Countdown

When I was maybe 4-5 years old, we went on one of those exhausting family educational trips.  These were apparently conceived out of some vague sense of personal neglect. While family memes of the 1950's seem so innocently and traditionally cohesive, parents really had very little idea of what their children were up to on their own. There was a remarkably loose tether of independence: I walked myself back and forth to school at five; in these times that would be a form of neglect or abuse.  

Anyway, once a year or so, we had some arranged pilgrimage to further our historic and patriotic consciousness: Plymouth Rock, Washington D.C., Sleepy Hollow, etc. Eventually it was assumed our school was providing all the necessary education and this tradition evolved solely into mandatory attendance at the annual Army/Navy football game.

But the trip that came to mind today was the one to Sturbridge Village-- probably still intact today, like Skansen in Stockholm. To me, at 4-5, it seemed like some kind of cult with the women in long dresses and strange bonnets and the men with their suspenders and funny accents.  The workshops were cool-- we watched them making soap and candles, weaving cloth, etc. And we were allowed to buy a small souvenir on these trips.  I was super intentional and methodical in the gift shops. It took ages for me to select something on-budget. Tiny things. But here I purchased a small egg timer which consisted of a miniature hourglass mounted in a piece of hand-forged iron. 

Nothing I owned-- no toy had ever provided the utter fascination of this little gadget. I tested it against watches and our old ticking stove-knob; it was pretty accurate.  I held my breath to it, tested the length of my little records. I turned it horizontally, played with its simple physics.  Of course my sister tried to convince my mother it belonged in the kitchen.  Whatever I had, she absolutely needed. But my mother let me keep it in my room where I learned to respect the value of a minute. I didn't particularly like boiled eggs anyway-- they were more like an assignment than a breakfast.

I must have listened today to twenty people remarking on how quickly this year has gone. Yes, I agree, also thinking that for those who have left us, they will remain permanently in 2025.  Their tombstones and memorials will be forever engraved with this number. They will go forward no more.  For the rest of us, our lives continue to be diced into these annual portions which become thinner and thinner as we age. I noticed today how a few of my peers seem to be moving more slowly, more carefully.  A fall, at this temporal moment, can be life-stopping. Maybe the slowed pace makes the actual time passage seem relatively faster... as though the 3-minute egg takes us five minutes now, which results in fewer eggs, translated to minutes.

My beloved neighbor passed in November. The days of agony he endured were slow and painful. The forty days of mourning began to sail by, as the new year loomed.  My Elizabeth-- we left her months ago... Jon Gordon, the Reiners... now Tatiana Schlossberg whose November post was so nationally heartbreaking... she, too, will remain in 2025.

I've been reading the second volume of a Norwegian trilogy which centers on a nationally iconic television producer who may or may not have murdered his wife. It occurs that this was written in a time when the medium of television was central and crucially influential. There were few shows, they were for the most part memorable and great, and we all watched them.  I can't imagine the experience of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan in this time-- or Walter Cronkite on the JFK assassination.  In the 1960's we all sat-- in real time, together.. mourning, celebrating. The collective consciousness had a certain power. In a way the Reiner tragedy has something to do with this former cultural resonance. 

Today I see on one channel alone there will be fifty New Year's Eve entertainers.  It's daunting. I have not even heard of half these performers who will be broadcast worldwide to a media-exhausted audience. Over one million spectators will congregate in Times Square to participate in maybe the world's most watched time ritual. The huge ball is bigger than ever, of course. I will go out and enjoy the fireworks, missing my old bandmates and the umpteen New Year's Eves I got to play a punk rock and roll version of Auld Lang Syne to a room full of drunk dancers. 

Channel after channel broadcasts the sad litany of those who dropped out this year.  We continue to be appalled at the madness which pervades our government. Life goes on... Beyonce has become a billionaire-- even Powerball has ballooned to an obscene monetary prize. Our economy is so bloated we average people cannot process these sums.  And yet we owe more than we earn.  And people are hungry-- some out of greed, some literally starving. Farewell to the poor meaningless penny, to the metrocard and telephone switchboard operators.  

I walk the streets, pregnant in a way with my own nostalgia and poetry.  It comes, like moments-- whether I summon it or not, although I am not sure any of this will actually be delivered.  In addition to the world-stage absolutely thronged with celebrities and superheroes, there is a vast infinite digital universe of performance. Look at me, everyone seems to be saying... or-- yes, I can be you-- I can wear your dress and get my body sculpted to resemble yours.  I can imitate your music and I can use my fortune to own your unique artistic creations.  My name, next to yours, like a museum. Despite all of this, I am trying to quietly log these last countdown minutes, like timing an egg... altogether too many, and never enough.  The 2025 hourglass has surely run its course.

The New After-Math

I am approaching another of those age milestones which prompts assessment-inventory mode.  In one sense I have exactly the life I want—no apparent routine, no apparent ‘boss’ or structure except the pressure of time itself-- plenty of creative ceiling.  The fact that I have very little income, cannot master that Wall Street math that makes millions out of air, and spend inordinate amounts of time devising Rube-Goldberg-worthy schemes to manage, is quite a challenge, some days.  I concede this life of spontaneity, as one gets older, is comprised of myriads of loose ends—things I collect, daily-- thoughts, projects, ideas, inspiration.  Then there are the stray people I take on, the fact that I give time to the insane unemployed physicist in Starbucks, the Holocaust survivor who nags me to at least hear her memoirs because there is neither time nor sufficient megabytes to write it out;  to the blogger with no blog, the dog-savers and ex-junkie poets, and to my friends--- few as they are, now, the good ones.  Not to mention kids, who wouldn’t even know my birthday without facebook, and they are too busy or too guilty or whatever. 

I know now that no one will ever pay me back, and that as I begin to melt more into the fabric of what is the forgotten class of people--- the has-beens and middle-aged-- no one really wants to listen.  I am succumbing to the alarming fact that I go to the library and besides the re-packaged classics whose recent translations are often offensive and colloquial and wrong, the new books—even the New York Times top 10 of the year--- well, they are generally a literary disappointment.  Do these authors feel like failures?  Do they realize that the Housewives of Atlanta are winning?  That Warholian fame has become cheapened beyond his prediction and 15 digital nano-minutes might be all there is.  That the old has been shoveled up and piled on dumpsters not because it is useless and obsolete but because it was real and had a shelf-life, and value has become something the hedge funds determine to accommodate their maximum bonus pyramid.  

My life has resonance, I try to console myself, as I leave the grocery store practically empty-handed.  I attend few gallery openings--- not because I don’t have suitable clothing, but because most shows are just an idea—of course, some are executed with enormous gestures and presented with unprecedented chic décor-ready props, but although they ‘look’ good--- as fashion on the runway often does, it is unabashedly deja-deja-vu for me, and the models, lovely as they are, ‘wear’ the idea, but do not give it real content.

I recently was really taken by photographs of an art-piece done years ago by a window-dresser who actually went a little ‘outside the box’.  They were from the 1970’s—she’d actually created pulp-fiction-type drama within the store display windows--- with guns, intrusive characters… even a plaster hand that protruded from the actual store window---‘Help’ it was saying…’I am crossing the line between reality and advertisement, of theatre and solicitation.’  The artist then placed the mannequins in real situations--- dressed and still—in cafes, one even on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum where she sat—all dressed up and nowhere to go… alone, in the wind, among the then-small crowds who went to museums which were still, in the 1970’s, for art and not spectacle.  I remember the windows.  They were important.  But now I realize they were a sort of foreshadowing. 

Even the 1970’s still had some credibility, some sense.  There were still typewriters and land phones.  The people who brought the news on TV had side-parts and narrow ties and dark suits and spoke extemporaneously with unadorned style and used words properly.  They had something to say-- and when they didn't speak--- well, that was a statement in itself.   How many Anderson Cooper reports would it take to weigh in with Walter Cronkite removing his glasses in 1963?  The old journalists weren’t reading prompters and chatting about pop-stars who can’t sing and football stars with fake girlfriends because none of that was invented and people with no talent stayed home or worked in a cupcake factory and hummed to themselves while they wrapped their kids’ lunch sandwiches in waxed paper.   Some of them even smoked while they did this. 

So now, maybe the mannequins are the art… the clothing--- well,  the packaging--- the ‘carrot’… another public company on the stockmarket because commodities are no longer wheat and corn and coffee—these are altered and manipulated, and futured-out.  Now there are handbags and cellphones which move the markets-- accessories-- and yes, there are worthless ideas--- like facebook--- like Zinga and instagram--- ideas which are mysteriously bankable and which put solid-gold spoons in the mouths of the Goldman Sachs Babies, and the finest sushi on their conference tables, billions of monopoly dollars in every greedy bank account. Web-ideas trying desperately to convince us we are not loose ends--- we are connected, we are touching… we are blogging and we can see Beyonce from our desk, we can tweet her and we can tweet Carmelo Anthony and Ashton Kutscher and we can see what jacket they are wearing, and we can see their baby pictures and their girlfriend’s bikini butt and her spray tan.

I am realizing today that fringe is what happens to the loose ends—when they are gathered.  At the edge of the fabric.  I am not even sure my loose-ends of books and poems and songs are that cohesive.  Maybe I am not even fringe-worthy.  After all there is a fringe-festival and although I attended one or two events years back, I now process it as the ‘cringe’ festival.  I am not speaking virtual or tongue-in-cheek fringe, I am speaking threads and knots and speaker-wire and guitar-chords and lyrics—lyrics that float and haunt and define me, first lines of books I can still remember—these things did exist, these things made me the disorganized and obsolete person I am, on the verge of extinction, without a human-loving society to protect us and find us and tag us and make sure we are not being stoned to death or slightly abused by our neighbors who shop online for their Jimmy Choos and live in glass houses with no books and speak too loud on their phones in Starbucks and misuse the word ‘of’ even in newscasts.  We, the real-time newly unpublishable, who type and write and think and refuse to lipsynch… who hear the sound of one hand clapping and the still-silent voice in some loose-ended non-linear universe with far more resonance.  We are listening, we are counting...