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January 5, 2002
During a week long absence of my spouse over the new year, who tends to accumulate and distribute detritus about our abode in a way that brings to mind the word spoor, I discarded objects and cleaned with an energy and enthusiasm for the task that I thought had deserted me. In most households I have occupied I have been the cleaner. Cleanliness held no fascination for my parents. I lived with a man who subsisted on porridge and fried sausages. I would discover pots sporting the most fantastic blue and green moulds and Antarctica of sausage lard sculpted into frying pans all stowed under a bed or in a closet. Suppression superseded soap in his domestic system. My current house mates on the North Fork apparently find domestic chores to be as compelling as daily Bible reading. Cleanliness is not next to godliness, in fact I suspect it may be indicative of small mindedness, mania and neuroses, but it does appeal to me in odd ways. It’s one of those chores that you are alone with, you and your conscience. It’s for the pleasure of completing a task that needs to be performed on a repetitive basis and without rewards financial or professional. Who the hell will notice if you clean the plastic box in which you keep your cleaning supplies? Nobody. But it reassures me to know that I’ve resisted the temptation not to clean it. This latest episode of cleaning convinced me that the pleasure accrued from cleaning might be applicable when tackling other, grander projects in life. Quiet tenacity without expectation of reward. You can just pay someone to do it of course, but it’s an inexpensive and straightforward way in which to garner some feelings of virtue. Others have busier lives and for them it makes sense to pay for it, but I have expended considerable energy on avoiding a life of extreme busyness. A certain level of distraction is desirable, but your average New York day - as documented, for instance, in a recent issue of the New York Observer describing a day in the life of certain City notables on September the 10th - resembles some kind of assault course that would shave my nerves to a bloody fray. Short of being able to retreat to a cork lined room one of the things you can do to be less busy on other’s terms, but to be amply distracted, is to clean your own toilet.
December 12, 2001
Perhaps it was the timing. Christmas came early for me this year. I think I worked myself into a seasonal froth and prematurely ejaculated all of my seasonal jissum. And now I’m finding it hard to get hard for the holidays, which isn’t like me. Some mania had me doing it too early, baking mince pies by the baker’s dozen, boiling plum puddings until I had steamed my epidermis into a ruddy ooze, combing FAO Shwarz for various godchildren and wrapping their gifts with ornate paper they will never notice, even mailing cards to people who there is a substantial chance that I will never encounter again. And now I am left with something akin to a hangover of the season as those around me are just getting up to speed. The Swiss contingent feeding us with troughs of melted cheese, friends variously taking their kids to chop down Christmas trees, doing too many drugs, having nervous breakdowns, and ordering several phyla of beasts from d’Artagnan. Me, I have this underwhelming desire to sit very still, perhaps not eat anything except for some vegetable broth, to read extensively. It seems unlikely that this will happen, there is a piglet in a box in our van, a house full of humans, and two children wielding axes in anticipation of felling their first Christmas tree. In situations like this I have come to take comfort in the retreat to the kitchen and in what one can produce there for those gathered. One can participate while being absent, contribute while not having to converse, to celebrate by doing.
December 4, 2001
I am sitting on a bench in Soho. A French woman wearing too much perfume sees the bench, some of which I am saving surreptitiously for my late date, and informs her husband that (littoral translation), “truly, there is a rarity of benches in New York.” She’s right. I momentarily resent her for stealing my date’s portion of the bench, but I have been waiting a long time and some part of me knows that his arrival will coincide with a vacancy on the bench beside me. I have been sitting there since the last gasp of late fall evening light, which brings a brief stillness before dark. I have been running errands for former super models as a favor to a friend. Do former super models run their own errands? Probably not. Nor do they sit on benches anonymously, waiting for their perpetually late date, and get to see the day turn from gilded bronze to milky tea. The bench clears of perfumed French shoppers, of art boys trumpeting articles about themselves in Art Forum, and of Southern belles asking their mothers for cash hand outs on cell phones. My late date arrives, crooked with the day and in need of a seat.
November 26, 2001
The white car was still there on Spring Lane this morning. The doors shut and some of the objects on the grass exchanged for other objects. It was early and I didn’t cycle by the doors to see if she was sleeping in there; I had the feeling that she was. It was a foggy morning and there was condensation on the inside of the windows. I had had misgivings about my romanticizing of the old lady who might have lived in a car. On the first day I saw her she was a rune of solitude, today when I saw the car she was a warning. Perhaps she is not a voluntary nomad but a woman who never found a place or a way to make a living. A woman without friends or family, without income or savings. Without access to heat, healthcare or home. Someone who had lived carelessly without any tenacity of purpose or the ability to subdue her pride in order to hold down a job. Someone who had gambled on never being old and had lived life as if there was perhaps a tomorrow, but little beyond that. Perhaps, when younger, her contemporaries had tried to help her. To get her jobs, encourage her in her skills, to advise her to be a little more prudent in her approach. She balked at their advice, held onto the idea that one day she would settle down and make a great deal of money very easily. It became more difficult as she got older; she was alone in her stubbornness and her disbelief in the future. By the time she saw where she stood it was too late for reform. What could she do? At fifty, with her husband fled, train to be a nurse? The rooms got smaller. Eventually they had no kitchens. The bathrooms moved to the hall, always shared now. Her daughter gave her a lump sum and she bought a car. She drove the car to a lane. She picked the lane with great care. For its appearance, its lack of other people and its name: spring.
November 21, 2001
The perfect inoculation against weariness for the city that you live in: four days in another city. London splendid; return to New York golden. Driving up Sixth Avenue I spot Wallace Shawn outside Balduccis hailing a cab. He is being set upon by his own Thanksgiving shopping contained in several large white bags dwarfing his diminutive stature. Spotting him seems a good omen, he always seems perpetually amused by life, in love with the city and never oblivious to his own good fortune. Odd how one forms these notions about public figures, largely unfounded, based in part on appearance, facial expression, and on his work and the work he chooses to involve himself in. I love his book “The Fever”, he suggests it be read aloud. I thought of it when I saw him and had this longing to get out and give him a presumptuous kiss on his lovely bald pate.
November 12, 2001
When I was a child I don’t think I spent much time speaking as a child. I was channeling demons or mute. The latter, suddenly, seems appealing again. Except for certain phrases. The man on the bench reiterating to all passers by, “Sit with me, sit with me, sit with me.” Though nobody did. To remain quiet, to approach this next parcel of effort without reporting it. Blithe mute. That is what I think will be helpful. So pardon me if I am recondite but sometimes the telling of a thing makes it worse. The not talking cure; more than brevity, silence.
November 13, 2001
On Sunday I went on a long bike ride on the North Fork determined to exhaust the proliferation of roads that grow around Nassau Point and Southold like a system of blood vessels running perpendicular to the shore of the bay. On Spring Lane parked on the grass verge was a white car with the front and back doors open. In the back a woman of 70 or so was reclining with her feet up on the back seat and her back stretched against the jackknifed front seat. She had a container of food which she held up close to her mouth that she was eating from. Around the car, on the grass, were an odd assortment of items as if she were having a yard sale. One item was one of those baby strollers for jogging with that you see svelte young Manhattan couples heaving along in front of them, there was also a small table and chair. We looked at each other and said hello, I cycled on. Her face had contours of wrinkles running concentrically around an oval face. If I had stopped to befriend her I might have found out more, but it is not in my nature to stop and befriend people even though I often wish it were in my nature. I had spent the morning feeling anti-social. So when I encountered her it was somehow reassuring. How do you grow old? There she was, my perfect old lady. Reclining in a car on a Sunday afternoon eating a frugal picnic. Did she live out of her car? One might have imagined her to have been lonely, abandoned by men, women, children, but I had the distinct impression that she was deeply happy. A rune of solitude announcing to me that this was something for the taking without guilt or misgiving. Twice I passed another woman of a similar age walking on a long straight road. I was bundled up, my face wrapped in a red balaclava, a homage to my mother’s fear of the chilled skull. She would go out with her head bound in odd pieces of cloth and wool for the cold and rain. Every old lady reminds me of my mother, to paraphrase the poet. My mother gave me so much sap and on days like this I see that it is not diminished in me, but I fear that her own sap is being drained. The second old lady said to me on my second pass by her, “I think you were smarter than me.” I did not know if she was referring to my mode of transport (wheels over legs), my garb (warm, perhaps even overdone for the day), or my route. I said, “I’m not so sure about that.” You’re an old lady for godsake, alive , hale and walking the roads on a beautiful fall day, walking alone, what could be smarter than that? At one point a deer crossed my path, a hart. I have always loved the word. The whole afternoon left me with a feeling of the allegorical: wise old ladies, healthy adult male deer, many dead ends with beautiful views of water.