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March 10, 2003
Jean makes me want to smoke cigarettes. She makes me want to light the next one with the one I’m finishing. I haven’t really smoked consistently in seventeen years and it was never my biggest vice. But Jean could change all that. I see her twice a year at a mutual friends house. The house in question is a non-smoking residence (as is my own—depending on what you’re smoking) so we lurk in the kitchen with the window open and blow our second hand smoke out the crack. We sit on stools and talk to each other about our lives. About how winter kills us. How cooking saves us. About how our friends annual Robbie Burns night, where we always see each other, positioned in the calendar at the arse end of winter, drags us through this treacherous seasonal passage and girds our drooping loins for the onset of spring. Jean reminds me of why I took up smoking in the first place. At boarding school girls can be divided into two camps: the smokers and the non-smokers. Those that spend huge tracts of time in bathrooms with cans of ozone depleting deodorant gripped in their hands, behind the bicycle shed, sheltering under the cricket pavilion, negotiating the muddy paths of the nearby woods, all in order to have a smoke. I don’t know what the other camp does as I was never part of them. I suppose they went to the tuck shop, toasted white bread, chatted up boys, maybe even studied. But I was smoking. It takes a surprisingly long time to get the hang of smoking as any smoker will tell you. Hours of green gill inducing nausea on buses returning from away hockey matches, bathroom dizziness, head bobbing over the bowl, horizontal spins. All this was an initiation ceremony worth enduring for the pleasure of the company of women. A certain kind of woman. When I look at the smokers in my class, some of whom I am still close to, they are the ones still getting into trouble, still turning their lifes around in their hands looking for new surfaces, new shapes.
I know other smokers, but Jean is the one who instantly transports me back to this society that adopted a very specific ritual to denote it from all other lodges.
Lately I have been listening to Jean. When I hear her voice I want to run out and buy a pack of high tar smokes and gasp through them in quick succession. I want to brush my teeth, like I used to in school, and then light up in order to taste the tobacco better. Jean works as an interpreter at the United Nations. She has a voice that reassures one that all will be well with the world, and this in spite of the subject matter she is interpreting. She fulfills the requirements of her job with such grace, imagination and passion, converting the discourse of desiccated nations into an urgent poetry. If you listen to the Security Council hearings (my only concession to the impending war as I have couched my ostrich-like sloth in the convenient stance that I hate war-mongers, but I also hate the anti-war mongers: down with mongerers!) she is there telling you how important it is to talk. To sound the voice. Her Scots inflected speech can make you hear the time we are in. And it can convince you that whatever happens we must go on talking into the night, against the odds, channeling streams of sound into gummed up ears in the hope not of boring a passage to the brain, but simply because defeat is to lose one’s voice. To concede that we are rendered inarticulate is a fine admission, but silence is still a fair approximation of death.
All that smoking has only made her voice more beautiful.
January 7, 2002
The window that was being bricked up yesterday in the apartment building that I see from my desk has been finished. However, rather than bricking up the whole area they have halved the window space and now a new frame and pane sits on one side of the original structure. It is now a New York bathroom sized window rather than a full one. When I squinted out across the snowy, sun filled parking lot to check on it this morning it took me a while to locate the new window. I was looking for an area of brick, window sized and slightly lighter in colour than the brick of the building. My eye was confused and had to scan all of the floors. I was both relieved and disappointed when I realised that some compromise involving the former window’s fate had been arrived at.
“The worlds whole sap is sunke:
The generall balme th'hydroptique earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the beds-feet life is shrunke,
Dead and enterr'd, yet all these seeme to laugh,
Compared with mee, who am their Epitaph.”
A Nocturnall Upon St. Lucie's Day, Being the Shortest Day
John Donne
Here in the bowel of winter
(I always loved those lines from Donne, if not the time of year)
I am speed reading my life, asleep, in dreams,
Feature length with terror and amusement in equal parts—
I sit with my mother in perfect company
Admiring her profile
And the full, dark Lytton Strachey-like beard
That she has decided to cultivate;
I note how well it suits her.
Driving in planes
That balk at becoming air borne—
And life drifts back in briefly during part of a day
With a book,
Or an animal,
Or Vladimir and Estragon, still waiting, this time on TV.
But opposite my desk they are
Bricking up a window;
A terrible omen in the urban lexicon,
And I wonder if some part of me has been
Diligently and thoroughly closed,
A bulb disappearing permanently,
Sealed in brick and hardening mortar
The smell of damp cement
That is not nature,
That is not entirely synthetic—
A token of senses
Once bulging through
Each window
Every crevice.
December 17th, 2002
Dublin is a small town. You might think that you would have exhausted all of its streets during part of a lifetime lived there. Recently, during a ten day visit there, I discovered new vistas, new corners, new junctions. Going up Merrion Street past Doheny and Nesbitts pub I take a left down a lane and another left and am back on Merrion Square where I have just walked through the beautiful park in the square. I am killing time before meeting a friend in the Merrion Hotel. This approach to the square gives you a head on view of the fine Georgian architecture of the National Gallery, Government buildings and the grassy splendour that surrounds them. All newly clean, reminding us of Ireland’s economy that continues, if a little more slowly of late, to grow like a cabbage. This town is, in many respects, so different from the one I left seventeen years ago, return is both endlessly familiar and reminiscent of visiting a European city that you have never been to before. There are portions of it that are etched into my head, as familiar as one’s own moles. Bewley’s Cafe with its stained glass Harry Clarke windows: I meet a friend for breakfast (weak milky coffee, rashers, cherry buns and Irish butter). There is a roaring fire in the fire place and the whole place is suffused with a golden light. How many afternoons in the past did I spend here? But now the city also supports wine bars, cheese shops, and business people dealing tęte a tęte or on cell phones. I am from here but no longer exclusively of here. I meet a man and am reminded of my own race’s entertaining and eloquent charm, the sturdy flesh and pale skin, am reminded how I was often oblivious to the appeal of my own when I lived here. My mind performs a temporal boggle: This man and I are married, we have children, I work at something other than I do in New York, we go to the West at weekends. You peel back the fragile skin of destiny to expose the bundled nerve endings of another life, a life deserted, and your whole being loses its equilibrium like a ship in a gale force with its ballast ripped out. People, especially outside of Dublin, now mistake me for an American. I stare at the new Euro coins like a geriatric trying to make change. I know the city streets but get hopelessly lost when trying to negotiate the ever expanding suburbs with their glossy new EU funded roads. Sometimes it seems that everything has conspired to make me an outsider, even in my homeland. But the grand tradition of universal homesickness is a privilege I enjoy.
November 13,2002
Just as you expect the tide of hormones to commence turning amnesiac leaving you to plough ahead efficiently, genderless and libidoless, there is the realisation that their last gasp is going to be stronger than anything preceding this mid-life watershed of sudden womanhood. Does life begin at fourty? I think not. But I might have just begun to emerge from the long chrysalis of some inchoate gender, a delayed blooming whose dramatically tardy arrival is likely to disturb the proceedings of the evening. The women, most of them, who appeared to have been in this state of full womanhood for far longer than I, were usually the women that men friends married. They were not the people I chose first as friends; I was never assured that I could converse in their language. I admired them in the way one does an incomprehensible mystery, watching their virtues, unable to navigate the synapses between their ability to be wife, mother, thinker, worker, friend, domesticator. I was relieved to go to the boozer with their husbands. A brief stint in Paris left me perplexed by the complexities of lingerie, perfume, and heels; bewildered by those gorgeous, genteel whores haunting bookstores. Now I want to join them. Heel-up, upholster my breasts, confit dug legs, and think. I want to be all of those things I scorned along with all of the things I value. The rigour of another language’s grammar has suddenly started to be less opaque. If I go missing you may find me dancing around a Maypole, my impossibly high heels gently pock-marking the grass, my clothing an uncanny symphony of drape and wrap, children flying out of my limbs. No irony in sight, merely the inevitability of a late onslaught of tertiary sexual characteristics.