Sowing Oates

It occurs to me today that this is the quintessentially perfect Sunday... the relentless comfort of nonending rain, like a kind of temporary seascape, because we all seem to inherently believe the blue-sky reassurance will resume-- the status quo. Weather optimism doesn't exist for me; I prefer the grey interludes, wish that they would extend.  There's a fishing port in Vestland, Norway where precipitation is near-constant; the mere thought comforts me. 

My neighbor who hates discarding things has been leaving her New Yorker issues outside my door.  While it's hard for me to turn down reading opportunities, I generally avoid magazines-- just so many books here wagging their paper fingers, reminding me of countdowns and lost hours.  So this morning I read the recent Joyce Carol Oates profile.  I can't seem to get enough of JCO biographical although I suspect she might have disliked this one-- at least the ending.  She is the single most prolific writer in a present which seems unprecedentedly chocked with distraction. 

JCO is an odd, quasi-Goth personification of the dark and odd and not pretty.  And yet, she has had a life of rarely paralleled literary productivity and not one but two enviable marriages. I'm never sure which of these accomplishments I admire more, although a statistic was mentioned-- that one needs to write two pages daily to rack up a lifetime total of 100 novels. Remarkable the time one wastes.

One tends to compare one's life to that of these exemplary people. While JCO is a sort of flawed human, I have always admired her for what I assumed was her frank self-assessment and her lack of self-pity.  So much of excessive compassion and charity is time-consuming.  I am not just guilty, but guilty of the guilt-- one of those bleeding-heart characters who cannot sleep after a global tragedy, who absorbs the suffering of others and cannot turn away from a depressed friend. It is a choice, I know, and it has affected my output, although this, too, is a human choice. I try to dispense with regret the way JCO seems to have little patience for practicing empathy, except maybe with respect to her cats.  And children-- well, not in the equation.

Of course I am not qualified to judge.  Her novels are excellent, although, admittedly, I have never granted her the status of literary genius.  She has her critics-- Truman Capote was harsh, Michiko Kakutani as well, and personally I have found myself arguing both for and against her talents.  I am also not sure whether acknowledgment helps those few who have their own standards of excellence.  We see them rarely in this polluted sea of celebrity and fame where social media followers fill virtual stadiums for performances that would otherwise remain where they belong-- inside a phone. 

I have known some famous writers... through dates, acquaintances... I even babysat for one or two.  When I moved to this apartment I was quietly stalked by one who lived on my block.  He showed interest in my work; I was flattered.  He even came to a couple of my solo gigs, wrote me literary postcards and gifted me small stacks of books and proofs for discovery.  Years later, I realize he probably just wanted to mark me off as one of his many conquests, but I felt 'considered' sitting in his library, listening to his startling confessionals, being called late at night for an opinion on an essay he was writing.  

It also occurs to me that I could have written a profile of this writer; others have done so, and the time we spent was more than any random interviewer might have received. Journalists craved his dialogue, and he seemed to shun publicity at a time when the act of doing so only solicited more curiosity. And yet while I coveted and collected our time together, I feared his disfavor more.

As happens so often with one's mentors, his 'disciples' were distinguishable by the stylistic choices on which he insisted.  The women often slept with him; one stalked him noticeably, kept a jealous eye out.  He openly spoke of his sexual encounters and the preferences and oddities of his writers.  Not wanting to become one of his anecdotes, I kept a distance.  After a while I began to tire of his editorial preferences; I could predict where his crossouts would come, how he would leave maybe three lines untouched in a long poem. 

One day I wrote a sort of nasty piece which obviously featured my writer-neighbor in an unflattering character.  He never again spoke to me.  All our intimacies, our 'back-and-forths'-- the postcards, the gifts, the phone-calls-- they stopped.  Dead.  I went on to continue writing in my own way, without the critical 'eye' of my neighbor's editorial penmarks.  It felt freeing. After a year or so, I apologized.  I still deliver copies of my books; he does not reply. 

I saw him on the street yesterday; he's old, but still commanding in a way.  He's rich and a little powerful and has plenty of help and the kind of academic reverence an old writer merits.  He doesn't like the work of Joyce Carol Oates; I know this. I'm not sure he likes his own work, at this point.  He dislikes biographical pieces and yet collects them. He has written his own-- some as literature, and they are fairly brutal and quite good. I have a shelf of them-- most inscribed to me from several years ago, when I seemed to matter in his life, and it mattered to me that I did. 

On these days when my reading matters more than any writing I produce, I conclude that an artist, in the end, is considered so when his output exceeds input in significance.  By sheer number, Joyce Carol Oates has set in stone her reputation. Whether or not she will receive her Nobel prize, or be considered worthy by her peers, might matter or not. My neighbor will be written about, I suspect. As for me,  I will never know whether it was my poetry, my bass-playing or the length of my legs that engaged him and deceived me into believing, for a time, in my own merit. And I suppose two pages a day is manageable. 

Crimea and Punishment

A friend of mine bought me a Murakami novel a couple of weeks ago. He came by to deliver it but I so rarely hear the bell downstairs or even answer the phone in my post-pandemic insulation.  It will take me a while to adjust to spontaneous door-knocking and full-frontal facial nudity.  While he didn't leave the book, in his honor I took another one from the good old NYPL.  I liked it-- until the end, that is.  Many writers have this issue with endings... like they fall in love with their characters and can't bear to leave... or they have multiple finishings... like a sort of round table discussion in their head, with the characters in triplicate, discussing.  And it hurts the book; a good story already has an ending. 

In this case, the characters sort of split off-- like they could see another version of their own reality... death and life coexisted-- the ending and the plot.    One of the women even had white hair and black hair, not that this is so unusual in our cosmetically facile culture.  After all of the credible reality and details Murakami set up, it just seemed like a cop-out.  A space ship comes down and airlifts someone... or you simply disappear, like one of those strange mysteries.  In our society, missing people haunt us; for the most part, like milk-carton children or even that Gabby Petito-- there is evil in the explanation. 

It was especially disappointing because I identified with the character. Hard to imagine Japanese girls being messy and badly groomed... on my visit there they were spectacularly put together... but it was part of her charm.  Murakami protagonists-- and narrators-- are often disarmingly direct and candid.  It seemed obvious to me that her disappearance was out of character and engineered by the author.  I prefer when the characters tell us writers what to do, lol.  Literary fate.

I am resisting the temptation to go off on one of my academically ingrained analysis-tangents.  Murakami can inspire this sort of thing... and every so often, despite the omnipresence of detail, there are these blurred adventures which step out into a sort of unlikely dream, or alternate reality.  For the realists and sleuths among us, this can be challenging and annoying.  But lately I have had these overpopulated dreams-- with plots and armies and characters and weather and animals;  they last for what seems like hours and bring me into a morning-after mental hangover.  Not unlike these novels. Waking I find some of the tragedies and losses of my imagination quite real.   

Even more than that, it forced me to think about perceived and actual realities, as manifested in the narrative of this horrid Ukranian war.  I don't pretend to understand the complexities of the disagreements and the difficult history of Crimea and its affiliation. As often in these territorial wars, the people inside the borders are not as cleanly delineated as the political boundaries.  But the main issue is the humanitarian crisis that has emerged.  And the manipulated distributed journalism in Russia is disturbing, unless we are misunderstanding entirely.  Lack of transparency, personal threats, imprisonment for opinions-- these are all qualities of a bullying and paranoid government.  While a solution seems near-impossible, it is unacceptable that innocent civilians pay the price of despotism and aggression.

Mysteries abound; people are missing, lost.  Families are divided and things have been left behind.  I have read Russian stories claiming they are rescuing Ukraine from Nazi forces.... they are liberating and protecting the people.  The POW soldiers insist a similar fiction has been their motivation.  Another story today accused the Ukrainians of inventing casualty statistics-- of  'staging' these photographs of the dead and wounded for effect.  How can these realities co-exist?  

Fake news... we are all-too well-acquainted with the term and the meaning.  The UK poet laureate used the term in his new official poem decrying the war.  'False news is news with the pity edited out,' he says, with maybe  a little intentional clumsiness... but I choose to continue to see it as news with the truth removed, and reality skewed or divided or manipulated.  Rather than 'Resistance' the poem seems to convey a sort of impotent spectator-ly dismay.  

Maybe acceptable in fiction, this lassitude of conviction and failure to convict... but with the reality of a war, the threat of annihilating a country... well, not nearly enough.  I'm not sure what is demanded of us here... perhaps if the theatre of conflict was closer to us, we'd be more active, more alarmed.  It seems discussion and talk have been dismissed;  how did we end up here, watching a hideous version of political failure become bloody and tragic history?  Why is war the chronic destroyer of peace?  Are there not enough problems without these absurd man-vs.-man killings in the name of some propagandistic principle?  

I think it's time we name a few additional sins.  The seven seem not nearly sufficient for what ails not just Eastern Europe but the global geo-political pandemic of greed.  I wonder how long it's been since Putin read Dostoevsky... a writer who understood endings.  And sin. At this moment in time repentance may seem a lot more appealing than conciliation.

Signs of Where

I had a strange phonecall this evening... a woman's name ID'd on the screen... a writer I remember meeting some years back when we were both editing on our laptops in an air-conditioned Starbucks during a sweltering August heatwave.  She'd smiled at me, we had several non-smoking cigarette breaks on the sidewalk outside where we'd briefly thaw out in afternoon heat.  We exchanged numbers... she was working on a difficult historic novel which had required years of research and period reading.. a sort of Name of the Rose mystery.  Unlike me, she had some family money-- sold a pricey Carnegie Hill coop and downscaled to the upper west side with plenty of cash support.  She was beautiful in a pale, fragile book-worthy way.  Well spoken and intelligent-- but soft and womanly.  We were both brimming with our projects and ripe with future.  Ensconced in a literary neighborhood, we'd trade rumors about at least one of our elder urban mentors as he shuffled by with rolled newspapers or muttering to himself beneath a wide-brimmed disguise.

I remembered all of this, as one does, in a flash-- this is how our brains work-- we get a cue, and we unravel the relevant 'bank' with all its stored observations and details: a profile, like our own personal Facebook page we create for each of our friends-- facts, details, family names, images of moments we have shared or imagined from conversations and communications.  I used to pride myself on something of a 'phonographic' memory; I recall sounds-- associated music, accents and voices...  and images... the setting, geographic details-- how I stared at a painting on the wall while someone unburdened themselves of a sad story... the way the old window sashes crossed while my mother read aloud the March Hare or the Lilliputians.

It felt especially pertinent-- this associative process-- because less than a minute into today's phone call, I realized this woman had dialed a number she found on a random scrap of paper... had no idea who I was, confessed to having a terrible memory... commended me on mine... did not recognize my name, insisted after a bit that she'd met me at a meeting and we'd gone to a bar (not a chance), etc.  I asked her where she lived... she mentioned the number 104 and couldn't seem to move on from there. You're on the west side, yes, I suggested...? and she replied, Not very far west, I think.  By the end of the brief interrogation-- she began repeating questions... her focus was disintegrating.  I began to inquire, hoping to steer her into some familiar space, as I used to corral my mother in her dementia into some small fenced-in area in which she could function.  Her book-- she'd tried to write and failed...  I eventually hit a wall-- had to somehow disengage; she took my number (!) and asked if we could get together... having me carefully spell my last name.  I will be very surprised to hear from her, or perhaps she will call again tomorrow, looking somehow for some mental foothold.

On the street I felt a little distraught; after all, we are about the same age and I'd recently watched my own mother take the slow fade from bright and bitchy to a milky soup of confused and unrelated word-strings.  So I took time to listen to one of the chattier housekeepers who was often out walking her pair of lazy retrievers. She'd raised 3 children whose mother had just died of a terrible cancer;  the kids were acting out and the father was already dating.  The dogs were not healthy...  one was worse than the other; the housekeeper's accent was slightly Caribbean.  Where were they going for the summer?  I memorized her braids, her part-- the way her left eye was brighter than the right-- her lovely teeth...  Stories... I needed stories.  I stopped to listen along my 10-block way.  I spoke,  I watched... I heard sirens... followed firetrucks and ambulances until they disappeared... noticed baristas and customers inside shops.  They nourish me.  I need them.

Back home after a long evening, I retrieve my 'eye-photos'... I recall things, thoughts I've had... plots I've woven around simple facts and remarks.... nothing remarkable today-- a few confessions and bad date-stories, a friend's itinerary... some phone calls... music... my Latin Hip-Hop class where thankfully I am able to reproduce the chain of steps that constitute a routine... I know whose voice the singer reminds me of, what melody has been stolen... I've written lyrics in my head, forgotten most of them... but still I am able to retrieve, to unpack a few folders.  Of course, at my age my mental knives could use sharpening--- but they function... for today, anyway.  It is like unpacking a small basket of groceries you have gathered for a modest meal.  It is there-- your substitutions, your little economies--  your process that will become something you will make.

It has been a dark year for me and for many of my beloved friends.  I have had hardships and losses-- disappointments, cancellations, betrayals.  I have been hungry and tottered on the edge of envy.  But to speak to someone-- a complex map of neurons and synapses-- of brain power and creativity-- a talented, delicate writer-- and find her stumbling in a pool of her own confusion-- was more than upsetting.  Maybe the worst nightmare of all is the one in which you can't find your way home because you can't find you.  To lose all my orts and scraps of ideas--- to see them as indecipherable, as odd word-bits, not pieces of a puzzle only you can assemble... well, for me that is terrifying.  Not poverty, not failing at love--- even the sorrow of death-- but the concept of living death, of wandering without consolation or direction.

Months ago I asked some auction house about an old drawing which touched me-- its condition... 'Light signs of wear' was their email assessment -- but they'd typo'd and exchanged the g and n.  Light sings of wear, I read.. and my heart opened-- the charred, fragile, disintegrating version I've been carrying-- with its slow uneven beating and its careful mourning hesitations...  well, I felt its light and its tiny soul shaping into some lyrical epiphany for me.  Like an Amen... one of those tight banks of imagery unfurled into something like a miniature parade, a tiny joy.  I will carry this forward for now,
in the name of the writer, Abigail, who has quite lost her place in line.  I will continue.

Homeward Bound

On the way home last night, I hitched an uptown First Ave bus; it was after midnight-- my card was near-empty but the driver was kind and waved me on.  The ride uptown took nearly ninety minutes.  It seemed every stop was crowded with the down-and-out crowd.  By 34th Street the bus was jammed with passengers-- many of them homeless men and women with oversized carts filled with stuff.  The stench was strong, but the driver patiently rolled out the handicapped ramp and let them all board, mostly without paying.  it occurred to me that they wait for this man-- maybe the beginning of his shift, and they know they can rely on transport, these forgotten untouchables.  Maybe some of them ride all night to stay warm.  A few disputes erupted among cranky territorial passengers, but for the most part people were complacent; many came from the VA hospital, Bellevue… a drunk man kept yelling he needed a hospital… but then he passed out and slept like a baby.  It was a kind of pre-Thanksgiving reality check.

When I was young, I used to visit my friend's grandparents in the same building where I now live.  It was a little far uptown to be fashionable, in those days-- a great old turn-of-the-century prewar with a grand lobby but no doormen or luxury services.  Their space was massive-- lofty-- with skylights and high ceilings, and resembled my imagined version of a successful European artist's studio c. 1900. It stretched from one end of the building to another, with huge windows onto upper Madison Avenue.  Sparsely furnished, there were plenty of loungey sofas and reading chairs with quaint lamps-- tables and ashtrays-- window-seats and desks.  As they were part of an important publishing firm, they entertained writers and intellectuals; there were books everywhere… yards and yards of shelves, and piles and piles of treasured volumes, magazines, journals.  The radiators clanked in winter; in summer, in those pre-air-conditioned years, the top floor was sweltering.  The park was half a block away, and there was often a breeze on the roof, if you climbed up at evening.  It was a source of gossip and rumors-- secrets were exchanged here, a few inappropriate relationships, many drunken dinner debates-- a million cigarettes, deals inked and stories begun.

The sprawling apartment-- undecorated and decorous as it was, felt like the heart of adult New York.  This was what I would be when I grew up and got old--  a host-- a home-conversationalist in a book-lined room alive with  dialogue and energy-- ideas and excitement-- like a sort of club whose membership required no dress-code or mindset, but a passion for literature and art.  But more than anything-- it was a home.  You knew where you were when you were there; you could wander and browse, sit and lose yourself in a poem or look out the window… but you felt 'embraced'.

Thirty-five years later, I bought into their building-- a funky back-door apartment in need of renovation but with the pedigree and bone structure that had become part of my Manhattan dream.   It was cheap and a little dilapidated, but I was a young single Mom and felt so empowered to have bought what would really be my own true home.  My first Thanksgiving was blessed, for so many reasons… but I felt the tradition of that building, even though the publishing family had died long before, and that grand space had been divided into smaller units.  There were neighbors who had grown old in this place that seemed magical to me;  there were senior couples with piles of books and great art and they welcomed me into their homes with the often shabby old chintz curtains and the beautiful but worn Persian rugs; they spoke the cultured and human language of old New York; they had ideas-- they loved music-- they wrote, still read Latin and Greek, many of them… they treated their neighbors with kindness and generosity.

In those years the old building had a single employee: a superintendent who'd been born here… he was in his 60's, had raised his family in the ground floor rear unit.  He painted, polished brass, cleaned the old marble.  The rest of us chipped in and tended the garden, had lobby parties-- we were a true cooperative in the old sense-- a group of tenants who all cherished our home, who seemed to agree that our space and privacy were sacred.  Our individual priorities included maintaining a low public profile, modest monthly fees, a non-pretentious simplicity of style.  The architecture spoke for itself-- a quiet, old elegance, without luxury.  They welcomed me-- financially limited as I was, because they knew I was happy to be part of this lifestyle.

It took years to fill what seemed like a massive space to me-- to furnish it with my books, the art I've collected over the years, the finds and objects, the old furniture I've gathered at random auctions… It is quite full now-- my instruments, the things I love… I have quite everything I ever longed for as a young woman… and yet I am no longer content and secure the way I was twenty years ago.  In the early 90's, I helped a senior woman in my building-- Jane, was her name-- to pack up her spartan belongings.  Regretfully, she told me she had intended to die in this apartment, but her very modest pension from years of brilliant editorial work no longer covered rising maintenance costs.  I recognized so many of the wonderful books we carefully piled into these boxes like relics from a life well-lived and no longer valued.  The economy had changed,  New York had undergone a massive progressive facelift; the Wall Street culture had created a greed-bubble that has not just priced most of us out of the market, but has altered the rank-and-file New York City human profile.

While Jane was forced to move in with her son somewhere out of state, I find myself living on $3 a day most weeks--- having given up all luxuries including the subway, some days, in favor of walking, rice-based meals… my entire annual clothing allowance is less than some people spend on lunch.  Haircuts… movies… vacations… a day at the beach… have been so long left behind… but these days I dare not buy myself even a coffee.  Until last night's ride, I have been plagued with my annual Thanksgiving dinner anxiety-- putting on a brave face while calculating how I will pull together the meal on a skeletal budget, how it will set me back.  But turning the key into my place-- like a souvenir-shop of my life, a three-dimensional photo-album of memories-- I realized I was 'home' and the idea of these people on the bus having nowhere to 'let down' just seemed tragic and inhuman.

In recent years young bankers and hedge-fund managers have recognized my old building as the potential cash cow they envisioned. These families renovate, destroy, combine, disregard… and then sell. They have way more space than anyone requires; they are rarely home and they have no observable sentimental possessions or books. They have architects and designers, and mostly photoshoot-ready but soulless apartments.  The ghosts of former tenants and the spirits in old walls and floors sigh and creak at night.  The old radiators still bang, although they will manage to eradicate these eventually.  They have forced doormen and lobby improvements-- fancy elevators. They have usurped the great old roof with their equipment and air systems. Even as the smallest shareholder,  monthly costs nearly exceed my very humble income as a musician/poet.  My slender spending habits have become emaciated.  And tonight, as I listen to the soft roar that is New York City seep through my leaky windows, I wonder if these people feel 'home'.  As in home-less.

There is some George Segal movie on from the 70's and this is New York, the way I remember it… before clothing advertised things.. when even rich people's apartments were comfortable and slightly messy and filled with things... when hair was not perfect and women had wrinkles and the buildings looked habitable and a little dirty.  I realize I am of a dying or defeated generation here-- hanging in, holding on to what I know and love-- my building, my old guitars… sentiment...

Things change-- I know this, and not all change is bad. But this Wall Street generation changed the rules for many of us who thought we had secured some kind of tranquility for our older age.  Our trusted annuities and medical plans have been up-ended, our modest pensions have been diminished and decent healthcare is precarious and prohibitive.  I naively bought shares in a wonderful institution, only to find myself a tiny minimized partner in a corporation with an agenda of money and attitudes and little regard for human values and the great cultural mesh upon which this city was founded.

I will be home for Thanksgiving, and I will try to forge onward and resist what feels like a tidal insult to everything I am.  My neighbors will never share a bus ride like the First Ave. M15 at 2 AM; they don't want to see or smell this kind of thing, and they seem to enjoy the demolition of old walls as much as they enjoy their indulgent vacations.  They will grow old, too-- not as gracefully as this building has, and maybe one day they will discover nostalgia or homesickness-- that nothing is ever as precious as that which has been lost.   By then I'll be sharing a cigarette with the old ghosts on the stairs while, God willing, someone might be enjoying a home-cooked turkey in what will always be the old rooms with the book-lined walls.