Driving Mr. Madden

Throughout my life, my father was something of a mystery to me.  He had very rare moments of joy or lightness, but mostly he brooded-- he paced, he fretted, he lay awake at night.  Of course in the 21st century one would have recognized the classic symptoms of post-war PTSD, but in the 1950's, retired soldiers were expected to re-acclimate to civilian life-- to have families and jobs and be 'normal'.

Whether or not he was CIA, as some of my curious boyfriends were convinced, he'd had a challenging military enlistment punctuated by wounds and acts of great heroism. As many soldiers will attest, the accolades and medals do little to assuage the deep psychological trauma that went mostly unaddressed in those 'happy' days of the 1950's.  Many self-medicated with alcohol or prescriptions, but they were mostly on their own.

At some point in my adulthood, my mother tried to soften the emotional walls I'd created to shield myself from the effects of his moods and disapproval. I was referred to as 'the one who works in bars' with a kind of built-in question as though not even that description was apt. Anyway, during one of his more difficult depressive episodes, she related a story to open my heart  a little. As his enabler and life partner, it was rare that she divulged anything, especially to a daughter whose natural inclinations toward the arts and free speech made her suspect and outside the realm of trust.

During his European service, my father as Captain of the 101st Airborne had a driver. Besides his military field heroics he also participated in some dangerous undercover intelligence missions.  His driver was a black man from Kentucky. They became close. The driver made him promise if he was ever killed in action, my father would go to his family in person and deliver the news.  He did not want his poor mother who could not even read to have one of those terrible telegrams she feared.  So they made a pact.  One day during a risky maneuver, they were attacked and a grenade blew up the jeep.  My father was wounded but not critically; his driver, attempting to shield my father, took the brunt and was instantly killed.

After 9/11 my father was given a hero's license plate which allowed him to park anywhere in the city.  For some reason he seemed a little lightened by this recognition.  While he still experienced periodic deep depressive episodes, he began to attend weekly Old Guard meetings. Being too macho to submit to psychiatric treatment, these meetings were therapeutic.  I guess he was able to pull this story from his memory...  one of the terrible guilts from which he suffered. Most of them were unavoidable-- the consequences of following military orders.  But this was a personal debt he'd left unpaid and it ate at him, decades later.

Why he never attempted to contact the family is a complicated mystery, like most of my father's narrative. For me who goes to great lengths to fulfill even the silliest of promises, this is baffling. But recently it occurred to me that among the landmarks of my life that most irked my father, I married a black man. Perhaps he saw this as a painful reminder and criticism of his personal failure. I don't know; he so rarely gave me a kind look or an embrace; I both feared and hated him.

Last week I read the Count of Monte Cristo... a classic I had written off long ago as a 'boys' book.  It was in my son's teenage library, untouched. And it was fantastically entertaining. Adventure, intrigue, conspiracy, murder, romance... everything one would want.  But most of all it was a story of not just revenge but the resolution of deep irreparable damage from the miscarriage of justice, the way one envious man can turn against another. The unlikely resolution of one man's trauma results in further damage. 

Today as a kind of personal dare I have begun the daunting Divine Comedy. Dante, like Dantès in the Dumas, had been wrongly accused, and the writing of this was a kind of retribution. Whatever the motive, I surely read it in school-- the Longfellow translation which is maybe not the best but I learned today how HWL faced this project just after his beloved wife was killed in a house fire. He, too, was wounded in the inferno. A double dare.  

As we age, the issues of guilt and anxiety weigh on us.  We look back and try to re-interpret our past as though there is a moral there. Sometimes we find understanding-- forgiveness. I tried hard to forgive my father, and have done so, to the extent that I have forgiven myself where he has not. We don't have an enlightened guide like Virgil to guide us through the layers of narrative, to shed light on the good and evil of our present which seems, like worlds past, to have confused the system of punishment and reward.  The life which seemed so easy and simple in the 1950's has become cluttered and confused. One wants to write a guidebook to take us through these times where there are literally millions of digital answers to whatever question we pose. A definitive contemporary Divine Comedy.

In the end, we are each of us responsible for not just ourself, but someone else-- maybe one other person-- fulfilling the promise we made, or explaining, or listening to the man on the bus who looks ill... or the lady on the park bench who stares, day after day, who leaves her lunch untouched on the seat. I am sure that my father, to someone else, was a hero-- was perhaps kind, and understanding. And I hope somehow that driver's mother-- now long dead, certainly, was able to find peace.  After all-- no one's presence could really have relieved the pain of losing her son.  Maybe my father knew that. He was a believer, I think. Maybe at the end, he finally forgave himself.

Not Vegetarian

As a needed literary palette-cleanser I picked up a Murakami novel. I'm beginning to outgrow certain books... or expecting more than I get.  Murakami is always admirable for trying... one often reads for the mystery factor... and he is literate and understands music, art... it's reassuring and good.  This time it was Kafka on the Shore... my expectations were different (the title, lol) but it was okay.

For months I've been waitlisted at NYPL for a couple of Han Kangs... The Vegetarian came last week and I devoured it in an evening. Maybe it was the still-lingering taste of Murakami, but I was underwhelmed. I felt like I'd been there, I'd known these people-- all of them, with their issues and a sort of projected character-narcissism I can't help attributing to the writer?  I am sinning here, I know... but with my limited years of life, diminishing by the moment, I feel annoyed when I am disappointed.  Murakami.. how can one compare (?); but his ambition never fails to impress even when he is less successful. And his characterizations-- well, they are so much less pretentious.  If I had bought this book, I would have felt duped. Apologies to the Nobelist.

A story in the Times today about an eccentric tough professor--  a kind of hoarder... who upon her death left sizable sums of money to selected students.  It felt meaningful, and in the context of recent relentless meditations on death, wills, afterlife... it was a kind of solution. Obviously, being memorialized with a New York Times post-mortem story had its own merit.

The river of death continues to flow past me... the mounting losses among friends, and the utter failure to honor these people who touch us so profoundly... and become a small paragraph-- a post, a broken heart meme... what can one do, without becoming a professional mourner?  Aside from the Pope and former presidents, funeral rituals have become less stringent since Covid.  One adjusted to the idea that a gathering or service would perpetrate more death, and postponed.  Reading history-- whole civilizations were characterized by the way they handled burial and afterlife philosophy.  What one leaves behind has ever-increasing longevity as opposed to the meagre years we are given here.  Not even an eye-blink in the monstrosity of time.

I was forced into a major discussion this week with a teenager who had decided he'd had enough education, and college would be meaningless.  Go ahead, I said... I mean, there are pictures of everything... does one really need to read the captions?  It's useful... and the richness of everyday existence is really measured by the resonance of experience-- how a song reminds us of something.. a piece of melody-- the way some assortment of trees calls up a Monet image or vice versa.  Art-- something not always understood... the process, the pieces.  How will you know about what came before? How will you know what there is to know? Dead writers are not often reviewed in daily media... but they are the foundation.  They are my intellectual family... my teachers. 

Once the actual experience of death is comprehended-- terrifying and unknowable-- it is the eternal obscurity that is depressing.  What we have been, what we have done-- it's just so temporary and unimportant in a culture which deifies the moment-- instant fame. No longer 15 minutes-- it's more like 15 seconds. One wonders that these monstrous people like Sean Diddy Combs are proving evil more memorable than goodness.  They receive enormous media time... and what is goodness?  Pope Francis became a kingpin... we are fascinated, but we go on sinning and wasting time and failing to rescue opportunities.

We cannot save people... The Vegetarian author knows that. I had a longtime best friend who suffered various mental illnesses and I acknowledge I grew tired of being sympathetic. It was exhausting watching her refuse food and company when she was one of the most artistically gifted people I'd ever known.  Part of it-- I was furious at losing my BFF who was better than I was at drawing and maybe singing.  And I adored her. But the option of choosing a kind of death in life seems so selfishly anti-humanitarian.  Not to mention requiring an enormous amount of medical and psychiatric attention. 

Personally I have befriended darkness and process this as a kind of shadow without which there is no light. I have disallowed mental illness but subscribe to psychological variety in the extreme.  I want to see art which explores these channels without shouting about it. Without promotion there is no exposure, I suppose. It is the paradox of this culture which prioritizes marketing above product... which monetizes just about everything... and defines success in amounts. Our heroes are in a way half baked... some of them suffer from the guilty pleasure of fame but many just continue the glam-squad lifestyle and continuous partying.  Maybe it is the new 'B-side' of creativity-- alternating phases of production and then celebration.

I keep returning to the classics-- I am obsessive and worried about my lapses... my failures to discover important things that are no longer popular or even in libraries.  The printed word-- it's so important. Currently I am reading Colm Tóibín's The Magician.. another digression before I start my next difficult 1200 page opus.  It tells the story of Thomas Mann... really just leads one to the writer himself... I wonder if he is read as widely as the Tóibín novel was in this decade.  

Daily obituaries remind... one must memorialize oneself I suppose-- this is the appeal of instagram?  That one's 'legacy' is copious and therefore significant?  And if one is undiscovered, is this worse than death?  There's a universe out there... an infinite, incomprehensible chronology... ever-expanding like the ratio of death to life. Until we have done ourselves in... all of us.  All of the art-- from cave paintings to Stonehenge to the $4 billion-dollars-worth of paintings sold at auction last week.  All of the books... the beautiful buildings-- the Sistine Chapel.  We can all sense goodness... it doesn't necessarily make us famous, but while we are living-- this tiny gift of time-- we can make something, we can leave a mark.  And we can 'not-fail' the ones who came before us, who sit patiently on library shelves, waiting... collecting dust, tottering on being remaindered in the next generation... Eek. Amen. 

Recognitions

My friends know I have never been really on top of technology; while I bought and messed with electronic synthesizers and keyboards when they became commercially affordable in the 1970's, I was late to get a computer, lagged far behind in digital 'joinings', and only recently, on the insistence of my son, carry a cellphone for emergencies.

Besides the standard bedside-worthy pile of books, I have an old iPad (2011?)-- for recording inspiration-- lyrics, as they typically come to me in the dark. The fact that one doesn't need to turn on a lamp is convenient.  It also delivers messages-- from the random 10 or 12 people who have access... and the way this penetrates my daily agenda is extraordinary. I can only imagine how the daily psyche of normal people is shaped by the constant barrage of texts which unlike email seem to have full access.  

Since I have lived alone I have the habit, late at night, of browsing my bookshelves. Like leafing through a photo album or web-surfing-- or the hermitic version of taking a drive, it's comforting and reassuring. I have a wealthy person's library, somehow... collected over 60 years by hoarding things I read and loved, lingering in old bookshops in the days when buying was an analogue-only activity and road trips and random travel digressions presented these opportunities.  Libraries used to pare off extra copies--- their sales were extra-serendipitous because the books were almost giveaways-- sorted and pre-filtered by institutional acquisition priorities.

Huge books have punctuated my life... I can vividly remember where I was when I was reading War and Peace or Proust or The Recognitions-- more recently, Peter Nadas, Marguerite Young (still), Thomas Mann. As a girl I fell in love with the sheer weight and reassurance that this was not just a one-night stand, but a long-term relationship.

Last night I wandered across my shelf section of Joseph McElroy... the copy of Women and Men I've had for nearly 40 years, and which has been coveted by readers who visit me.  It is unread-- pristine, my copy... for some reason I searched my iPad at dawn and found a Paris Review piece on reading this book-- meeting McElroy-- another of those quintessentially New York City writers who has shaped the urban post-war canon. Like Gaddis-- he's difficult. I shared it with one of my few friends with whom I message.

And then 'I am millimeters from the abyss', I told my friend this morning... it just texted itself... the operative word being 'from'... and I had this image of Dick Van Dyke, just recently celebrated in a video, nearly immolated in his neighborhood wildfire, then being returned to his unscathed home yesterday.  We saw the  photograph-- all of us-- on the 'entertainment' pages... it distracted from the one of Jamie Foxx with stitches, the constant litany of photos of the prep school Valedictorian-turned-murderer.  There is little refuge here from the worrying world-tensions, patriotic anxieties and catastrophic climate threat. 

Most of all I am haunted by not just recent deaths but the ebb-tide of mental skills I am forced to witness among my decreasing circle.  My mother at a point became overwhelmed by an incomprehensible sea of words which whirled around her withering brain like a terrifying tsunami.  A friend has been afflicted with a cruel and progressive form of aphasia which has left her stranded and near-mute on some non-verbal desert island.  My neighbor upstairs who shared my love of literature can no longer see. And a horrific brain tumor has devoured most of the capacity of another.  I visit her and she is beached in a bed, unable to communicate. 

The vertical/horizontal grid of bookshelves has always been stabilizing. And the books are my friends... my mentors; they are my past, my present, and many of them are inside me. It is a great comfort to scan the titles at night-- to pull one out and know it is there-- all of it-- with a kind of permanence. The diminishing number of unread ones beckon... Don't leave me, they call out at night... We have not yet become intimate.  It is a kind of future for me, at the edge of this looming unknown catastrophe before which many of us graze at this age.  

This year I have been more or less fortunate to have survived and mostly recovered from an accident which temporarily froze my daily activity.  It helped me understand and appreciate the pitfalls of human existence, and left me a little more grateful for the outcome, considering the odds and the ends of blind human faith. 

As a girl and a teenager we had a few end-of-year family rituals-- every New Year's Eve my Mom would ceremoniously wish me a blessed future;  it became a compulsory phone-call as we aged, with a little bit of superstitious 'prevention' in the mix.  When she passed away, all bets were off, so to speak. I mark her absence most of all at that end-of-year moment, she who was most responsible for my existence, for the blessings... for the strength with which I rehabbed myself over the past 10 months. She was not much of a reader herself, but she read to us as children-- Lewis Carroll and Robert Louis Stevenson--- Francis Hodge Burnett and A. A. Milne-- Frank Baum and C.S. Lewis... Johanna Spyri, Lucy Ward Montgomery...on and on... it was a bedtime ritual which I carried on with my own son, but being a musician and having night-working hours I often left a cassette tape to read him to sleep. 

The perceived acceleration of time this year-- the occasional empty hours and the speed of days-- obsesses me.  I cannot seem to make things matter more, although I still write my poems and make my songs. Few care about what I do-- fewer read or witness. Whether or not 'recognition' has a sort of parental role in adult lives is something we struggle with.  Celebrity, fame... seem to equate less and less with quality of work, although that is a bit of sour grapes.  At the edge of this sense of passing, I am propping up the months with my reading lists and projects; it helps anchor one's existence in a rocking sea of the unknown. There is travel and romance for some; for me there is the opportunity to spend long hours with the creations of great minds-- to mix my thoughts with theirs, to blend my flaws and weaknesses and come out with a possibly better version.  For my dwindling friends to whom I confide dark morning thoughts, I will try... I will turn the page of another year, God willing. 

Blue Ink

 Over the weekend I was touched by the obituary of a type-face designer who passed away.  His fonts and graphic 'eye' are well integrated in our every-day visuals.  The musical metaphors he offered, the way letters and printed words 'speak' to some of us... these people are part of media obsolescence.  I find myself mourning the disappearance of them as though they are family.  They are part of the soul and material of my life.  I miss them; I miss the reality to which they belonged-- the priorities and signposts. “The most beautiful thing in the world,” the Times quoted him as saying,“is a blank piece of paper.”

Credit...

My neighbor is a well-known older writer.  When we met, years ago, he exclusively worked on an odd and dated version of a dedicated word processing machine.  One night he called me-- panicky-- because it was malfunctioning and any self-respecting computer repair man declined to service this.  I offered him my 'transition' typewriter-- the kind that memorized a line at a time and then printed it out on a page via plastic ribbon.  I held onto these things as souvenirs, and for just such literary emergencies.  It distracted him, but it was wrong.  Ebay, I suggested... and sure enough he was able to find a replacement.  

Meanwhile, I remember thinking how far I'd come-- writing my first novel in Word Perfect, on a Dell PC I'd been gifted, to replace my used  8 MHz IBM PS  which prompted me to install DOS by floppy disk every time I turned the machine on.  From my first ancient Royal on which I'd typed my Princeton thesis (with carbons), to an electric Smith Corona, and onward.  My friends know I'm still using a telephone land-line; I've resisted change/technology along the way.   I am uncomfortable with these systems that seem to accelerate my process until I don't recognize myself.  I need the heartbeat and material of sentence-building, of story-telling.  

The cross-outs and inserts of manuscript writing are part and parcel of understanding a writer's process.  Songwriters, poets... their doodles and marginalia enhance value-- provide clues to the creative path, to private distractions and passions--  a bit of humor.  In the late sixties when I applied to college the applications were hand-written.   On one of them, instead of attaching the passport-sized photo requested, I asked one of my friends to draw me.  I maneuvered questions and embellished things-- gave them what they didn't ask but maybe wanted.  Today the 'common' app most universities use are just that; they leave little room for variety or humor.  My little portrait would have been missed by any computer.  

I wake during the night and scrawl lyrics on paper scraps-- have a supply of writing utensils among piles of books on my nightstand.  Far beyond recalling inspiration now, I still shun middle-of-the-night technology, as though the bright blue light threatens poetry.  Last night I thought about summer camp.  I hated being sent away and from the age of eight spent a full two months in a cabin full of girls with no privacy.  Besides my rag doll, I brought a small stack of paperback books my Mom approved, and a white pad of stationary paper with a blue ball-point pen.  It was the first time I was allowed to use ink.  I can still remember the way it glided along the paper, the sweetish candy smell of the ink, and the halo of my flashlight underneath the covers.  It was during those nights that I think I became a writer.

In this era of backlit news, texts and emails which spread or shrink across screens, I still take my coffee black and my reading material in print, bound and paged.  The way the words flow in linear formations-- the serifs and italics, dots and lines-- these are essential.  They comfort me when I am sleepless, sing to me when I am alone.  The hours and nights of this pandemic have run one into another-- my solitude provides little punctuation, but the near-endless supply of well-written sentences in my old books, the familiar patterns of verse and chorus-- have provided some comfort, like the homesick summer nights of white paper and blue ink.