...more recent posts
October 14, 2002
I feel such deep relief at being alive that I become absent minded about the actuality of living, living in the sense that most are involved with being productive, working, making money, being creative, parenting, accumulating, planning for the future. Out the window everything is shimmering in its own fall galaxy of light and shadow and there is more birdsong than you might think congruous to such an urban environment. I’m too pleased with the day’s perfection to commence “work”, too content with an irrational and unfounded conviction that everything will be alright. I can't regret anything, the present is too all consuming. The relish taken in an ostensibly empty day: too much looking. To love the interregnums. To be between. More than reading, the putting down of the book before taking it up again. To be in transit is the sweetest anonymity. To walk in this air.
October 11, 2002
This weather, endless rain, both troubles and comforts me. My gene pool is pooling around me. While walking my jeans start to suck up water like that early physics experiment on water surface and meniscus. Crossing the street I do that directionless dance with another pedestrian. It can be a precious moment, an opportunity to pause, realize the absurdity of our ceaseless velocity, and to smile into another’s eyes. But my dancing partner today was not of this mind. “To the right, to the right,” she yelled at me. I wanted to yell back at her that we don’t all automatically go to the right. Who the hell teaches you these things anyway? It’s the first I’ve heard of it. Besides, are we supposed to go to the left in countries where that is the side on which we drive? It left me mildly irritable, another fact of life, of navigating the world, that had passed me by. It reminded me of going to school that first day and the teacher discovering that I couldn’t read the time; my mother had never thought to teach me. She was too busy reading me great stories about killer witches grinding up their victim’s remains with a mortar and pestle. The witch in question also used her mortar and pestle as a mode of transport, seated in the bowl while utilizing the pestle for propelling herself through the air and steering. Was she always yelling to other mortar and pestle conveyed witches, “to the right, to the right!”?
October 6, 2002
I’ve been thinking about Jim’s new T-Mobile Sidekick. Do I want one? It appeals to me as I am seduced by the idea of digital exhibitionism, of trying to stream a written “day in the life” onto the web in a more accurate fashion. The verb “to show” comes to mind, to make a show out of simply showing you. The French verb “faire”, to make or to do — wouldn’t it be nice to make as one was actually doing? Or would it? You see, as with most things, I have both misgivings and enthusiasm for it. The ability to document your life without the intrusion of a camera crew, or a laptop, to convey it immediately without too much damn interference from all that fussing with equipment, or with subject, style, plot, editing, and those other unmentionables, is both modern and ancient. We are able to revert to a freer form of the old instinct by the facility with which we can now communicate. And this makes so much sense at this juncture, as where else can we go at this late hour in the day when the anxiety inducing suspicion haunts us that we’re just crumbing the remains from the table of all the great makers? Technology is, at some level, a compensation that permits us to be primitive again. Oral tradition is rampant, the peripatetic pedestrian can communicate her sightings instantly to a loved one; you can blog away until you’re blue in the face; stream your bedroom antics onto the web; concoct mini movies with video cameras the size of a box of sugar; e-mail digital portraits of your New York family to your Granny in Greenland. It’s both wonderfully liberating and a frightening democracy.
I couldn’t sleep on Friday night and sat in bed watching a documentary on “The Making of the Misfits.” Arthur Miller, in the interviews, seems so incredibly male, as does Clark Gable in the actual footage from the film. And of course Marilyn is there being so essentially female that it is somewhat shocking, verging on the indecent. And then there’s Monty. It’s a great heterosexual moment (how many can you cite after this?), in both the film’s ending when Gable leaves with Monroe, and Miller’s obvious appreciation in the documentary of his former wife. As Miller was flying back to the East Coast from the set, he hears that Clark Gable has died. (Miller’s marriage to Monroe has also ended.) Gable insisted on doing his own stunts. You get the feeling that he had to put down his manhood at the end of the movie in order to make his character’s departure from the cowboy life convincing. In some mythical way you could believe that this, rather than a mere heart attack from overwork, is what killed the actor. What’s this got to do with Jim’s new “mobile”? I don’t know, except that insomnia had me pondering the two things back to back, and one is a documentary and the other enables you to provide evidence of your own existence to an audience. It strikes me that this is what it’s all about really. It’s a deeply unoriginal thought, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to reiterate it, just as with the occasional compulsion to share the contours of a deeply unremarkable day. The documenting of a life, at whatever level of accomplishment and with whatever degree of invention, is integral to existance itself, and the undeniable urge to convey the human condition has always been with us from the earliest cave paintings, to Joyce’s Ulysses, and in everything in between and beyond. Should there be more or less people exposing their creative efforts? Edit or babble? Gag it or succumb to logorrhea? Suppress or publish? Self-destruct of self-preserve? Old chestnuts. I’m never sure. And grateful for the not knowing.
February 28, 2002
In my younger and more vulnerable years, as well as in my older and even more vulnerable years, the phrase from Samuel Beckett, “imagination dead, imagine” is capable of striking fear in my heart more readily than any description of fire and brimstone, any passage of Paradise Lost, any portion of Dante’s Inferno. I mean, it’s the end isn’t it? Real death as opposed to mere oblivion, of which the latter actually seems like a deeply desirable state at this strange corner of the year. Iatrogenic is a word applied to medical treatments whose side-effects are more unpleasant than the symptoms of the condition being treated; it seems to cover a vast array of medical regimens. I’ve been availing myself of some iatrogenic medicine recently which has resulted in days made tidal with waves of nausea and immobility. Thankfully, the tide seems to be in retreat as the body, once again, shifts to accommodate another poison. The thing that remains is the reminder of how certain conditions are a threat to the imagination, nausea being one of them. Nausea obliterates all of the senses replacing it with one sensation. One vast cloud of heavy gas weighing out all of the faculties, bleaching all colour, disarming the imagination. But even in the midst of this debilitating bout there was one recurrent image that persisted with me like a morbidly funny talisman reminding me of the existence of imagination and of humour: I put on a shapeless wool coat and wrap it about myself, a body that in my state I perceive as an amorphous and pale lump, and stagger outside. The landscape is a hybrid of poor video and something more romantic, Lawrence Olivier as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights in that Hollywood version of the Yorkshire moors. My tottering steps lead me to a narrow path running parallel to a cliff. I shuffle along against a headwind until I fall over the cliff in something that is both a bowling pin collapse and a lemming-like dive. This image, which a fretful doctor might define as suicidal ideation, actually managed to make me laugh each time it re-ran in my mind. So, Sam, I suppose what I have to say is that I can’t fully imagine the dead imagination, not yet anyway, and thanks for your beautiful irony.
January 17, 2002
I’m not sure how old H. is. She has children my age (40), is technically a grandmother, though she avoids the moniker, and recently underwent her first face lift (this I am sure of because she asked me if I liked it the same way you ask your best girlfriend if she likes your new hair do.) I have to say that I’m not too keen on her face lift or her new hair do, now everything aspires too violently upwards, skin, hair, eye brows. As I was talking to her last night at a party I kept thinking of flying buttresses and how great she looked before she shocked her hair and face into an anti-gravitational revolt. She has recently lost her second husband and is vaguely thinking about looking for a third. She joined a video dating agency and was full of the delights of technology as a way to find a companion (she kept reiterating that she did not want to have sex with these men or a new husband). She has recently secured a book deal to write on the subject of dating after fifty, a sort estrogenless Sex in the City, and after several glasses of bad champagne decided that we should work together on the book. I’m not over 50 and am proud to have never been on a date, but this doesn’t seem to bother her. H. is one of those people that either reduces you to a cauldron of oozing hatred or who you forgive endlessly for her faults. She’s an only child, a Gemini and is the only woman with children who I have ever heard admit to having no innate maternal instinct. Perhaps it’s this unholy trinity of selfishness which we share that assists us in some bond. There is something vaguely immoral about her and her completely ageless capacity for having a good time reassures me that real maturity can be avoided indefinitely.