Summer Interlude

July humidity is a uniquely oppressive phenomenon for those who are economically committed to all-urban summers.  Nothing-- animal or material-- escapes its wilting inertia; we slow, perceptibly, like a musical command... and offer an opportunity for things to penetrate. If we took a personal inventory,  I think summer memories would dominate.

After the massive Nersesian novel (thank you, Arthur, who individually thanks an impressive litany of his East Village neighbors at the end), I took up some late Roberto Bolaño who never lets me down, even at his least luminous.  A summer vacation diary-- with deaths and mysteries and World War gaming minutiae... but the heat... the damp, the summer rain.  It stuck to me like my clothing.

And then Soldier's Pay-- to cleanse my literary palate, so to speak-- with early Faulkner.  So many of us read Faulkner in school-- before we were able to absorb his language facility-- well, it's worth going back after all this time.  One wonders where Cormac McCarthy would have been without him.  The imminent summer is palpable... and the way he is truly in love with not just words but the way people speak them... and the descriptions drip vocabulary like wet rain.  He over-saturates but it's young and utterly world-shaking. 

It occurs to me that old writers become more sparse and bitter, as though they are slowed and dulled by their own self-critical ghosts. Maybe, as we age, we spin off enthusiasm and joy like coats of paint-- and we are left, in our later years-- wiser but hampered by our own hesitations.  Rarely does one see a senior kick up his heels on the sidewalk. Later novels tend to be more careful.

Evenings I still circle the park; one of the highlights is the 110th Street drum circle.  Africans of several countries meet here and sing and dance-- some in T-shirts and jeans, some in colorful native dress. Beats and chanting fuse with the denser landscape up there into a ceremonial soundtrack.  There is joy in the circle-- camaraderie and affection... but overall there is this pall of homesickness-- of these transported people into the harsh summer reality of Manhattan... and I feel sad for them.  

Among friends, many are crippled with a kind of depression which seems less justifiable in summer, but nevertheless persists.  I speak to them because they know I'm awake at 3 AM when they are haunted.  I empathize, and I refuse to cross their boundary of despair.  Some of them hide in their apartments-- I, too, am a little guilty of anti-sociability-- but they assume these Facebook Fred personas-- they post and converse on social media... it's an anodyne, I suppose.  Many of them describe and display their surgeries and illnesses-- their recoveries and badges.  It's wonderful-- but what about those of us who toughed it out-- no  addictions, no drugs, no 12-step programs? We changed diapers and bailed kids out of jail.. we did the daily penance with no one but a vague Jesus beside us to listen to our prayers. No award.

Some of us cannot see what we have become.  Some of us work hard at filling in wrinkles and lifting saggy jowls-- at coloring our hair and camouflaging reality.  The depressed and vocal do not see how they have become narcissistic-- a black hole into which they draw their friends and anyone who will listen.  It's like a kind of emotional quicksand.  

As we add more and more to our life scoreboard, the losses ironically mount disproportionately.  Some of the losses are more memorable than the wins, although in this Olympic season, we barely remember even the medalists.  We love doing some things in life... others we dread, but we are glad that we did them.  I thought much about that couple who set out to sail the world and were found dead in a lifeboat.  Even they would not have had regrets; somehow we know this.

At a certain point we begin to give things away-- we realize what we got is not really what we wanted, and conversely, what we wanted is not what we got.  Some things happen to us... and they are not good, but I also often wonder that life has not been even more tragic-- that the good has outweighed the bad, that five mediocre novels do not change the one brilliant one; it is only the writer who suffers.

Tuesday at 5 AM I watched part of Bergman's Island... the original documentary which is Bergman at 80-something speaking about his life, filmed on his beloved Fårö.  He is consciously at his productive end and has always been clear about his films-- their meaning, the brilliant intertwining of his life's personal narrative with his work. But it seemed so simple-- the landscape, the genius himself in his fleece slippers, sitting on his fireplace, looking and explaining.  He was so utterly candid-- so honest.  His fear of death, his failures, his memories. It's extraordinary-- what he accomplished and how he of all people was able to see himself.

Dawn seems to come quickly in summer.  Evenings are slow... I feel certain, on the cusp of August, I will sense the season being sucked from the room.  It's another goodbye.  Whatever the summer has brought, whatever it has meant,  I hate goodbyes.  I will miss my sticky fingers on the keyboard in my unairconditioned apartment.  I will log my summer reading and console myself with the knowledge that these months are a smaller and smaller fraction of my lifespan. But I also think, after all these changes, I do know who I am.  And despite the relentless over-saturated cloud of grief no one measures with daily weather and air quality statistics, I belong here.

August Thresholds

The threshold of sleep is fragile; on one side there are dreams, relief... on the other, the exhausted edge of living effort-- work, sorrow, anxiety, worry.  And on the far side, like unexplored ocean, there is death... or we hope so.

Waking these days in harsh light I feel the summer waning like an old moon. Oppressive heat in August is a little more bearable than July.  I memorized Jane in these evenings just one year ago gathering her various delicacies idiosyncratically...  me knowing it would be her last heatwave.  I have learned not to take things for granted... sunsets, weather, annoyances..shade.

Saturday I stepped outside on 12th Street to the distinct scent of animal-- hot fur, sweaty jungle skin... almost as though the street population of Union Square had migrated a few blocks down... the pungent phantom of exasperation-- of disappointment and failure, inequality and bad hygiene.  The park is filled with demonstrators, vendors, farmers' stalls and sidewalk deal-makers... shoppers, eaters... tourists and thieves... Across the way there is the department-store marvel of Whole Foods-- the behemoth horn-of-plenty of the bourgeoisie... the massive cooling machines bless you as you enter... the color-coded cashier lines humiliate you as you exit... back to the steamy sidewalk lined with defeated people of all shapes and colors with signs and cups and stories... the contrast is a shock.

Today I recall the palpable humidity of Neptune, New Jersey-- a car trip at one of those moments when your relationship is wilted and deflated... and you try some vintage honeymoon clichés-- the shore, the old Asbury Park landmarks.   You stand in the surf being photographed with your flowered dress clinging, your hair blowing in the hot breeze... knowing this is the end of something.  Meanwhile, nearly out of cash, we negotiated a basement room in a cheap motel at midnight.  I climbed the fence and swam naked in the concrete pool while everyone slept.  Even the room-conditioned air was soggy... as though our spoiled love had soaked into the walls and there was nothing left but the horrid turnpike back in a rental car that smelled of someone else's stale beer.  

Years before cell phones, when you were virtually alone with whomever... even with a sense of doom and personal despair... the low ceiling of crushing heartwreck hovering like a storm cloud... the summer was somehow the season of homesickness... of being sent away, of lonely nights in tents or cabins or sleeping bags... staring at the moon, longing for something you knew even then you'd never have.  It was as though you could feel love like seawater evaporating on your skin.  There was even a song, that Neptune summer... waiting for me to change your mind.  I didn't understand, and I let the tide run out, as it does.

In the early morning on the threshold of sleep I can hear the hum of air conditioning in the courtyard, the soft sounds of people stirring in their apartments... no longer putting a kettle on, as I do, but making coffee.  They say some children suffer night terrors because they fear death-- like a premonition, a memory from previous lives... Waking in August heat is disorienting; leaving a late-summer day is inherently sad for some of us... we blink in the darkness of rooms and lose our timeline.  Some of us regret.  

Some nights I imagine myself a desert child dreaming of surf... a deaf child hearing his own song... the far-off whistles of trains.  Stuck in the city-- deprived of beach and horizon vistas, I miss the sea like a lover.  It is the 'missing' that haunts my edge of sleep... the missing of things-- of people, the sense of being loved.  "If ever I would leave you,' my Mom used to sing to me... 'It wouldn't be in summer'.  I was safe.  Yesterday marked four years since she passed away... on the threshold of sleep, into another eternity she left me.  I will follow her one day... everyone leaves, someone said... as I drift in and out I remember so well watching her sleep, at the end; it was all she had left...