Hospitality

When I was younger I loved entertaining. I loved cooking a large meal-- baking, spreading out copious plates on a table where my musician and artist-friends would gather on unmatched chairs-- two on a piano bench, a few on Fender or Ampeg amplifiers which provided extra seating and wheeled conveniently.  For the most part I loved my guests, although occasionally I had a few undesirable intruders who drank too much, sloshed red wine on the rugs, stayed too long. Generally everyone seemed to enjoy these evenings-- like a kind of salon, with some guitars inevitably pulled out as inhibitions waned. In later years people commented on the company-- they wanted to know who was coming and who wasn't. And one night some unidentified person walked off with a painting-- took it right off the wall and I assume stuck it under their coat. It was brazen and hurtful and I still have not forgiven whomever it was who violated my hospitality. 

Once I had a baby I limited these evenings to holidays or celebrations and they were considerably less wild, less generous, less hospitable. As my resources shrank and living costs blew up, priorities had to change. I often remember my mother-- her dinner parties for my father's business associates-- how she fussed over hors d'oeuvres and menus-- place settings, silver service and wine choices. By today's standards her dining room was very modest-- the table extensions made it cramped but she persisted-- with her crystal chandelier and the fancy china. There was something positively homey about it all. Today, corporate dinners are most often catered or moved to restaurants. 

I can remember sitting at the top of my family's staircase, eavesdropping... sometimes I'd sneak down and open the hall closet where I could bury my face in the ladies' furs, and try on the men's hats while the grownups chattered on.  The dogs were locked in the alcove, we were sequestered, and the house smelled of perfume for days. There were place-cards, invitations, gifts to amuse us.  There were formal thank-you notes and after-gifts my mother would display on the mantelpiece, all mentioning her stellar and warm hospitality.

The word confused me-- I'd broken my leg and been x-rayed and treated in a local hospital.  Why were people mentioning this sterile awful-smelling place in relation to my mother?  It was also ironic that grandparents ended up in the very place they felt least welcome, and most uncomfortable, with the deceptive name. No one has really ever explained this semantic discrepancy with any finality.  

Most Saturdays I work at an art gallery.  I'm generally there alone and it's a vaguely intimidating place, as many galleries have become in recent years. It's as though they establish an aura of exclusivity and discourage average people from entering-- a social boundary which walls off the often baffling and exorbitant pricing of art-- intentionally intimidating, implying only the gallerists have the key to the mystery of collection and value. I am there alone; I'm careful to welcome people, to dress casually and encourage a positive experience looking at exhibitions. 

By contrast, at home I've become a little reclusive. Maybe since the pandemic I lost the habit of hosting groups of people. I'm more private and less sociable; I'm covetous of my time. Gigs used to give me an opportunity to welcome friends and socialize behind the curtain of music.  Everyone had a good time and then I could go home and be alone while staff cleaned up. Personally I don't use instagram and refrain from posting family and private events on my limited social media. I don't share health status or much besides my work and maybe my son's when he solicits this.  Raising kids, the very idea of solitude became impossible-- a lost luxury some of us rediscovered in older age.  And good fences good neighbors do make.  City dwellers in apartment buildings tend to keep healthy distances from our neighbors. We hear too much, we observe more than we should and we try to ignore over-intimacy and establish boundaries. It's an art-- to be warm and friendly but not invasive.

Last Saturday a woman came into the gallery, pulled up a chair and began a conversation.. She'd somehow been personally stalking me... after a convoluted soliloquy about her lifelong pursuit of the arts, she tried to convince me to let her stay in my home.  But it went on --- it became unsafe and alarming.  There was no 'no'.  There was just more manipulation and pleading.  She would not leave when guests and clients were asking questions... she sat herself in an office and just stayed. In the end I asserted the meanness I reserve for extreme situations. It had gone on for hours and I was literally shaking.

To distance myself from the episode I walked a good five miles uptown.. ended up passing my son's favorite Mexican restaurant where the doors were open, welcoming customers in the early summer weather.  I took out the phone he makes me carry to take a photo to send him and there in the corner of the frame was a young rat-- as nice looking as they come-- sniffing around outside... and then it entered. Slipped in. I wondered whether I should interfere and alert staff but I watched as it casually crawled underneath a table where two well-dressed women were sitting.  It explored their feet.. unobserved... did that hesitation dance rats do... walked itself around the place, and carefully left.  Totally unnoticed... that little rat taking advantage of city hospitality and beyond... or finding the place not suitable-- who knows why it left? 

I couldn't help drawing parallels to some of the characters of my recent weeks-- the stalker in the gallery, those few who have invited themselves into my home... and the places I've been where I felt strange or judged or misplaced. Being on an extreme budget, I do not have air conditioning.  It makes my home less hospitable for sure in the summer. It's a kind of protection. I'll do my socializing off-site. And God-willing I will manage to avoid any seasonal hospital hospitality. 

Reel Fiction

A friend and I were reminiscing about our first records... not the ones we shared with our parents, not our adolescent rock-obsessions but our very own early-childhood albums.  Mine was Funnybone Alley.  I played it over and over on my machine-- with the switch and the heavy rotating disc covered in some kind of wool or felt-- the metal bullet in the center. There were silly songs and dreamy songs-- marches and sad ballads. Just for children. I inhaled these... memorized every melody, every lyric. One step more sophisticated than the little colored plastic sing-along rhyming discs, it sang to me, this album.  It changed me.

My first book-- the one that was really mine.. was A Fly Went By.  I was already a pretty good reader at 5, but this was a gift. I devoured it-- over and over.  'A fly went by...he said oh, dear... I saw him shake... he shook with fear...' I could recite the entire text now, 60-something years later. The color blue on the cover was perfect.  The little freckled boy-- unlike the drab boys in my pre-school-- he was adventurous and independent; he was there for me, whenever I picked it up. He was my friend.  The boy.  No names, these books. Likewise A Hole is to Dig...  A Hat for Amy-Jean... these were my companions, my confidantes-- my familiars.  They never abandoned me.

Lately I've regained the habit I once had of reading.  I've been through Dostoevsky, Murakami, Eliot, Musil.  The depth of my library never ceases to thrill; I will never finish. I also frequent the library for discovery.  Coincidentally, I live on a street rich with writers.  My neighbor's son recently wrote a novel.  It was pretty decent... but I couldn't stop looking at his picture on the back sleeve;  I knew him. The book won an award, and now he wrote another one.  Again, the photo.  You feel close, like you have shared some intimacy... this time he divulges his masturbation fantasies, he dissects his father's flaws.  It's fiction but you know better.  He passes you occasionally on the sidewalk... for you it's like seeing an old lover.  He has no clue, of course, that you applaud him for craving his father's approval while giving him the finger.

In college there was a famous Physics professor.  Or maybe it was Philosophy.  There were rumors... he'd written a bestseller and his boyish profile with the shock of hair on the backcover-- the loosened tie and open collar... sold books.  Not long after I graduated he let my college advisor know that he'd had a little crush on me. Flattered, I agreed to go on a date-- intimidated but somehow reassured by the familiarity of that image on the book-cover.  I knew him... the way his fingers absentmindedly held the piece of chalk-- the way he gestured with his hands, and pushed the shock of hair off his forehead. When he came to pick me up, he told me he'd often thought I had the legs of an extinct running animal.  I'm sure I wore a very short skirt; we all did in those times. As we walked he calculated the number of shades between the whiteness of my skin and the black of my hair.  I was a little speechless... out of my element.  He took me to the movies-- something almost embarrassingly pedestrian like Rocky.  The smell of popcorn and urban movie-theatre didn't quite fit in with that disheveled young professorial silhouette.  I wanted him on the cover. That version. Somehow I felt humiliated when he left me at my door, as though he had put me back in some inferior student slot.  I thought about the comments he made... Liar, liar, pants on fire I said to myself over and over in my apartment, like a 5-year-old, to console my ego.  

Since the pandemic has completely disintegrated whatever skewed temporal reality I once had, I often stay up and watch films-- great ones: Godard, Almodovar, Fassbinder, Kurosawa. I am transformed by the better of them-- the way I was when I took my first course in film in boarding school, and was shown Truffaut and Fellini and Bergman. They seep into the cracks of me-- the ones that haven't been filled by novels and text.  They haunt my dreams and my strange daily existence which is at least five degrees more separated than it once was.  Sometimes I feel as though I've been transferred into another human form.  I am married to my solitude; I have said this many times, and it has been a wonderful and attentive husband.  

Tonight I ventured out to witness the Philharmonic on the Great Lawn-- this annual event I'd attended so many times-- with husbands, boyfriends, schoolmates, babies... I stayed on the outskirts like an eavesdropper, with a book to fill the intermissions.  At the end I wandered back along the reservoir-- my daily habit... and pausing to watch the post-concert fireworks... I was nearly alone-- not even the ducks were awake-- waiting, except for two large dogs who are normally prohibited there, but it was late.  Suddenly I began to sense there was a couple embracing in the shadows... it was awkward; the dogs eventually forced them to address me. The girl was familiar-- I'd seen her on the way to the park with her dog...  beautiful like a younger, prettier Natalie Portman... and sweet;  she smiles at me often with true kindness.  The man was older--- boyish and familiar... I recognized him hours later... an actor... anyway, it became apparent that I was somehow inserted into their story-- or film.  We made a little smalltalk.. and then the actor came over to me and began speaking-- nervously-- soliloquizing... mentioning his little sons.. how one of them was terrified by fireworks, their sleep habits, etc., etc...  It was a moment of intimacy he opened and I suddenly realized they were meeting illicitly there... he, perhaps, had a family-- a wife.. but the two of them were so magnetically attached, there on the path-- watching their dogs play... touching, waiting to touch... and there I was, the unanticipated witness... maybe the only witness. I am safe, I did not say... you are safe. 

Once the fireworks ended, I took off down the steps of Engineer's Gate... they waved from the wall, and recalled the dogs who followed me for a bit.  The night could not have been more perfect... one day past the Strawberry Moon.  I have plenty to grieve this year-- the loss of friends, relatives-- the absence of my former habitual performance schedule-- the closing of so many beloved shops and venues.  I am a shabby aging writer/musician... a dying bohemian breed with barely enough income to cover the most basic expenses. Apologies to my late mother, I pay little attention to my wardrobe and appearance; she who was proud and always groomed would surely pass me by on the street, the way she publicly ignored me when I was going through my grunge phase.   

And yet I am still in love with New York-- the silhouette, the stones and sidewalks, bricks and facades... the graves and plaques and benches which memorialize so many vanished writers and artists and composers and heroes. The faded narratives and unseen films-- the diaries and heartbreaks. I will be gone one day but tonight I participated in one of those random urban tales of intrigue and passion and some kind of longing... and it felt like closure. My own little movie-- no wardrobe, no lines... just me, the intruder and the witness, who altered the narrative just that bit-- left my tiny mark on the city. 

Turning the page

Aside from the various Christmas gifs and Charlie Brown vignettes and musical e-cards, I can divide this season's personal email wishes fairly neatly into two categories.  The first: a terse but cheery message heavy with jpeg attachments-- large families in warm living rooms- -dogs, kids... the chaos of wrapping paper and ribbon littering the floor around the decorated tree-- Grandmas around hearths, grandbabies crawling, children of children, festive sweaters and laughter.  Or seated around large tables laden with dishes and bottles... everyone toasting the camera with laughter and joy... view after view as though we are looking through some social keyhole onto the version of normal American holiday cheer we have come to recognize as a kind of status quo.  Many of these.  Here am I-- scrolling through-- reminded of Christmases past when my biggest challenge was the piled up dishes and flatware-- the confectioners sugar fingerprints on sofas-- the broken wine glasses, trips to the recycling with empties... no camera.  

And the other half... text-heavy messages without photos or emojis or gifs... long sad paragraphs that conjure the old 'America's Neediest Cases' feature in newspapers.  I grew up relishing these-- sometimes weeping and learning to disburse my petty childhood disappointments against the magnitude of real human tragedy.  Please, I would beg my perfectly manicured mother, can't we bring them some presents?  She had little sympathy for much of anything outside our family circle.   'Volunteering' was the mysterious thing women did without their husbands... but essentially it was as though charity and pity were not part of being a 1950's housewife.  

The 2021 version of Neediest Cases, personally delivered in my Facebook and email inbox, was sobering-- the predominant theme being isolation.  My generation was generally comfortable with alternative living arrangements--- serial monogamy, uncoupling and individualism.  In times of sickness, tragedy-- what felt like independence can dissolve into acute loneliness... depression, anxiety... lassitude and hopelessness.  Those of us accustomed to freedom were compelled to give up our wandering, eccentric socializing and submit to enforced alone-ness.  For some it was transforming and meditative.  For others it was unbearable.  Not to mention the claustrophobia of quarantine fomenting break-ups and bad drama-- relapsing bad behaviors and paranoias.  But these are my friends... like my mother I found myself a little overwhelmed and, while sympathetic, unable to do much besides listen.

And then there are the deaths and losses-- some timely and expected, some shocking and devastating.  The crying and 'care' emojis have surpassed all others. Our shaky foundations and podiums are damaged.  Layer upon layer of hardship came last week via email-- some coping with enormous courage and strength, some confessing their weakness with another kind of unacknowledged bravery. When the tears subsided and my vision cleared, I saw as well the emigrés of my beloved city-- the ones who gave up-- abandoned ship-- for safer shores that failed to quell their terrible homesickness. A few in particular had seemed part of the very fabric here-- the foundation.  Indigenous musicians who had once beckoned like gods to the likes of me, who put down roots and discovered the secret landmarks of an artistic world that once was New York City.   

Yes, the past 19 months have been hard.  We received tiny grants and gig-assistance and rent rollbacks-- food stamps and free covid care... but it was not enough to break up the monotony of waiting that became our daily lives.  Of course, as I've explained many times-- this has been a process.  The attrition of artistic institutions in the city-- the small, human ones-- is an old story.  But the overwhelming current disparity between the small artists and the corporate behemoths-- well, it has been crushing.  And the larger they grow, the harder it is for them to see the small treasures that used to form the bohemian personality of our city.  No one seems to realize that so many of the grant-worthy creators are not visible.  It used to be woven into the very definition of an artist that they were incapable of self-promotion.  

Taylor Swift has posted huge sales... Bruce Springsteen sold his catalogue for a fortune.  Meanwhile the tiny, fragile talents have slipped into cracks-- even suicides... maybe given up and taken a job delivering Amazon packages, stomping out the sparks and feathers of imagination.  I remember so well the joy of my first apartment-- classes, jobs, art galleries... sneaking into clubs and movie theaters... talking and smoking into early morning hours with others... drinking ketchup soup, crashing at places that smelled of paint, while guitars and amps were dragged up long flights of tenement stairs.  To have been thwarted with a nightmarish year-long hiatus would have been more than devastating-- Broadway and the LES the new boulevards of broken dreams.  It's surely the more fragile genius that is crushed first... and I grieve the missed opportunities and invention that have been few and far between enough before all of this.  

You are old, said the youth to Father William, or me...  and maybe young musicians no longer crave artistic Nirvana but instagram fame. Maybe I am wasting my sympathy on what I consider the tragedy of our city, while dire social, civic and racial issues rage on, beneath the pall of this pandemic.  At least I have some sympathy-- and useless as it seems, I will forge onward into yet another 365-part quandary, god willing.  For those fortunate enough to have celebrated, I wish you well.  To the senders of the sad emails, holidays are almost over... you've weathered another masked and trying season with some naked grace. And despite falling on deaf ears, or none at all, I vow I will not be silent as I walk into evening. 

Omicronic

The pandemic, in all its variations and behaviors, has again become the enigmatic chart-topper of the year.  It commands a massive global audience-- we participate, we read, we listen-- suffer, weep and throw up our hands.  It has confused performance with spectators, victim with aggressor, mourner with mourned.  Like a biological fugue, it plays on... movement upon movement-- scherzo upon adagio; just when we think we've reached the finale, there is another coda.  

One thing of which it reminds me is the proverbial sound of one hand clapping.  We have experienced the solitude of isolation-- of grief and loss, of quarantine.  Those of us who are comfortable with ourselves have indulged-- even enjoyed and 'caught up' with scrap books, nostalgia, creative projects we'd procrastinated.  We read from our bedside stack of books... we watch old films and try out recipes.  

The couples among us have either flourished or suffered.  Some compete for space or crave silence... some embrace the home-honeymoon scenario. But the performers-- the singers and players and actors-- have taken a major hit.  Yes, they go on their Facebook pages and zoom-entertain... but I notice the audience is dropping off.  Some of the die-hards look anxiously at their live stats as they sit at a piano, counting the drop-ins and regretting the passers-by.  I feel sheepish sneaking away.  But to broadcast myself? I shudder (shutter). 

I've already admitted to indulging in scads of old films-- way too much television, a healthy amount of YouTube concerts and comedy. Reading-- yes, but proportionately more screen time and channel changing.  The old films are always comforting... and seeing New York City as it was seems more compelling than ever.  Pandemic-era shows are immediately recognizable and besides the incessant news, I grow distant.  

Another thing I've noticed is how quickly the brief cultural timestamps seem... as though the expiration dates are closer and closer.  While old films have a timelessness... the newer ones (aside from Titanic and a few ubiquitously recycled classics) seem irrelevant and cheap. Contemporary celebrity is a vast field of edited heads and faces. Modern options have altered them-- morphed some of them into a kind of generic air-brushed idolatry.  Flash back to Ingrid Bergman or Veronica Lake-- Gary Cooper and Gregory Peck.  They are iconic... unmistakable.    

I am the recipient of hundreds of art blogs and online publications.  I browse auctions and museums-- virtual galleries and whatever I can... but see these sadly as imagery with short shelf-lives.  Yes, I'm old and cranky... but I wonder where Jean Michel would be if he'd survived.  A fat, cigar-smoking billionaire with trademarked colors, photographed in LVMH with Beyonce and Jay Z?  I suppose the riddle answers itself because he did not get that far, nor did he relish the pre-millennial changes as they affected his work.  

The irony of covid robbing us of smell and taste is poignant.  Once the Black Lives Matter violence subsided, I feel as though we all fell into a kind of bland stupor.  We fooled ourselves into reverting to old habits-- crowds and concerts, shopping and sports... and now we are again forced to reconsider.  What did we accomplish?  Our country is a divided mess, we are reeling from isolated natural disasters which raise the bar of anxiety.  But mostly we look into our little social media mirrors with unprecedented narcissism, the way the Queen in Snow White was told over and over she was beautiful.  We sing Christmas songs to one another online, we buy gifts and pretend.  

Who is watching?  There used to be movie magazines and celebrity papers for the kings and queens of Hollywood.. but did a local underwear model have millions of 'followers'?  Girls coloring their hair in front of phone cameras and cats parading in costumes... If we added up all the numbers on instagram, what kind of infinity would this be?  I can't help feeling this is all some catastrophic distraction, and covid aside, there is something wrong with everyone. 

Is it me, one of my friends asked on Facebook, after seeing a few of our old rebel heroes posing with political superstars who veto abortion and refuse vaccines and masks?  Where are priorities? And more important, where is science and data?  How is it possible that the Uber-protector America has let us all slip through its medical fingers, despite our obedience to accept not one but three unproven vaccines?  Are we just narcissistic little guinea pigs who post on our social media our immunity-badge which seems to fail us at just the wrong moment?  Is there something they are not telling us, or have we just lost the ability to listen, to read between lines?  

I've been playing, over and over, on my double bass, a few Christmas melodies.  I could fool an amateur into thinking I am proficient on this instrument.  Over and over in my head and my heart, I wish my friends and even my enemies and fellow countrymen a Merry and peaceful Christmas... with tidings of comfort and joy (emphasis on comfort-- repeat 2x)... 

Sonidos de Soledad

 I've been joking with friends about my lifelong penchant for solitude.  We've had a private relationship for years, I say-- flirtations, sometimes a secret affair...  but lately we've become more or less exclusive.  To be perfectly honest, I never really felt totally connected.  I loved my mother-- but the others-- well, it was like we were made of different material.  We'd get banished to our rooms for various childhood misdeeds and while my sister would tantrum and panic, it was sort of my sanctuary.  I invented stories and poems-- I read, I painted pictures, talked to my little animal collection, looked at stamps, built things.  It was the group activities that terrified me-- even a family dinner was like a tortuous ritual.  

It's not like I was a loner; I was social and participated... I took ballet and chorus and orchestra and loved the ensemble thing, but I craved solitude.   When I discovered music-- pop and rock in those magical years of the early 60's, the lyrics reached out to me.  I went as an exchange student to a remote city in Veracruz, Mexico and the language difference separated me further, but also drew me in.  The girls had names like Blanca-- Rosa-- colors... or Dolores (sorrow), and my favorite friend, Soledad (loneliness).  It was like a legendary story and I was a character.  Life was simple and basic-- no electricity or plumbing; we slept three 'sisters' to a floor-palette.  People sang and danced.  

I'd brought with me Simon & Garfunkel's 'Sounds of Silence' album.  This had been a revelation to me-- from the very first lyric 'Hello darkness my old friend'... I knew I was 'home'. Unfortunately there was no turntable and nowhere to plug one in, but Soledad daily came and studied the cover-- turning it over and over, touching the vinyl grooves as though magic would emerge.  They had a guitar; I was not good but could figure out most of the chords... So I spent the summer translating song lyrics...los Sonidos de Silencio.  My versions were clumsy and filled with mistakes and misinterpretations but I began to understand the underlayer of the Spanish language, the way we in school wake up one day to the concept of symbolism.  Names have a meaning; characters represent things.  What is the meaning of my life, I wondered, as I wrote out Yo soy piedra/yo soy isla... and Soledad looked at me from her black eyes of sympathy.

My first stop when I got to Mexico City later that season was a record store where I found The Who's 'Tommy' had been released.  I spent the afternoon in an isolation booth with headphones, savoring the re-discovery of recorded music--like an old friend.  For those of us who begin to 'live' via music, it is only this that accompanies the solitary room of existence.  Every sorrow has a theme, every grief has a soundtrack. 

Ironically, in my 2020 confinement here, I have been separated from my live musical connections.  Players need one another-- we need noise and amplification and audience and company... personal intimacy.  The absence of the alternative to solitude takes away some of its meaning.  I'm not sure Thoreau would agree-- or St. Augustine or those monks who suffered and labored for years confined and deprived.  For me, during much of the year, loss and grief have defined the boundaries of my shadows-- they have drawn the outline of my silhouette.  Some nights it has been hard to even listen to songs of my personal history that conjure old memories.  Here I have all the time and space I have ever craved, and the ghosts of music past haunt my evenings and color my auditions with a kind of pain.  

Tonight I did my lap of the park reservoir in the cold with the wind stirring up a current on the glassy water... A lone goose was calling-- shrieking, squawking.  The moon had painted a clear white broken line on the black surface but she avoided the spotlight.  I strained to understand her, to fathom her language... to no avail... but within minutes a whole flock came and surrounded her.  For a time they all shouted and sang; then they were quiet.  What was the meaning?  Was she banished or punished and then forgiven?  They all seemed so calm when I turned west-- gliding across the rippling cold water, listening to the sirens and the soft wind, unaware that the year is about to turn over.  

I realize that Soledad taught me somehow the difference between solitude and loneliness.  I wonder where she is today-- an older woman like me.  She liked to dance-- she would undoubtedly have led the happy/sad life of most beautiful women.  I am still mourning the losses of this year, but am grateful to embrace the amplitude of what I have been given.  It is as though I am in an empty room with nothing but a wand.  There is another language still to be learned; I am beginning to see this, and I look forward to a  slow melodic passage into another year where I will once again hear and translate the sounds of silence.

Home Alone

 I read an article this morning about the alarming surge of suicide in Japan.  More people there took their lives in October than died of  Corona virus in ten months, the highest rates being among young women and schoolgirls.  The very word--schoolgirl-- pulls at my maternal heartstrings; there is no more poignant symbol of soft-edged vulnerability...  the magical prologue to the drama of life.  The image of Japanese girls lined up and giggling in their staid uniforms like delicate figurines-- children-- juxtaposed with the dark confessional teenage social media posts-- well, it is heart wrenching.  

As I discovered in 2017 when I went with Alan to Tokyo, masks have been standard street-wear for years... so it seemed to me the pandemic protocol would be not quite the adjustment it has been in New York City.  But loneliness-- isolation... is a difficult prescription for the adolescent psyche already afflicted with perpetual FOMO or social addictions.  Being confined to the house with one's insufferable parents is a sort of punishment... and when life is all future, quarantines are a kind of extreme deprivation.  I am not well educated in Japanese culture but found it to be a weird mix of ultra-sophistication and this cult of the child.  After our rock and roll show a young woman presented me very seriously with a lovely doll.  

Despite all the Thanksgiving messages of hope and gratitude, there is the widespread epidemic of depression and sadness.  I tried my best to be festive at my small table, but the echo of former guests' laughter hung over us like a memory cloud.  I miss the Hendrix tributes; I miss coming in from a gig to face an all-nighter of cooking-- I miss the musicians passing my guitars back and forth as the sun rises on Black Friday.  

In addition to the 'Virgin Suicides' plague, I've been reading pieces about postpartum depression-- miscarriages... the sorrows of women.  We have always carried our layers of grief, but only recently I have had to see Chrissy Teigen's Instagram photo-shoot with a shrouded fetus... not to mitigate her right to mourning, and the pain of losing a child... but in this worldwide 'weather' of death, it just seemed a little overdone.  

I've been emailing my long-standing women friends; we seem to have a need to communicate-- to bare our  loneliness and disappointment to our sisters with whom we can 'let down'.  We're used to sadnesses-- we have mourned the phases of our lives.  While I didn't have the luxury of postpartum moods, as a single mother and sole provider, there was the sense of shedding a skin-- of losing the tender 'girlness' that makes those Japanese adolescents so compelling and soft.  We are no longer the little twirling ballerina on the cake-- we are someone's mother... we are responsible ministers.  As my own mother warned-- she who disapproved of my life-style and single parenthood-- knowing how I craved my own independence and creative solitude, 'You'll never be alone again, my dear!'  Intended as a cruel prophecy, she did not live to witness just how wrong 2020 has proven her.

Now that our children are adults and we are becoming grandparents, another skin has been shed.  I wonder if moulting snakes feel pain... they seem to slither out of their coats with no regrets or hindsight... straight ahead into the next phase; not so we women.  Forward we go toward a winding-down; the current braking of culture and community leaves us leaning on our lifetime sills, looking through criss-crossed panes at future and past, sensing our own helplessness to protect our children and other women's children from falling in love with death, the ultimate solitude.  

Turning the pages of my blank calendar, I can still remember years when every single day was not just crammed with events and gigs and meetings-- but the possibility of things... the slivers of soundbites and colors-- fashion and books... hooded eyes meeting yours... flirtations and messages exchanged on papers during breaks... Today I could swear I smelled the patchouli-vanilla aura of that dread-locked guy from Dan Lynch's-- with the muscles and the smooth brown skin who left his scent on you one night,  like a taste of what you were missing.  And these moments you skipped-- stones you left unturned-- same as the ones you pocketed-- they were still there-- in the night air-- in the live-wire sea of the possible.  I can imagine these sad girls of Japan-- everywhere-- like a new race of pandemic humanity-- barefoot on the shore-- sentenced to unsampled beauty and sexuality-- wading prohibited.  

Time is a tightrope, I once wrote... love is the fall; love is a one-track mind... time is the crash.  At that moment I would have died if I was separated from my own passion.  For the sake of children-- of girls everywhere-- may this end, may we return to some normalcy of touch and taste and uncovered faces and hearts... and may the older among us accept our fate with the strength we acquired when we were young.  Not to forget... but to look back at where we have been.  Preserve your memories, Paul Simon wrote... they're all that's left you.  I was barely 15 and writing in a secret diary when I heard that lyric for the first time; I can scarcely recall why it touched me then, but some 50 years later, it is just as haunting.  

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'.