee of everything from medieval chants to Prog rock. Composers often dream melodies and songs; I do... but is this mysticism? Music transforms one-- it opens us, makes us fall in love. What would cinema be without music? I read once Scorsese spent eighty percent of his Mean Streets budget securing rights to the songs he felt were essential to the film. It is the very soundtrack of our lives. But mysticism?  More like a kind of unique personal recipe, I imagine, where inspiration supplies the ingredients.

Anyway, as I begin my annual fall alumni interviews, I wonder if I would fare well at a university in these times-- when song lyrics are taught in poetry classes, when CBGB's and NYC street culture are the stuff of Master's theses. I just suddenly felt a little duped.  I came expecting some revelation and instead was led via a circuitous intellectual musical-chairs to some pop-culture home base.  Scanning the shelves nearest to my chair was comforting; I'd read many of these books-- they were old friends, some in new packaging, but familiars. My heart opened. 

Back in college I'd had one or two low-key mystical experiences... things coming together that had been broken... a bird one night in my little college room which was absolutely sealed and locked. I craved these things, some extra-terrestrial epiphany at a time when my sexuality was blossoming and my brain being primed.  In art history classes I was drawn to these depictions of martyrs who were torn and penetrated.  It was mesmerizing; at the same time I became acquainted with drug use and friends who experimented with physical challenges and extremes like cutting.  I suppose today we have the gym-obsessed body-builders; it's become all too common to distort one's living anatomy. 

On the way home from the event, I started to think about my neighbor who has grown svelte and fashionable since her daily injections of Ozembic.  I saw her with her dog in her Prada... she's begun to look positively malnourished... her cheeks are sallow and sunken.  Oh no, I want to tell her.. you've gone too far... but I don't mention that she looks perhaps self-stigmatized. Instead I compliment her on her shoes which cost more than an average month's rent in Manhattan. Maybe two months.  

At home I took a couple of books from the shelves, as I often do at night... like a promise for tomorrow... and somehow had this flashback of Van Morrison.. Into the Mystic... it must have been 1970... I was barely 17.... a senior boy came into my college dorm room-- he was so handsome, with his long golden hair and his steel-blue eyes.  I had just picked up my copy of Moondance... he heard it playing from the hallway.. and by the last track, he had coaxed me into a slow dance with him... one of those magical romantic moments when I had no idea who I was or what I was doing but the moment carried me off.  

Here I was, free-associating, contracting the huge spiritual concept of mysticism into a shortened and altered form of the word, and a pop song... so maybe the panel authors were not so wrong.. and maybe the whole  meaning has somehow merged with this vernacularized version of whatever 'transports' us. At the time I remember imagining a sea called Mystic... the future... everything I was about to know. 

Thank goodness for these privileged moments-- me now, more than fifty years on, looking back on one of those heart-piercing instants, along with its indelible soundtrack... a kind of personal spirituality. What a thing is memory-- which connects us to ourselves, to our wounds and our blisses, our love and our sickness, as though these things were painted, as though filmed.  The eternal which will end with us... no matter how many posts or photos there are... only we can reach back into ourself... to browse our own long journey-- without books or Google or the internet.. and so precisely recall and revive the ignitions.  Amen.