Into the Mystic

Tuesday evening I went to a lecture on Mysticism. Actually it was sort of a book tour by an author who'd written on the topic.  Guesting on the panel was a well-known scholar and Medievalist who was there to generate a kind of Socratic discussion because the author himself seemed a little quagmired.  The Medievalist was skilled as a teacher-- the way she spoke in clear language, the way she addressed the packed audience-- was masterful and charismatic.  I remembered why I loved school-- the classes, sitting at the feet of professors, receiving information and ideas, and perpetually turning my intellectual world upside down.

So for the first forty-five minutes I was in a kind of familiar heaven... recalling things I'd studied-- old texts, narratives... saints and martyrs.  This had been my post-college major; I'd travelled, kneeled in old churches throughout Europe in search of understanding. The medieval centuries were harsh, punctuated by passionate religious sentiment-- and also by wars, disease, cruelty and torture. Fathoming these times was a challenge... the mystics and visionaries were both celebrated and punished. I also remembered consulting St Gregory... how the Bible stories had four meanings-- the historical, the allegorical, the moral and then the mystical. It was part of study, interpretation.  It was assumed.

The celebrated author speaking was also a 'philosopher', a designation which makes me squirm. These people seem less necessary in the present; they often pontificate on about pop culture-- sports, fashion, football, human weakness and addiction. They manipulate facts and maneuver narratives-- kind of like psychotherapy.  I have a hard time with this.  The issue of feminism crept in, as it does... especially since the larger number of stigmatics were women.  There was a hint of sexualizing... it's trendy... and then this conclusion about the outcome of 17th-century Mysticism being music... Bach. The author began to reference classic rock... at this point I looked at the shelves behind me, tried to plot my escape. 

Maybe I misunderstood-- missed one of the leaps of faith and took a wrong turn.  Maybe after weeks of relentless political rhetoric I am hostile and defensive.  And I've been a musician most of my life-- a passionate devotee of everything from medieval chants to Prog rock. Composers often dream melodies and songs; I do... but is this mysticism? Music transforms one-- it opens us, makes us fall in love. What would cinema be without music? I read once Scorsese spent eighty percent of his Mean Streets budget securing rights to the songs he felt were essential to the film. It is the very soundtrack of our lives. But mysticism?  More like a kind of unique personal recipe, I imagine, where inspiration supplies the ingredients.

Anyway, as I begin my annual fall alumni interviews, I wonder if I would fare well at a university in these times-- when song lyrics are taught in poetry classes, when CBGB's and NYC street culture are the stuff of Master's theses. I just suddenly felt a little duped.  I came expecting some revelation and instead was led via a circuitous intellectual musical-chairs to some pop-culture home base.  Scanning the shelves nearest to my chair was comforting; I'd read many of these books-- they were old friends, some in new packaging, but familiars. My heart opened. 

Back in college I'd had one or two low-key mystical experiences... things coming together that had been broken... a bird one night in my little college room which was absolutely sealed and locked. I craved these things, some extra-terrestrial epiphany at a time when my sexuality was blossoming and my brain being primed.  In art history classes I was drawn to these depictions of martyrs who were torn and penetrated.  It was mesmerizing; at the same time I became acquainted with drug use and friends who experimented with physical challenges and extremes like cutting.  I suppose today we have the gym-obsessed body-builders; it's become all too common to distort one's living anatomy. 

On the way home from the event, I started to think about my neighbor who has grown svelte and fashionable since her daily injections of Ozembic.  I saw her with her dog in her Prada... she's begun to look positively malnourished... her cheeks are sallow and sunken.  Oh no, I want to tell her.. you've gone too far... but I don't mention that she looks perhaps self-stigmatized. Instead I compliment her on her shoes which cost more than an average month's rent in Manhattan. Maybe two months.  

At home I took a couple of books from the shelves, as I often do at night... like a promise for tomorrow... and somehow had this flashback of Van Morrison.. Into the Mystic... it must have been 1970... I was barely 17.... a senior boy came into my college dorm room-- he was so handsome, with his long golden hair and his steel-blue eyes.  I had just picked up my copy of Moondance... he heard it playing from the hallway.. and by the last track, he had coaxed me into a slow dance with him... one of those magical romantic moments when I had no idea who I was or what I was doing but the moment carried me off.  

Here I was, free-associating, contracting the huge spiritual concept of mysticism into a shortened and altered form of the word, and a pop song... so maybe the panel authors were not so wrong.. and maybe the whole  meaning has somehow merged with this vernacularized version of whatever 'transports' us. At the time I remember imagining a sea called Mystic... the future... everything I was about to know. 

Thank goodness for these privileged moments-- me now, more than fifty years on, looking back on one of those heart-piercing instants, along with its indelible soundtrack... a kind of personal spirituality. What a thing is memory-- which connects us to ourselves, to our wounds and our blisses, our love and our sickness, as though these things were painted, as though filmed.  The eternal which will end with us... no matter how many posts or photos there are... only we can reach back into ourself... to browse our own long journey-- without books or Google or the internet.. and so precisely recall and revive the ignitions.  Amen.

The Sound and the Fury

I'm up to The Sound and the Fury in my Faulkner project... maybe it's the precursive reading, but I'm not struggling with the narrative the way I recall in high school. Maybe also it's the consequence of election season... the fact that I've somehow immersed myself in southern politics and culture, trying to comprehend the swing-state psychology and the way a crass New Yorker with a crooked script could appeal to it.  Rather than being dated, the Compson family seems a little familiar-- something for everyone.  In fact, poor promiscuous Caddie reminds me of my older sister who managed to smooth over her many-layered indiscretions with a colossal and expensive wedding cake which only fooled a few. The marriage was pretty much done before the cake went stale. 

Every dysfunctional family has its parallels... there are the bad eggs, the mean alphas, the deflated father-symbols, the fallen daughters... the alcoholics, the narcissists, the mentally defective and the failures.  The unforgiven.  Many of these have a nanny-figure-- maybe a nurse or housekeeper-- a paid parental figure who heroically loves at least one member, and holds them together for at least a time. Then there are the funerals-- the disgraces, the suicides. As literature, the subject doesn't get old.  We are the Family of Man. 

The thing about being over 65 is that few really fault you for being outspoken... or else they don't bother retorting. I'm subtly motivated by the residue of resentments for the petty injustices I've swallowed during my lifetime; truth outweighs courtesy when time is limited.  I am so very willing to offer comfort to the sweet and fragile who are suffering, but less so to the others who have caused as much pain as they have absorbed. You know who you are, I want to say... but 'you' don't.  These people rarely take accountability. 

The best literature shows us ourselves... it doesn't blame or moralize, it describes and shines a light on the shadows.  It observes, where there are no witnesses.  We have all done things, unseen, that have consequences. Writers take the opportunity of talent to expose their own past sins and injustices.  And we all get to a certain age... the demons and villains of our childhood are long dead... it seems almost safe to write the stories, to point our fingers.  This, we reason, is why I am this way-- why a marriage failed, or why another never had children... why success evaded us or our ambition consumed our capacity for empathy.

There are not many clear heroes in modern literature. We have plenty of those in the classics... and the more complex life becomes, the more we seem to turn to heroics and fantasy in our cinematic entertainment.  It's a little absurd-- the apparently simple thematic formulae of these blockbuster extravaganzas. 

Friday night, late, I watched that Chantal Akerman film where 95% of the action is a bourgeois woman in her little flat performing her daily chores in a sort of domestic claustrophobia.  It's long-- it feels like the day passes in real time-- but it's hypnotic and, for me, mesmerizing.  At a certain point in the afternoon, this woman who puts on a prim housecoat to do dishes turns tricks.  You can't judge a book by its cover.  But I can't imagine my son or any of his friends having the patience to screen this movie; they prefer Marvel or Scorcese... fantasy and extreme violence and gangster culture-- some horror thrown in.  This is entertainment.  

On the political front, I am too nervous to be entertained by any of the Town Halls or celebrity endorsements.  We are immune to the pleading, sick to death of the accusatory and aggressive advertising... we are manipulated and lied to by the very same device that shows us drama-- movies, comedy, sports... it is altogether processed as a form of entertainment rather than our political future. The media describes Beyonce's simple dress and Michelle Obama's suit.  Sure, their words reach some ears, but it is what they represent that remains like an afterimage... and then they are gone.

How can this be happening, I ask myself daily... a buffoon of a man convicted of both tax fraud and multiple sexual offenses,  running neck-in-neck with a seasoned and reasonable politician who stands for American democratic values?  What universe is this that there is even an argument?  The election is not a TV show... it's a major event in our history and will shape not just the next four years but could damage and distort our national trajectory for decades, if we even survive the critical transition. 

Among my friends there are those that threaten to leave the country. I did, too, after Bush, Jr was elected. But I came back.  Then there was Obama... and here we are again, at some kind of brink which feels even more worrying to me now. 

In my own city, today, Madison Square Garden.. where I saw my first Knicks game, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon... was turned into a kind of theatre of the extreme grotesque.  Hideous soundbites were used like ammunition. Some of them went home with audience members, and stayed on their tongue.  We are reduced to two opposing teams here, like a Sunday football match; there will be one winner. 

The villains in our families either pass away, grow old and defused, vanish into cemeteries and old scrapbooks. My sister hurt a number of people by her manipulative behavior and changed my destiny, perhaps. We are forced to lie for these people whose blood we share, even while it changes and destroys people. We are punished by the Jason Compsons who dominate the softer among us. Families, even when we leave home at seventeen, have a kind of co-dependent effect.  We share shadows and genetics and we all have a different take on the central narrative.  It's complicated.  No matter how good we think we are, there is residual guilt and pain in our past.  

In an election, we cast our ballot alone. We get a clean sheet--no one supposedly knows our individual mind and some of us still believe we can change the narrative by a vote. Let us hope that, pen in hand, we put aside the entertainment factor-- the contest, the game... and consider carefully not just our personal but our civic responsibility. 

A-women.

Hail Mary

There are days in which I have little to offer, although it is hard to keep one's mind silent when the autumn sun is clear and shines effortlessly on those of us who are not in the midst of hurricanes and typhoons.  Even in those ravaged places, we know, the mornings after are cruel and calm and show unspeakable damage with blue clarity and the watery whisper of a quiet sea. Our well-dressed reporters and journalists with furrowed brows survey and film, photograph and interview.  We check our social media and breathe a bit easier... we give a little money-- we gasp and sympathize, we go on with our day. 

Yesterday I went gallery browsing-- the theme being indigenous Australian artists.  It rewarded in a way that contemporary American has not, in recent years.  Inherent soul and story-telling-- these young artists inherit the myths and beliefs of their cultures, and even without explanations, they manifest.  In their presence, one surrenders.

Earlier in the week I visited a few of the sick and aging among my friends who are imprisoned in an existence they can't have imagined or foreseen. As time goes relentlessly on, there are many of these... no solution, and my presence gives merely a tiny atom of distraction to a cavernous lonely discomfort. There is no companion for pain and suffering; I find myself always walking home from these visits... as though I need to remain in a kind of prescriptive sentence of solitude to process what I have witnessed.  A few of these people might return to some kind of disabled living situation; deterioration is part of life... it's just that we childishly don't imagine it will really happen to us. Yes, we take care of our health, we take the recommended exercise and precautions-- some of us too late-- but we cannot avoid the reaper's overture.  

One of my friends has reached a point of collapse. She has bravely suffered the utter inexplicable indignities of a brain cancer which gradually absorbed her beauty, her grace, her keen mind and now her body.  Sitting by her bed, her head turned to one side, it was like speaking to an injured fallen horse whose life and fate displays its pride and sorrow in one eye. She breathes, occasionally sighs... I could swear I saw a tear.  Music, I said... makes one sad... and she seemed to agree.  I walked the seven miles from North Bronx to my apartment, trying hard to supplant this vision with memories of her vitality.  It will take some time; the dull and needy neighborhoods beneath the train tracks provided a kind of visual accompaniment to these souvenirs. And suddenly... there is the bridge over the Harlem River... the sunset... the glory, the antipodal irresistible reality.

For some, memorials and rituals are important.  The pandemic era made this less so, in a way.  The pomp of services was disallowed and one grew used to mourning in a kind of vacuum.  Death-- the death of others--  is the portal through which all grief expresses itself. Tragedies are often measured by its  statistics.

Australian indigenous art is permeated with narrative... and as in most cultures, these narratives often interweave with death.  It makes the art more compelling and true-- more universally articulate. There is also a kind of hope or rebirth that permeates all religions.  This is our deepest wish-- to return to some kind of life or afterlife. As though the sad material of human beings had a value... still, we believe this.

In the aura of what I witness, I return to my computer and come across a feature-- about how contemporary artists deal with concealing their under-eye circles.  While I truly hope this is some metaphorical piece about the omnipresence of tragedy in art, it is rather a cosmetic piece. Irony noted.

Maybe my epiphany of the week is how some kind of narrative (or the utter opposition of it with philosophical content) compels us-- from the Bible, classical art, indigenous painting, to modern literature... and yet we struggle with the absurd human inability to decipher our own.  While we control and change direction and envy and pity and weep and laugh, we rely on anything that is not our own. 

My son, this week, is obsessed with the baseball playoffs.  It's an American thing and, surely, the love of sports brings more people together than politics. It's a finite thing, too.  There is a clear winner and loser.  Not so even in elections, with the electoral college nuances.  It's confusing.  With baseball-- barring happenstance-- the final teams are pretty surely the best.  One believes-- one hopes. This seems to be the common denominator-- hope. Millions of people in stadiums and bars put on costumes and make the prayer sign. Even I, for the sake of son, root and cheer.  We read the stories of each player and feel connected. It is giving us a viable distraction in a difficult month. 

Walking into a church for some instant spiritual support, it occurs that for most women, no symbol will eclipse the Virgin Mary.  If we could reinvent her... but we cannot, and her meaning has been manipulated and distorted.  We have tried-- the Barbie Movie, etc... but no.  She is the suffering mother, the comfort, the grace, the vessel and the very epitome of grief.  Even the athletes call on her. In every culture-- we are born with some sense of belief... it connects us-- makes us human, and gives us the courage to hope-- despite all odds, despite my ailing friends being down 3-0 in the series, or not ever having made a single playoff... or even a team... there is this thinnest thread that in an impossible narrative just might lead to a miracle.  

A-women.

Where the Truth Lies

Last night in the rain a man literally walked into me on the street, and then shoved me and shouted out how I'd better look where I was walking, etc.  It shot me into this sort of rage that I witness so often in the city-- I mean, this 'fight' reflex.  I'm going to find a policeman and have you arrested for assault, I threatened, knowing well I'd do nothing. 

And it wasn't the physical shove that made me want to punch him as much as the phony accusation. My personal history is a little littered with these twisty versions of reality, these false manipulations which place one on the wrong side of a barbed fence.  It's the Trumpian version of reality-- the slippery miscarriage of facts that makes him an absurd debating opponent and an elusive and dangerous candidate.  Our daily newsfeeds bleed with his petty face-slaps and pokes and lies.  One wishes that AI could highlight untruths in red. It just piles up-- day by day. But it was as though the man on the street was trying on DT's personality costume, with an extra dose of bully. 

On 14th Street I've noticed a new approach to panhandling.  It's sort of migrant-related, because young mothers sit on cardboard blankets with their children-- sometimes two or three-- with a sign saying they've just arrived and need help.  It's heartrending and also manipulative, when most of these families are being given aid and shelter-- granted, not ideal-- but using children this way always bothers me.  Last week I was confronted by a man-- maybe around 30-- who asked me for money for his baby.  He showed me photos on his phone and I looked into his eyes and tried to see his soul, as I agreed to use my food stamps to buy him formula.  In the supermarket, the large-sized can was $36; as I paid, the checkout girls were all silent and judgy as though I'd assisted in a crime.

So apparently, I learned from a more streetwise neighbor, powdered formula is used to cut street heroin or other drugs... looking back, it was sort of a generic baby photo I'd seen-- it looked staged and professional.   I tried to forget... it wasn't the $36 but the complicity that plagued me.  

My longtime friend and onetime fiancé has been like family throughout my adult life.  For thirty years he accompanied me to funerals, graduations, events... collected me from wearying hospital visits-- photographed my son at sports events.  As we aged, we often talked about taking a retirement trip across the country-- living in an RV-- doing things I'd never done... maybe even sharing a mountain-house somewhere with a front porch and chairs to rock in while we admired the view and drank coffee like old friends.  But I was utterly shocked to discover that he'd been secretly married... yes, I had to pry it out of him... and was living an absolute double life.  It wasn't the romantic thing-- that had long since fizzled out and we'd always shared stories of affairs, etc... but the utter betrayal of what one assumes is a kind of honesty among intimate friends-- or even thieves, lol. The fact that day after day he'd stop by and we'd drink a coffee in his car-- he'd call or text many times. He described every move, every meal... or so I thought...  he came for Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc... always solo, not that it was a requirement; he knew all of my circle.  Could my judgment have been so poor? I felt ill-- tainted... invaded.

Even my close friends could not believe his duplicity-- like an alternate reality.  While he begged and wept for forgiveness, alleging he was stuck in some terrible entanglement... well, I gave him a little slack and sympathy.  Years later, I find he has never divorced, and while he claims to have left the state, he has been here... he appears... presumably still pays her rent, like a sort of guilty phantom. And me-- not just another betrayal-- but a huge one, because my trust was so broken, not to mention the fact the 'wife', known to no one,  had no knowledge of his attachment, romantic or not.  I am not the 'other woman' and I have a right to object to being backed into that complicitous corner. Swallowing other people's lies is like bad food-- it just doesn't go down.  And he, above all, is a liar. Full stop.

I was thinking today about Pete Rose-- how he fell from grace... was it money, some kind of temptation or just bad decisions that imploded his career some years back?  His legacy will be vaguely lightened by his death, but not whitewashed. I can't imagine how his family must have felt... 

With all the cameras around-- the constant recording of reality-- how is it that we seem less attached to truth than ever? Plastic surgery, weightloss drugs, pitch-correction, photoshopping and filters...  we can present as almost anything. As for Mayor Adams, I am withholding judgement.  In this milieu of deception, lying, cheating, his indiscretions seem less heinous than the things that roll off of Donald Trump's tongue hour by hour.

So at my age, it's no wonder I'm wound tightly enough to want to punch back at the man in the street who shoved me... to feel venomous toward my friend who wants to be forgiven. The baby formula-- well, I've been duped many times and choose to believe the 1% possibility his baby son is being nourished on my 'dime'. Watching resignation after resignation from city agencies, it's hard to believe in the innocence of our mayor.  Assuredly running municipal business requires skills I'd rather not think about. But on the larger stage we have a criminally indicted ex-President who has somehow maneuvered his way back to candidacy.  What is wrong with us? 

And then there were two (too)

Anyone who has lived in New York City for fifty years or more must recall at least one of several sets of twins who appeared in tandem on the streets, always dressed identically the way their mothers must have done when they were infants. They all seemed a bit theatrical and bizarre, like a living Arbus tableau, and they were known and well photographed. Before the phone era, street 'theatre' and even just dressing up, had a different meaning-- it was a kind of art, a kind of living performance that has grown a little cheap in this Tik-Tok/instagram age. I've heard there are these extreme sisters on a TLC television channel-- girls who insist on having their teeth pulled simultaneously, even though only one has an abscess.  

When my son was in a pre-school playgroup, there was a set of identical triplets-- girls-- who seemed to signal one another mysteriously and then perform the exact same movement or mischief like crashing someone's block tower.  Their mother seemed to age years every week. It was kind of a supernatural thing and actually fascinating.

I've been reading Miss MacIntosh, My Darling,  again... I often pick it up after a hiatus and am always intrigued by the two Mr. Spitzers-- one dead, one living as the attentive but always-denied suitor-- identical twins who may or may not be aspects of the same person. It occurred to me that my last read, Solenoid, was narrated by a man who claimed to be the sole surviving twin whose brother had died shortly after birth. The concept of original twins-- like Yin and Yang, is archetypal. One wonders if the human state of longing is the result of losing something at birth-- of separation or the sense of missing, as though we all once had a twin in utero.. a little companion-cell-- and yet we are born alone.

My first husband was a twin; very prematurely delivered, he'd been left for dead in a shoebox with his tiny brother and moved just enough to be discovered living before burial.  He became a musician, among the chain of men I've been close to who were often searching for something elusive which they either mistakenly or not (temporarily) discovered in me.

More than ever, despite divorce rates, despite the diminished significance of mandatory marriage rituals, this culture is obsessed with coupling.  The overwhelming numbers of dating sites, matchmakers... the barrage of television shows seeking mates in various ways, all bolster this obsession.  Tonight, I noticed, there's a Bachelorette version for seniors.  In the arts, I've been to several recent gallery exhibits which present 'pairings'-- some of which are feasible and others of which are far-fetched and almost silly.  I've been to restaurant dinners which feature meal pairings, course by course, of wine and food; these generally make more sense.

There are almost no Wikipedia entries that don't list, with vital statistics and data, one's spouse or partner.  This interests us, as though it explains something about the person-- that they are loved, or that their wife was beautiful, or their intelligent scientist husband thought enough of them to procreate or simply cohabitate. If there is no spouse or companion listed in an obituary, we pity that person... or we wonder. There is simply this inherent 'quest' one has for an 'other'-- someone to whom we can roll our eyes and know that they will understand precisely what irks us.

The trouble is-- the act of coupling is not neutralized by uncoupling which is complex and not simple.  I used to watch Thomas the Tank Engine with my little boy; the uncouplings were routine and mechanical... but in our lives, these are rarely amicable.  Still, we pursue this like a career 'calling'.  Many of my son's generation have chosen to freeze their eggs and wait to have children... yet the biology of conception doesn't seem to affect their desire to have a partner. So many of us have tried on marriages which do not fit, or which we outgrow like old fashion or clothing. Some of us find our significant other has coupled with more than one simultaneously. While a pregnant woman cannot get pregnant until she delivers again,  there is no biological law that discourages or prevents her having sex with several partners. 

It's not really a comforting thing-- the way a twin is 'for life'-- unless one dies, that is, and this must feel like a kind of death for the other. To be born together, and yet to die alone seems somehow odd, although it is fairy-tale stuff to have simultaneous deaths.  

I read recently a literary piece on the language of Shakespeare which pointed out his extraordinary and deliberate use of the word 'and' to join disparate ideas or things... we expect the two sides of the conjunction to be equal and yet they are not.  Of course Shakespeare's exquisite command of the language is beyond reproach but many of the contemporary 'pairings' I've recently encountered require a huge step to digest any valid relationship.  There was a Calder and Klee show which was spectacular but in a way unsettling and opportunistic.  Certainly the Hammershoi paintings coupled with Anni Albers or Robert Mangold at another gallery seemed at best uncomfortable. And odd couples are a thing-- opposites attract, etc. Oxymorons and paradoxes abound in our daily speech.

My very good friend who was sort of an acquired twin to me for decades... turned out to be coupled with some 'else'.  He'd hidden this-- not just from me, but from everyone... it was only happenstance that brought me to the knowledge of it.  He is miserable-- badly paired and unable somehow to remove the attachment.  In fact they barely see one another-- ever... but they have a legal bind.  While I have uncoupled, somehow there are jagged edges, or tiny pieces that adhered and are hard to delete.  It's like a human virus, I suppose.  So while the theoretical plan is to find 'the one' and go through life arm in arm, hand in hand, this is a rarity. And the fact is, despite all the dating and mating sites, the even-numbered rituals and pas-de-deux, perhaps these are only our attempts to subvert the harsh reality that we all do die alone.  

On Point

It's closing in on a year since Matthew Perry's death... and the trail of blame unravels: the unscrupulous doctors and enablers, the greedy parasites who attach themselves to celebrities who are emotionally disabled.  I've seen this-- rockstars who struggle, actors between successes hanging out in bars, drinking themselves into a kind of crippled charisma.  It has an appeal, this state of manic hilarity, of self-effacing confessional deprecations and desperate nightly dramas of carousing.  While some pick up their career and dust themselves off, all too often this ends in tragedy.  It's very hard to measure quantities of alcohol or meds when one is just intent on blurring out the demons.  The failure we fear is too often simply the fear of failure. It's complicated.

Still, in the very sensitive aftermath of a tragic death, there is unprecedented sympathy.  Where were these mourners and criers during crisis?  Matthew was not in an appealing state, and I've argued in vain (pun intended) with addicts and junkies at the midnight hour when nothing but a needle makes any sense.  But after the fact, as a sort of clearance for the victim, there is this blame game... sometimes valid, sometimes a consolation narrative.  Where life insurance is concerned, there is a financial reason to morph a suicide into an accident or a manslaughter scenario.

And then there is the chain reaction-- those who are on a kind of edge and are so derailed by the sad ending of someone who struggled, as they do-- especially when that person was a 'someone' whom they admired.  If this man couldn't manage, one thinks, how can a loser like me ever get clean or sober or 'happy'-- that evasive human nirvana?

Granted, there was a hideous sequence of heinous people who profited from the pseudo-medical art of prescription peddling, especially common among well-known people who want to keep their vices within a more private circle.  But it helps to exonerate the deceased and attribute his errors to an evil little machine of individuals which took away his choices.  The consistent popularity of Law and Order and varieties of Dateline exemplifies our human obsession with blame-attribution.  We want justice for the innocent, and we often want the guilty ones we love to seem less guilty. The dead cannot defend themselves; we must unravel and discover.  

While I find mass shootings (and all random shootings) horrifying, I'm not sure the gun makers are culpable.  For someone strangled with a silk tie, well-- nearly anything in the wrong hands can be transformed into a means of killing.  Of course guns are made for this... and what is wrong with our culture and all past cultures which decided that wounding human bodies was a way of solving massive conflicts? All guns aside, it was God Himself who weaponized rain in Genesis. 'The fire next time,' He warned, in the traditional spiritual which inspired the James Baldwin title.  This always frightened me, like a premonition of firearms, nuclear war.  Summer wildfires are terrifying enough.

We named my very first band The Blame.  Blame it on rock and roll; something like that.  Blame and guilt go hand in hand in adolescence, in bad relationships, in family dynamics.  We grow up pointing fingers... even the dog gets involved as the fallguy-- eating homework, breaking expensive china, etc.  And then there was the pandemic-- the ultimate culprit in stalemating lives, creativity, social connections.  It caused depression, isolation... it had no end, no boundary... for many of my peers this became a new way of living. Come to think of it, was not the great flood of Genesis the ultimate cancel-culture event?  

August always brings with it a kind of nostalgic regret-- the end of summer is sad for children; they must go back to the grind of school, and leave the freedom of unscheduled days and jacket-less afternoons.  We adults carry this with us... the cusp of September seems always harsh for me... as though I no longer deserve a day of respite, of freedom.  We are grown ups-- we must take responsibility for our failures and lapses. Jews have a day of atonement; I wonder how many in Israel will be thinking about the Palestinians whose children will be vaccinated against polio, but destroyed as a people. It's downright ironic, this priority to cease warfare just to insure that these babies in the line of fire are inoculated. 

Not to deny the back-and-forth between our political candidates. Leaders are generally held responsible for the ills of their regime, but the blame game goes far beyond culpability in an election year. Finger pointing and accusations far eclipse the vulnerable reality of policies which are only as solid as theory or hindsight witnesses. We are all to blame for sins of omission, for selfishness, for failing to reach out and empathize.  Too often the burden gets transferred and passed down to the one who has least power to defend.  Like the tastelessly loud guitarists who blame their sound crew-- the venue-- acoustics-- or band members for volume issues. All we have are tools of prevention, and our own hearts and minds which will hopefully embrace some kind of universal truth and move this world forward into not just a foreseeable but an accountable future.

Grey Flannel

As part of my adaptive reading program, I just finished Mosquitoes-- a much criticized early Faulkner novel which, while flawed, still rewards with unpolished and sometimes erratic youthful exuberance of description. Another claustrophobic August narrative for me-- dank, humid and overripe with the disappointment of human relations. But well worth the effort.

Late last night after a day or two of uncharted sleep-deprivation, I made the mistake of flipping television channels.  Besides my go-to film stations, there is quite a bizarre array of lameness across the board: flimsily-premised game-shows, re-treaded bad 'reality'... it's as though everything has been done... and redone, or the interesting actors have taken a hiatus and left us with the dregs of low-level celebrity who for the likes me are not just unremarkable but unrecognizable.  

Friends of mine are visiting New York, and ask me for suggestions. I'm not in the least tourist-ready, as I once was-- brimming with passion and lists of competing activities and shows... primed for inspiration and  ripe to be dazzled by some fantastic band or gallery exhibition.  It's not just seasonal malaise but a general thing. I mean, my books, most of whose authors are dead, do not fail me.  They also remind of my creative mediocrity and the distance between where I am and where I might have been.

And there are those among my Facebook acquaintances who still post and gush and selfie at myriads of openings and gigs and events-- dress up and do their hair and socialize.  It is a reminder of why the Stones are still touring... for those of us who have found little else to replace what used to be a common and easily-accessed quality music scene. 

Around 2 AM, there was a Nashville songwriting hour program, featuring three young artists.  One had guitar skills, but the songs were utterly cliche'd... another I recognized from the club scene here twenty years back... here he was on television, with his talent yet to sprout... and a third-- the daughter of an old and extremely good songwriter... she-- whom I'd met as a baby-- seemed exhausted by life; her songs, too, were old and not memorable.  I felt a kind of pity for her performance, especially conjuring her father whose genius was undeniable despite extreme stage-fright in his early days which he battled by facing away from the audience.  It was charming because he was brilliant and undeniable. But where am I, I was thinking?

I happened on a brief clip of a Townes Van Zandt memorial songwriter's circle-- with all the best Nashville celebrities from the 1990's... with each performance of a song more heartbreaking than the previous.  I watched and I wept.  Townes was an occasional visitor to New York and the sheer pleasure of having once spent an evening with his humble sense of humor and utter boy-charm was thrilling.  He was a consummate and sad artist.

There are of course a few lights in the August tunnel-- the Os Gemeos murals on West 14th Street, not minding the occasional soaking of a passing rainstorm... the pale moon, translucent over the twilight river sky.... the perfect pitch of a little morning dove who visits my bedroom windowsill nearly every day... just inches away behind the glass.  And what I call the 'grey flannel' days- those occasional weather-anomalies of chilly rain, reminders of the autumn to come, and of those homesick summer camp mornings when we were forced to pull these scratchy uniform components from the bottom of our steamer trunks and wait out the sun dressed like soldiers.  These days make me grateful to be an adult-- to have freedom of time and wardrobe and activity-- privileges we aging seniors take much-too-much for granted.

This morning I woke up with one of those vivid memories one occasionally pulls out of a deep subconcious hat... of a late August trip with an ex to the Jersey Shore.  Difficult to get away without children in those days, but we managed to rent a car and have a couple of unpremeditated days exploring roads I knew from college and he knew from songs.  We were surely at the end of some journey as a couple, although we had some fun... including a night in a cheap depressing motel in Neptune we booked out of desperation-- in the days when one had to drive from place to place to inquire about vacancies: it was after midnight and the desk attendant was annoyed and smelled of cheap whiskey. We swam in a small, sort of fetid pool and then slept poorly in a damp ground-floor room where the air conditioner was ineffective and one felt like a mushroom. 

Anyway, at least the ex got a decent song out of the trip.  I came home with the desolation of another failed relationship, and that deep sorrowful mix of nostalgia and regret and impending loneliness that comes when one distinctly chooses to put something precious behind a line which marks past from present.  There was some love there, or had been... and surely it was I who destroyed it-- I was very good at that.  Although now, so many years hence, I suppose the song still exists, and between us, the thing that replaces everything in the end-- what we had, what we had not, a kind of distance through which we see things both less and more clearly as we log yet another season.