Parallel Stories

I'm reading Péter Nádas.  'I have spent my life between imagination and reality' is the translated catch-phrase that comes up in an internet search, from a widely-seen brief interview in his native language.  Years ago, I read the Book of Memories which was highly praised by Susan Sontag and described as Proustian; it was well worth the time investment. 

This time it's Parallel Stories--  received with mixed reviews. Among these were comments on the more-than-1100 pages as 'not quite the disaster of Brodkey's Runaway Soul' (which I managed to complete), but flawed.  It took 18 years to write. Like Mann's Joseph quartet-- also under-read at some 1500 pages, the author considers this his masterpiece.  I respect that, often consider the fact that the best songs I think I have ever written receive the fewest 'listens' on streaming media.  

It's hard to explain the attraction these huge novels have for me-- Proust, Mann, Bolaño, Gaddis, etc... even David Foster Wallace, more recently. As my personal hourglass runs down, the blessing of my well-stocked bookshelves and stacks and piles of run-over compels me... while I still have the bandwidth, although one never knows when one's capacity takes a hit; my memory for long-ago titles, plots, etc... is failing. 

More than any event in my life, the pandemic altered the wiring of my brain.  Grief, shock, solitude-- the coincidence of age and eventlessness... changed things.  I found myself distance-walking often-- monologuing, singing to myself-- inventing narratives and weaving a sort of quasi-literary alter-ego in my head.  Some of these voices wrote themselves into poems-- as though all I did was transcribe.  But once the trauma of grief left me with a little peace, I substituted the intimacy of authorial narrators of literature... they became my deep companions. 

Long novels allow the writers to wander down corridors of memory, to pursue tangents beyond what one normally allows in daily life. Some of these are obsessive and uber-technical; others autopsy old loves, bare and dissect already-naked moments to the point of repulsion.  Criticism of Parallel Stories highlights  the more awkward passages and there are some truly cringeworthy ones.  Readers who grew up on Joyce are accustomed to explicit familiarity with body functions and explorations.  Few pursue these long novels for prurience or eroticism; there is way too much of that imminently accessible in all media.

But generally, I trust these writers-- I forgive them their excesses and cannot fathom the editing.  Nádas alleges that he writes in longhand and an assistant transfers to computer.  Then there are the translators. Being a diligent reader, I sometimes look at maps of Budapest and Berlin-- I brush up on the Hungarian uprising of 1956. Politics, history--  are the fundamentals and rediscovering is part of the joy of unraveling these novels. European authors have wars and bloody legacies in their private visions. 

To put some disturbing icing on the 100-page chapter of tedious sexual excess I finished, last night I watched two Michel Haneke films.  My neighbor-- a writer-- is a huge fan of Funny Games and recommended these. So, The Seventh Continent was just a brilliantly visual piece of cinematic art with very little dialogue that pulled through to what you knew would be a horrifying end... but still you kept on.  These films of personal horror-- the exploration of the range of evil-- of cruelty and sadism-- done not like Hollywood but with a sort of chilling matter-of-fact quiet-- well, they haunt one.

My physical therapist and I spend most of our sessions talking about literature.  He has just finished Paradise Lost and went on to Céline and Henry Miller.  It occurs, as he torments me in the name of rehabilitation, there's a kind of ironic parallel to the things we watch and read.  The possibilities and random incidents in a city- -the falls, the accidents, the smashes and crashes.. and the episodic street violence... discourages some people from taking daily risks.  The catalogue of films and movies-- the gore and blood and terror-- has surely anesthetized us to the massive global human suffering we see on the news.  And still I heard my neighbor scream when she cut her finger mildly with a kitchen knife... and a woman who fell off her scooter today-- nothing besides a bruised pair of leggings.  But the screams-- they stayed with me. 

These massive historical novels, years past the events they reflect, remind not only of the horrific immediacy of battlegrounds-- of the aggressive and shameful human tendencies wars and violence force men to summon... but of the consequence... of the future.  It's not the event but the echoes, going forward-- the psychological scars and warped behaviors we humans tend to invent to somehow repair old wounds we never deserved in the first place.  Impossible to go through life unscathed, but so much we could do in the name of prevention. Football players wear so much padding; the rest of us-- especially the children of war... are so unprotected.  When the blood dries and the limbs heal-- or not-- there will be some indelible residue of evil-- of endless disturbing parallel stories. 

Trespassers

I was just derailed by the image of the winning World Press photo of the year-- a human Pietà, faceless Palestinian mother holding the lifeless shrouded body of presumably a child-- not an infant, but a person. Processing these human tragedies on the massive scale is impossible; yet the singular image of grief is shattering-- choking. Here it has become almost beautiful in its absolute clarity... it is somehow horrifying and familiar to us all, just weeks from Easter.  

Being one of those people connected intimately to some form of belief, I often find myself silently reciting the Lord's Prayer, the Hail Mary.  Criminals perhaps do this... churchgoers and pedestrians... most of them begging for celestial forgiveness, for we are all fallible and flawed and even the best-hearted among us is uncharitable and occasionally mean.  While we ask perpetually for mercy and grace-- we are not always good at giving it. 

At this very moment a memorial service is being held for someone I knew-- not well, but enough to chat on the street.  I was shocked by her unexpected obituary... thought about attending the chapel... and some mischievous memory came up like a small jolt.  This person had cheated me, years ago, when I was selling art honestly, in earnest.  I found out completely randomly-- met the ultimate buyer and was a little shocked. I never said a word... duly noted, is the expression one uses.  But some years later, I tiptoed back-- presented another project to her. Again, I learned, she'd neither informed me of the outcome nor paid me my commission.  When I actually wrote her, she sent me some token small check with a roundabout and inadequate explanation.  Fool me once, is the appropriate comment here...  So with these tiny resentments in my normally good heart, I decided not to taint the service with ambivalence.  I am a little sad, but still find myself uncomfortably unable to cremate these thoughts.

Several years ago, I went to Japan with Alan Merrill.  He'd been celebrated and revered there in the 1970's and our reception was unlike anything I'd experienced in the US.  A young family who'd been tourists at a show in New York even traveled hours by train to come see us. They were overjoyed... the daughter presented me with a traditional doll as a gift.  The whole audience was so gracious and enthusiastic.  Afterward, we were starving and a journalist took us to one of those tiny great bars in Shinjuku which seat about five people. It was past midnight on a weekday-- kitchens closed, but he spoke to the owners-- a family of which the grandmother-- maybe 80-ish (the Japanese are so well-kept it's difficult to 'age' them) was in traditional dress. After some coaxing and negotiating by Alan and the journalist, they seated us on straw mats on the small floor area toward the back and brought a few varieties of saki and some snacks. While the small savory dishes were like things I'd never experienced, I was still starving.  Then for some reason, the journalist explained, the grandmother was taking an uncharacteristic liking to me-- the aging rock and roller.. and began to cook. Bowing, she brought out dish after dish of exotic noodles, mushroom and vegetable creations-- sea animals and sauces and soups like nothing I'd ever seen or tasted. We left at dawn... stuffed and slightly drunk and the kimono'd grandma and I hugging and wiping tears. Nights like this-- part of the magic of being with Alan. 

In downtown Tokyo--galleries and shops-- generally the popular culture was a strange mixture of the very childlike and the highly sophisticated-- of soft-spoken and then edgy... sweetness and noise. I stayed awake for three days inhaling what I could... the traditional and the novel.  It was a revelation.  I went home and read Shiga Naoya... Murakami... I put my volume of Genji on a table; it beckons.

This last week or two, I've been reading some of the reactions to the showing of Oppenheimer in Japan-- fully eight months after the US release. The reception has been mixed.  Personally I feel sheepish and ashamed.  The unprecedented horror of Hiroshima, and the subsequent perhaps not-necessary Nagasaki  attack-- we have read the accounts, more disturbing than any science fiction or disaster film. I have watched The Thin Red Line recently-- my own father fought and was decorated for his bravery in the Pacific.  It is so hard to reconcile this violence with the gentleness and cordiality of the people I met.

Watching the Middle East simmering as it is-- the eruptions and outbursts-- the long, long-seated resentments and hostilities... it is hard to imagine how the Japanese seemed to forgive us, in this century-- how they became our ally, how our sympathies and innovations mutually interchanged.  It seems like a kind of audacity to release this film there... and yet... it is part of our culture; a few of the comments empathized with Oppenheimer's ambivalence and difficulty.  Still... there is nothing in our history that compares to the wound we left in Japan.

My father, in the late 1950's and 60's, traveled there often.  He developed friends and did much business there.  He brought back souvenirs; our living room was nearly entirely furnished with hand-carved tables and antiques-- a lovely huge screen, all of which he'd had shipped.  Today we are Japan's staunch ally.  The cross-pollination of culture post-war is obvious.  Major institutions feature exhibitions; art auctions are filled with highly prized Japanese collectibles. In the 1970's and 80's, when I worked at galleries, large Japanese corporations were filling their spaces with European and American art.  They loved Warhol-- Jasper Johns-- even the symbols of American capitalism and aggression were understood and collected.

Not the narrative in the rest of the world; there are tribal differences and deep resentments. Killings, kidnappings-- the Palestinian displacement and starvation... massive destruction.  We ask every day for divine forgiveness, and yet-- try as I might,  I am unable to forget a petty little offense by a woman who has now passed away.  Do I forgive?  I do, but not entirely.  These things haunt my dreams-- cumulative unacknowledged sins and white lies still give me a little shiver.  Some of them may be unintentional... like stepping on someone's foot on the street, or failing to help someone.  

Yesterday an older woman was struggling to get into a taxi on my corner. She'd managed to get her upper body onto the seat but her swollen legs were helplessly stuck on the curb.  Me with my bad arm... I lifted one at a  time into the car... and Thank you, she said... embarrassed and awkward.  Like a faux pas, I blurted out-- 'Forgive me'... to this woman.  For what? For perhaps adding to the pain her disability obviously represented?  In general? Like a Hail Mary?  I'm not sure.  But I've repeated it all day-- where it doesn't belong.  It does. It belongs.  Reciprocal mercy... we are all guilty, the Bible tells us... we repeat these little sins and insults. We perpetually ask for forgiveness and despite the recitation of the Lord's Prayer, we fail to forgive; I do, anyway.  Forgive me.

Give Me Back My Wig

Maybe 14 years ago-- maybe more, I was in Chelsea where I often 'sit' for a friend's gallery... and lo and behold... the street was closed off, all kinds of black official vehicles lined up, complete with NYPD and massive security.. Could President Obama be looking at art? But apparently the small mob was entering our building... the Balenciaga store, pre-Hurricane Sandy, was one flight below.  Within minutes, I was being asked by a man with a walkie-talkie to allow some VIP to get dressed in the space where I sat, quietly... often alone.  Well, okay... we had a sort of relationship with the store personnel... 

So it turned out it was not the First Lady or some veiled Princess, but Beyoncé herself.  For her entourage, all street commerce had been stopped, gallery traffic disallowed.  My doors were locked and guarded, and the pop 'queen' (she did kindly nod her head at me in appreciation) herself began to disrobe in our unwindowed packing area.  No photos, they requested, as she was quite exposed in my makeshift dressing room.  I never even looked.  In less than an hour the street was returned to its normal state-- all signs of the visitation had disappeared.  Presumably Balenciaga was significantly compensated in sales.

I admit I was a fan of the Crazy-in-Love phase... how could you not admire those thighs and her dancing?  For a second there, she had the Tina Turner star power-- she could sing and dance.  But then there was the blonde thing... I mean, for young black girls-- is this the model we want to admire?  What happened to natural hair and loving one's color?  I'm old but recent years have blurred the lines between the Kardashians, the Beyoncés, the pop stars.  All the wigging and facial modifications-- the make-up and the image-creation... 

And all these celebrities crossing lines-- athletes who act-- models who sing, actors promoting everything from Bitcoin to life-insurance... Subway.  Aren't they well-paid enough?  Or does their hungry management advise them to take on these mega-contracts and endorsements?  Beyoncé... she and Jay Z have created a mega-fortune.  Do we have to see her on Super Bowl commercials literally raking in the massive additional dollars and wearing a small fortune while half the world starves?  

Art, they called her new album cover, where she is not very believably or even actually side-saddling a white horse.  White is the operative word here-- the horse, the hair, the culture.  Her explanations don't make sense; I don't particularly want to explore my personal patriotism by mingling with MAGA hat wearers.  Not that the country image hasn't evolved, and not that its traditionally all-white audience and deeply embedded racism haven't been updated... but Cowboy Carter seems more like a massive bad joke than an image.

It's  not that I am bitter or envious or hateful; I admit I haven't much listened to the last 20 years of Beyonce.  I'm already sick of the constant cameos in our culture-- inaugurations, award shows... twitter feeds; it's unavoidable.  Suffice it to say, besides Hank Williams I have never been a huge fan of country music.  Touring with rock bands, the fundamental Christian reluctance of certain audiences to embrace science, the backwater racist and sexist comments sort of reinforced this.  Many of my purist Nashville friends shun the current wave of country pop stars as inauthentic.  Still... who can resist Dolly Parton? Beyoncé could take a few lessons from her brand of authenticity, wigs, make-up and plastic surgery notwithstanding. 

I guess when I heard snippets of the new version of Jolene-- unavoidable here-- well, that put the proverbial stop on things.  And I'm sorry if I've ruined someone's Easter... but I've heard at least a dozen covers of this iconic and heart-wrenching song... and to say this new one does not do it justice is kind of an understatement.  Coupled with that cover, the inherent irony... what is cowboy about Beyoncé besides the styling?  And the photo more like a Jeff Koons version of ad-absurdum with a little Richard Prince tagline left hanging.  Dave La Chapelle Does Dallas?  Lady Godiva at least had a sort of platform. 

Give me Roy Rogers and Dale Evans... National Velvet... I don't know... I was a cynic back when Elton John released Tumbleweed Connection.  A gay English cowboy? It seemed so inauthentic.  But now the whole banned-book narrative, the Tennessee political atmosphere-- the bigotry, the Bible-toting hypocrisy-- while the world burns.  What can we expect next-- Beyoncé on the throne, scepter and crown... but she's already been 'Queened'?  What is the damn message here?  I don't want to read or hear another commentary.  Let someone else search the internet for the white-horse symbolism and mythology.  It's Easter; Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a damn donkey. I just want my music with a little less pomp and airbrushing and a little more circumstance and soul. Aretha, we miss you so terribly.

The Loop

I've been reading Jacques Roubaud.  It's not simple; he's a mathematician, a poet-- a member of the Oulipo group, along with Queneau and Perec, who use restrictive writing techniques and exercises to create their work.  But he's also an obsessive observer and among the literary labyrinths and obstacles, there is this awareness of life that dazzles.  Walking, he says, decades before cellphones and technology were portable, is a conversation with time.  

My habits of running and distance-walking evolved as a kind of therapy for the grief I experienced in 2020, after the death of Alan. I'd circle the park, cover the half-empty city streets, and count to myself... as though the intimacy of numbers had some message for me... like a non-verbal language.  The way mathematicians think about numbers is beyond my simple comprehension, but there are patterns and colors somehow, that belong to certain sequences... and most poetry has always kept a certain musical count-- its rhythm, its meter.  

Photography, according to Roubaud, is a conversation with light. This, too, obviously way before the massive daily output of digitally cheap images. And also linked with time... the shutter speeds, the slowness, the developing. There were exactly three photographs of my Grandma in our house; only one vague image of her parents, posed formally and sepia-toned with a sort of monogram scratched into the corner of the paper. 

I confess I watched some minutes of the Academy awards... enough to see Billie Eilish whose delivery I have begun to find affected and pretentious.  I don't find her song 'winning' and her effort to avoid a body-image statement has resulted for me in a fashion overload.  It's like a doll with make-up and too many outfits.  I don't get it.  What is amazing is the technology to deliver an audio performance of breath... a far cry from the dive-bar culture where one sang one's throat out over loud guitars-- no earphones or monitors... sometimes nothing but amplifiers as a sound system.  And still, there is nothing I hear on these recent award shows that dazzles my ears like Mama Say Mama Sah Mama Coo Sah... or whatever he meant.  

Competing with the award show was a 60 Minutes piece on Jeff Koons-- a contemporary of mine whose financial success is boggling. Even his eyebrows were so artificially groomed I found it hard to look during the head-shots.  The factory, the Warhol comparisons-- well, simply... not not not.  The complete lack of imagination and the grandiosity of kitsch is no longer funny or amusing or artistic... it's just, especially in the world of today-- of war and violence and disparity-- a hideous lead-balloon tasteless joke. 

Walking rush-hour streets in the rain this week it occurred to me how few people observe the umbrella etiquette one used to find so natural in London... whether it's awkward tourists, or entitled women-- it seems there's little rain-chivalry and plenty of umbrella competition.  I often feel I no longer belong... block after block of shops that display but don't speak my language-- things that are strange and overpriced and even the ordering process of a simple coffee is overwhelming, as is the payment.  The doormen and groomed security guards outside buildings who look at people like me with haughty disdain.  Not the city into which I was born.  

I still circle the reservoir at sunset-- despite the crowds these days, it's still spectacular.  But last week some mediocre violinist set himself up with a loudspeaker that was enough to provoke a duck migration.  That woman who assaulted the subway cellist-- a criminal act, but I suddenly understood her.  Our privileged solitary moments-- our conversations with time--  are difficult enough without intrusions. So little silence in a city... musicians especially should be sensitive to the space between. 

So I guess I prefer to bury myself in a French novel and to sense the time it takes to walk from the West Village to Harlem-- sometimes with Coltrane in my headphones, sometimes Morphine or John Lee or even nothing... to speak occasionally with a man in a wheelchair who sits outside the projects with a boombox playing old R&B and tells me Pain might be his only friend now.  I could cry.  Worthy of an Albert King song.

Leap of Faith

I've always been a 29 sort of person.  After all, it's the first two slashes of my birth date... and if you add up all the digits, including year, it's what you get-- sort of a secret numerical surname.  Plenty of babies were born today... although mothers will celebrate most years on the 1st of March-- a misdeed, in my book.  I mean, technically one is born on the day after 28, but February has a totally unique profile.  And its oddity, its fluidity... well, it's calendar architecture-- like the mistake woven intentionally into Amish quilts, to remind of the fallibility of all things human. 

For those who obsessively wish their Facebook friends a happy birthday, there was a bit of relief; only two names came up in my reminders, neither of which seemed familiar.  My 'Memories' notifications brought back the previous February 29th activities-- gigs with my beloved Alan who just four sun-cycles ago, one leap year, was still vital and singing his damn heart out in the dive bars of downtown.

When I was young, I chose to see the 29th as a sort of holiday-- a temporal snow day-- the gift of extra time we only perceive on the arbitrary fall close of Daylight Saving Time... that odd hour I've always treated with a kind of reverence, even though it's taken back in the spring. 

I spent much of the day returning phone calls, speaking to friends, finishing up a Brassai biography of Henry Miller complete with photos.  For all the nostalgia this generation seems to have for our city in the 70's and 60's... it pales compared with the bohemians of New York in the 1930's.  No one more punk and passionate than our Henry who lived a life on both continents.  The edge.  

Many of my friends seem stuck.  Life since the pandemic has yet to return to normal... but there is no longer 'that' normal.  It occurs to me that 'normal' is a hindsight kind of thing.  I overheard my downstairs neighbor discussing with her 5-year old their 'new normal'.  Like everything in this culture, the moments are shortened-- the eras are temporary, the semesters are eras, fashion is passé nearly before it emerges; the world is reborn in an instagram blink.

And yet I carry with me some sense of solidity... like one of those black-and-white photos of a wiry musician, half-starved, wearing a wifebeater, walking maybe a New Orleans street with his horn tucked under his arm-- no case.  I can almost whistle the music in his head-- no cheap soundtrack: this is the real deal here, and it comforts me like a kind of visual rosary.

My niece is struggling.  We endlessly discuss suicide-- not as an act, but a kind of boundary.  It's bantered around so cheaply these days, and the ease of overdosing has made it constant conversation.  Even Flaco the owl-- who's to say he didn't simply have enough? Tired of being an instagram sensation, tired of having his every move photographed and documented, of being stalked by birders in Central Park.  He couldn't even enjoy a solitary meal.  All things must pass.  Besides, death changes everything. The dead Beatles will always be the more sacred for me. 

Of all the visual poetics in my city, the bridges are perhaps my favorite... all of them... including the Hells Gate whose very name frightens.  I love to walk across the East River and look down, between the slats... and wonder at the engineering challenge of past centuries-- these literal and conceptual linkages.  Yet-- they have become symbols of another kind of leap-- the one without faith, the one of despair.  These jumper dramas-- the narratives--  have become part of the lore... the river, the piles and the girders-- the soaring arcs-- the height, the distance.. the approach... the symbolisms. What we humans make of what we have made...

The way I see things, we all have a sort of room-- our solitary confinement.  We leave, we travel, we love, we mess around-- but the proverbial room is our least common denominator-- our reset.  for some it is the size of a closet, but this is delusion.  Anyway, in one corner is the past-- which begins to hog space, to encroach.  In another are the regrets and hauntings. Maybe another-- for my niece-- the appeal of drugs-- of escape-- the ultimate 'free' but that, too, is another closet-- a dead end, quite literally. And somewhere, when one throws open the curtains, is the window of suicide... the false window, actually, because the light is made of reflection-- not sunlight or even starlight but a kind of thick, stale, smoky yellow. 

And then there is you... you are the room, with the possibilities and tools waiting in the most inviting corner, the one beneath the suicide window you will not use because you prefer risks and fear and passionate love... and a door that opens onto a house of dreams, in a world of your own design, where it matters less that you belong, than that you simply existed, and left your unique footprint, maybe even a multiple of 29.

Crossing Delancey

Convalescence, as frustrating as it is, brings with it a few perks.  No guilt about lying around watching films on occasional nights, and there is something truly innocent about any New York movies made pre-1990's.  Especially the 70's-- the Woody Allens, the Elliot Goulds and Scorceses-- anything that gives us a glimpse of our city before it was 'glammed'.  Apartments were human-scaled, not massive and blingy.  People made phone calls from a booth, or waited home for a message.

At 3 AM the other night I watched Crossing Delancey-- something I'd probably shunned at the time, in my  post-college snobbery.  But there was Amy Irving-- Mrs. Spielberg, at the time, working in a bookshop-- navigating life as a single woman-- relatable, fallible.  It occurred to me I'm now closer to the age of her Bubby, lol.  And how I married the British writer asshole/flirt she was lucky enough to escape.  The LES-- populated by pickle stores and shops in the days before even Dean & DeLuca...  the bars, women waiting at tables... women sitting home eating Chinese take-out watching television. Does anything work out? She was Mrs. Spielberg, and then she wasn't. It must have hurt.  The last time I crossed Delancey I was on my way home from an Alan Merrill gig-- exactly four years ago-- his birthday, I think;  it seems like yesterday.

These associations have become permanent emotional fixtures... the way 2024 will be the year of the Taylor Swift Super Bowl.  She has done much for football, especially among young teenage girls who will not remember the winning touchdown but the color lipstick Taylor wore.  Tonight I remembered going to MOMA as a schoolgirl to look at the Jackson Pollocks.  In those days, museums were fairly uncrowded.  On that afternoon Joni Mitchell came in with Graham Nash.. they were dating, wearing sheepskin coats and furry boots... looking buoyant and in love and the three of us studying the paintings... it stayed with me.  A perfect cultural collision. 

The novel Septology is forever entwined with my January mishap, the way Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ helped me process the post-9/11 sorrow. How I tried hard last week to get into Lucy Ellman's Ducks,Newburyport but realized the voyeurism innate in following her personal associations, however close they are to mine-- was just excessive.  I have my own.  Time is limited and one must weigh carefully available literary projects. 

There was a night I had food poisoning and watched a Tarkovsky film.  I will forever associate the visuals with vomiting; somehow I think Tarkovsky would have approved.  And a boy named Billy who pulled me out of a bathroom at a screening of Warhol's Trash which was a little much for my teenage sensibilities.  He called me a hypocrite and it stuck... I swore I'd fight my failure to accommodate things that were difficult... 

I remember the store where I bought my first Henry James novel-- The American-- 60 cents for which there is no longer a character on my laptop.  But the smell of the place-- the paperback display, the style of the covers... and the feel of the pages as I read.  I was simply entranced.  Professor Lange reading Goethe to us... how sacred these moments... the associations and relationships, in a time now where influencers will link themselves with pretty much anything that will pay them a fortune.   The greed-- the athletes and their branding-- the endless commercials, the ruthless marketing of vaccines and reverse mortgages by familiar faces which may not even be the people they represent.

Trump will surely bail himself out of debt with his golden sneakers... I wonder who made this suggestion-- which of his smarmy children or associates came up with yet another get-rich-quick scheme, and extort from people who can little afford these things.  Contrast the effort it takes for someone like me to sell a single book.. it's just baffling. 

And yet the rest of us-- we seem to spend so much effort running away from ourselves, styling a persona we think is presentable or desirable.. even desperate hipsters painting themselves with signs and attitudes. Are we not enough? 

Navalny.  The closest to a hero in these times-- a true hero who was unafraid and committed... I've been obsessed with the documentaries and the daily reports... there are few epic films, besides the Christ stories.. the martyrs and POWs... to rival his story.  The fact that Taylor Swift has many more followers than Navalny.  

The near future feels a little bleak, and I have come to know the deep comfort of a kind of pain.  Jon Fosse reminds me that the winter is like a lover you know you must leave, that God is somewhere in these February chills. Fuck the groundhog-- we are wrapped in the God of winter, Whose hidden-ness is what we know. The clanking radiators remind me I am here, and perhaps God abandons us because His absence is sacred.  The devil in the details, but God, in His absolute loneliness, in the shadows.  Amen.

Handicapped

I recently overheard my neighbor and his friends discussing their golf handicaps.  I've heard this term used re: horse racing and it always confused me.  When I was young, the phrase 'Hire the handicapped' was bantered around. There were also ranks of parking spaces designated exclusively for these so-called unfortunates with the wheelchair icon painted on pavement.  More recently the word has been designated insulting.  Even 'disabled' is used with great care. 

It's a weird word. I remember reading somewhere it came from 'cap in hand', a reference to street beggars in older times who often displayed (or faked) disabilities to collect alms in a hat.  Whatever. It's become distasteful.  It's used with a kind of irony among my friends who are suffering the indignities of illnesses and aging.  One friend not only copes daily with the devastation of a brain tumor, but has lost the use of her hand.  Another has not quite recovered from hip surgery... another wrist surgery; then there are musicians' hand issues, drummers' spinal woes, general anxiety and depression... cardiac problems. We are an aging generation... we have used and abused ourselves in various ways.  

I am sympathetic; I've been lucky to survive and recover.  Two weeks ago I had an accident-- not life-threatening but enough to limit my usual freedoms. I've become, in a temporary way, handicapped, as my friends joke... and it's jokable, not permanent, unworthy of a special parking space or license plate-- or hopefully not.  

But I've been watching a good deal more television.. football, taking in the Taylor Swift/Travis Kelce phenomenon which I'm sorry to say makes me less fond of the Chiefs.  I'd like to see an underdog in the Super Bowl, despite the political and social media feeding frenzy this celebrity serendipity has caused.  I mean, if she changes the election, like Oprah did in 2008, well and good.  But for me it's enough-- the money, the endless athlete's endorsements and influencing... the massive payments in addition to the fortune they are paid to play which makes the heroes of my era look like middle-class losers. 

And these endless boring game shows-- with second-rate celebrity hosts and guests and absurd criteria and rules... who is watching this stuff?  It just seems desperate and forgettable.  

I'm reading Septology-- the seven-part masterpiece of this year's Nobel-winning author, Jon Fosse.  He's quintessentially Norwegian and for the last decades I've considered Scandinavia my second home. I've left my heart there-- a couple of times, not to mention a beloved bass guitar waiting for me to tour again. Anyway, it's a wonderful winter read. The snow... the small towns of Norway-- the fjords, the boats, the childhood reminiscences. The narrator is a painter-- a loner who has suffered losses, but manages to find a kind of redemption in his work which I can almost see, somehow.  And his quiet obsession with religion, his daily coming to terms with what is God-- in his art, in his simple way of life.  It's sublime.

My temporary injury and this novel remind me of what has been lost-- and how we go on, we find our lives and our meaning day by day, reinventing our path to accommodate the normal indignities of age, the diminishing exterior 'light' of our presence as the years pass.  And still, we find some spirit-- some determination-- we befriend the present and reintroduce the past like an old boyfriend who was amazing but no longer serves.

For many of us, this reveals and highlights our so-called handicaps. Some of us become defined by this alone.  But for others, we begin to see the less inspiring narratives of our culture as the true handicapped-- the banal, silly, petty, appearance-obsessed, botox and Wegovy-dependent overpaid housewives, non-achieving but omnipresent celebrity image-makers whose contributions are well celebrated but are anything but world-changing. 

Today I pray for my distressed and disabled friends.  For me I have the blessing of choosing the option of rehabilitation-- of acceptance, of continuing to exist with some kind of muse pulling me along, coaxing and cajoling.. a deepened sense of what remains, of God in my small universe, whatever that means... of life... cap in hand not for pity but for reverence and awe. With grace I intend to recover from this small setback and shine as I can in this flawed and aging skin I've been so generously granted, God willing.