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. 

Oh Well....

For those of us with insufficient air conditioning in Manhattan, the first summer heat wave comes with an extra sense of suffocation.  Atmospheric claustrophobia.  People who live in smallish apartments tend to share dreams of opening a closet into a barn-like studio space, or an unexpected ocean view revealing itself through a secret window---or the ceiling suddenly rising...  we've been here before.  95 degrees and above is like an inversion of this.  You close your eyes and feel the collapse.

I've been reading a Murakami novel in which the protagonist, having listened to a terrifying tale of a soldier trapped for weeks in a deep narrow well, has taken to lowering himself for prolonged periods into just such a neighborhood well, where all sorts of fears and revelations take him into a new strange dimension of existence.

I do personally wander into such holes-- some emotional, some philosophical-- for whatever dark reason, and have become recently fascinated by the concept of minimal existence.  Economically speaking, this is a way of life; but physically--- well, vampires shut themselves into coffins... and some New Yorkers, according to a certain interior design blog, reside and flourish in an actual closet space.  I suppose this is the ipod-nano version of real estate-- appealing, as is minimalism in general, but I wonder, like the million songs trapped inside a tiny plastic rectangle, whether our intellects are as compressed as the tiny nano digital music files...   life in a cheap download, zip-filed virtual space.  What is going to happen when those virtual 'goggles' become as common as iPods, and we are all able to exist in a palatial environment, in our own tiny closet-beds?  Will Manhattan property values decrease?  Will my neighbors leave me alone and credit me for starting the trend of downsizing well ahead of my time?  Will the spatially obese see the spatially anorexic with new eyes?

We may be legislated into giving up our super sized drink cups.  Does this mayor not realize some of us economically challenged parents  buy these to distribute among 4 or 5 kids?  Is this yet another indignity to distract the already-punished from peering into the monster garages and liquor cabinets of the J.P. Morgan boys who have lost more money in a week than some African countries have seen in the entire 20th century?  Why not limit the size of allowable personal bank accounts, instead of hiking subway fares for us poor schmucks?  Trim the mountains of economic fat the bankers have not just scarfed up but hoarded.  10-gallon-sized cups of liquid gold that is poisoning their hearts.  Let them all eat precious-metal cake at $1,600 an ounce because they have health insurance.  The expensive kind.

I took a walk down Fifth Avenue Sunday and the crowds of eager shoppers were like nothing I've seen before in Manhattan.  Lines to get into Abercrombie which rival the Christmas Santa lines at Macy's.  For what?  The privilege to stand on line to buy mall-quality merchandise in the most expensive real estate in the world?  I don't get it.

Then again, I still don't have a cellphone.  "How can you live?" a young man asked me the other day.  How can you live without stacks of books and art and Beethoven and Leonard Cohen records and an old leather jacket, I wanted to ask him in return, but I shrugged.

My son called last night with new romance issues.  My niece, too, was waiting for a text from a boy she likes.  Personally, I can live without immediate answers.  The guy in the well took his watch with him, but couldn't actually see the time without light.  I like this.  So..."Does he like me?" my niece wants to know, while she is texting another person and reading an incoming message.  The nano-affair in the nano-phone screen... 3 texts and it's sex... 3 texts and it's over.

I don't know if I would want to know about love anymore.  I don't really always want to answer the phone in my house... I don't want bad test results and I don't want to know if there is really salvation at the end and whether it will hurt when I die or how much money I have in my bank account.  At least I want to filter when the answer comes.  I want to open the letter slowly, by candlelight, or let it sit on the windowsill for a few days.  I want to admire the stamp and feel how fat the letter is-- -whether my lover has taken time to explain things, to confess.  I want to feel the space of time because there is little time in the space I occupy here, and the long summer days are feeling just so short and precious.  I don't want to know how hot it is or what time the sun will rise, or how many scorching days I must endure in my darkened apartment with old things in it which have seen many, many lifetimes and are patient.  'Well...'..I said ominously to both my son and my niece who have no idea I am reading Murakami in this heat with the Mogwai soundtrack in my head and cavernous dreams without walls waiting for me in my existential bed.