Common Place Vol. 4

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COMMON PLACE NUMBERS 10, 11 & 12 | 2018 & 2019


Volume 3’s three numbers continue the poems and prose motif while varying the balance between them.



Number 10’s prose pieces use a form from Rilke’s poetry. There are also some recent poems of my own.


COMMON PLACE NO. 10 | SPRING 2018

AFTER RILKE (ESSAYS) | NEW POEMS & SKETCHES


PREFACE Much of what I write falls in that porous category, the personal essay. These essays began as memoir, but that proved stillborn. Reading Brian Dillon’s Essayism led me, via Robert Musil’s tribute to Rainer Maria Rilke (in Precision and Soul, a collection of his essays and addresses), to Ulrich Baer’s The Rilke Alphabet, which quotes a Rilke poem with the rhyming form, ABA CBC. (A poem included here, occasioned by a memorial for my friend Rob Gayle, uses this form.) Awake in the middle of the night, I thought of the form again as way to frame a series of brief essays. On a notepad, I wrote: A. Love, B. Death, A. Love; C. Place, B. Death, C. Place; A. Family, B. Self, A. Family, C. Work, B. Self, C. Work. Then I wrote the series’ title: After Rilke.


AFTER RILKE (ESSAYS)

Love An affliction and an addiction, love is also a kind of play we engage in early on and are always ready to take up again unless or although prudence and experience argue otherwise. Affliction is both illness and curse. Kicking an addiction (or being deprived of it) leads to a range of terrors. We learn this in stages. If I have consciously walled love off, it’s because I no longer believe in it. Love is an odd word that covers a huge territory. I haven’t walled love off, in reality, but I’ve foresworn acting on the desire for a woman to arouse and possess—to use the typical language, the shorthand, of a desire that is equally for the proximity or closeness love permits, with its unique exchanges, many if not all of which are as much between minds as bodies, or evidence yet again of the meaninglessness of that distinction. (Yet a dichotomy, and part of the terror.) “No longer believe in it” is imprecise. It’s like the difference between the quantum universe and Newton’s. There’s an element of destiny in love (that isn’t pursued purely as sport or habit) that’s uncanny in my personal experience. Like light as a particle, you think you can hold on to it. The world is as Newton described; like him, we sense that more is going on. This insight has no practical value. Goethe’s maxim, “Only love a woman you’re prepared to marry,” reflected his attempts to live otherwise. Hayek argued that tradition embodies evolutionary experience at a cultural level—widely shared “facts on the ground.” Facts can change, as Keynes noted, but the cataclysms are also part of the facts tradition incorporates. We tell ourselves we’re immune. Love can be revolutionary, two against the world. From that stance, tradition is there to be overthrown. Love’s approximation of being, at its peak moments, roots us in an unfolding here and now, but this is the flimsiest of constructs unless we take conscious steps to strengthen it. That means acknowledging the past and future that figure in any here and now. Anything less than this is artifice, however delightful. This brings us back to play, the scenes of childhood. Part of love’s motivation is to recapture a time when being came naturally and living here and now was all that was expected of us. Our upbringing hammers much of this out of us. That we should take life seriously is the message that accompanies the physical duress we experience testing our limits. We equate maturity with sobriety, but crave relief more or less constantly—a craving for a remembered paradise we believe we can recreate in an entirely different context. Maturity is a ripening. A clear head is helpful, and people achieve this in different ways. I see sobriety as a conscious decision to be free of a negative force, whatever it is, that exerts power. But maturity is also letting play ripen into something less destructive. Love isn’t precluded, but its negative aspects are acknowledged, brought into the picture. We look around us, not back.


Death “On borrowed time,” my father wrote me. At the time, I didn’t quite follow, but later I saw that he was referring to his own father, who died at 76. My father lived longer, dying at 79, about six weeks short of 80, so in his 80th year. I’m now in my 72nd year. My mother died in her 76th year, but her father lived into his 80s, dying in a car accident along with his wife. His father lived to be 97, I remember hearing, but I don’t know this for sure. A farmer, he continued to farm pretty much until the end. My father spent part of World War II in London, where he was bombed out—a lucky escape, waking up and going out for a beer, hearing the air-raid sirens, seeking shelter, coming back to find his building flattened. He was also inadvertently in the Battle of the Bulge. His survival is of course my survival. So, I too may be living on borrowed time, time handed me, a possible life. I’m not sure exactly how old I was when my personal mortality came to me in its full terror. I think 14, but can that be possible? A fear of death led me to stop flying at one point, but it was so impractical that I was soon back in the air. Mortality has two aspects: the transience of our material selves, no matter what; and the randomness of the larger world, no matter what. Much time is given, individually and collectively, to extending life and taming the world’s randomness. We even keep score, comparing peoples, cities, and nations. When I was diagnosed with cancer, my doctor told me that the longer I could forestall treatment, the better it was likely to be. Now it’s my eyes: if I can keep them stable, a genetic treatment may emerge in lieu of surgery. Earlier this week, I read that consciousness survives a stopped heart by five minutes. More accurately, the brain continues to function, although what that’s like within is unclear. (It has a bearing on efforts to revive people.) But the body is a package. You can work around deficits up to a point, but beyond that, you’re probably better off dead than living strapped to a machine. Suicide or its contemplation runs ambiguously through life. It has its varying traditions, some of which make martyrs, heroes, or stoics of the life-takers. I sometimes thought of it while waiting for trains or, in one instance, standing on a balcony. I was never serious about it. The only time I could see it was one weekend when I had an abscessed tooth and no pain killer. Once, visiting my family in Norway, I woke up in the night and realized that my late cousin had visited me and left a message for me to give to his father. There was no ghost, but no doubt, either. In the morning, I recounted this to its recipient, who told me I was the third person to do so. Later that day, I went to the communal graveyard where my cousin, his brother, and his son are buried. I saw clearly, clairvoyantly, that they were gone and he wasn’t. His daughter, then an adolescent, kept him tied to that place. Perhaps his wife did, also. The destiny that draws us to others reflects a time travel with intervals. This is my theory. The passage through may be loosely choreographed; it may even be a game. We’ll see. Love Poetry lends itself to writing around love. And death. Place By the time I was six, I’d circumnavigated the world by ship. Much of what I experienced no longer exists. The architect-designed house my parents built in suburban New Jersey in 1954, although a prime example of midcentury modernism, was torn down 45 years later. The only house of my childhood I can still visit is the one in which my late cousin also grew up. It still exists and I continue to visit it. My great-grandfather’s summer house, which I also knew as a kid, is nearby. I walked past it in May 2016, and my late cousin’s granddaughter now lives on its grounds.


I arrived in Berkeley in March 1969, having driven out from St. Louis for spring break. One of our party, who was from San Francisco, stopped the car at the top of the Berkeley Campus. I can’t really say, “I knew I would live here,” but it feels true. I sometimes say that I knew immediately that my wife and I would marry when I first met her, but the reality is that I felt we knew each other. She first moved to the block we live on in 1968. After our first son was born, we moved to her building, which her parents owned. Later, they moved into it, leaving San Francisco. We bought our own house across the street in 1984. Square and shingled, it was built by Charmaine Kittredge in 1902. Her father was locally prominent—a street is named after him. She went on to marry Jack London. Ours is a Queen Anneperiod pattern house made to look “shingle style,” as was popular at the time. It’s compact, but has a Victorian floor plan with a foyer and four small bedrooms upstairs. A previous owner added to the kitchen and built a large deck. There’s a 1902 shed in the back. From the room in which I sleep, I can see most of the Golden Gate, Angel Island, and the coast range that extends north to Mount Tamalpais. The view is part of the place, to me—an assertion that is actively rejected by advocates for higher density in “urban” cities like this. The location, four blocks uphill from what was once the main streetcar route through Berkeley, is “walkable”—close to shops, cafés, and one renowned restaurant, Chez Panisse. Living here has become “European” as the food and wine of the region have come up and up. This happened more or less from the time I arrived, creating a market for local agriculture and viniculture. But “Progress” (capital “P”) is constantly on the hunt to wreck this idyll. The region suffers from fragmentation, and each fragment imagines it can solve the region’s problems alone. The rise of the tech sector has created a kind of five-tiered economy, with the lower tiers steadily losing out. Young professionals of my acquaintance are leaving. This is said to be a catastrophe. And this is the Left Coast, a haven of old lefties and new ones. But the region’s politics are more complicated, often libertarian rather than progressive. (Tech-progressive, one could say.) The human mix feels like the future and is widely supported; the rest struggles to keep up. The regional economy is the size of the Netherlands (in a state economy bigger than France), but the pervading sense is a lack of public investment—austerity amid vast wealth—and a public sector that’s expensive and ineffective. Fragmentation ensures that reform is very difficult to enact. In 1989, I visited a friend who’d taken up a visiting academic position in Tokyo. He lived in one of the districts along the circle line that demarks the inner and outer wards of the city. In the 11 days I spent there, I came to love the texture of the neighborhood, which was dense but low. Someone told me the average height of the city was 1.3 stories. I imagine that Berkeley has a comparable statistic. When I heard it, I thought that adding density in Tokyo is mainly a matter of modest increases in height—something that was going on in the neighborhood around us. In fact, we lived in a three-story condominium building that consolidated the site of two or three single-family, probably single-story houses. The building fit well with its surroundings. Not every building on the narrow street needed to be redeveloped to add housing. The process, mainly instigated by owners in the immediate community, happened slowly. Slow is a good tempo at city scale, because the size of a city multiplies these small acts so they make a difference. Slow makes allowance for the character of a place in a way that fast often doesn’t. And fast in an urban context is typically glacial—a real slow that adds cost and discourages local initiative. Slow is made possible by a shared consensus about a place. The pattern houses that gave rise to much of Berkeley were densely sited and modest, affordable to young families. Most of them were built by small-scale entrepreneurs. Zoning reflected this consensus; now it doesn’t. A step was missed and building and owning property became politicized. This is a recipe for corruption.


Death From the sidelines, so to speak, I watched the mother of a friend pass from a vigorous old age to frailty to death. Her daughter reported this and, to some extent, I saw it in social media. Our occasional exchanges were mostly about weaving. I wove and she asked questions about it. Some years before, I interviewed a well-known critic twice in the space of about a year. He had declined significantly between the two conversations, apologizing the second time for a mind that worked slowly because his heart was failing. The first time, his Russian ancestry came to the fore. Or was it the Ukraine? According to a friend’s report, he died surrounded by his old colleagues, having excused himself to take a nap from which he failed to wake up. Twelve years ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. The man who made the diagnosis urged me to arrange for surgery that he proposed to perform. In time, I found another doctor and delayed treatment for four years. I also avoided surgery, which had no real advantages I could see over the radiation treatment I received. At my doctor’s urging, I made the rounds of other specialists. Falling in with a doctor that I liked and trusted damped down the incredible anxiety I felt at first. I went to two concerts with a friend immediately after the diagnosis and, at the second, realized that I had no memory of the first. This isn’t really about death, it’s about dismemberment. The territory of old age is perilous. I fell on the sidewalk twice in my early 60s and realized that not falling is part of it. You learn to be careful. But being careful only gets you so far. Part of the transition I’m making now involves learning how to be fitter than I am. I have episodically become fit, but the motivation wasn’t selfpreservation. The observation, “He treats his body as separate and thus it is preserved,” found in Tao Te Ching, applies. But which body, exactly? According to Chuang Tzu, the Taoist sages joked about being bent over double by old age. As bodies age, this happens. It’s definitely a reason to be fit, as another doctor, then in his late 80s, pointed out. (He retired to do more skiing, he told me. I wonder if he’s still on the planet?) But back to my question. My own body has always been only semi-reliable, now tiny and thin, now taller but fat, now thin again, now heavier. It seems to hit a plateau, but then it changes again. The mind attached to it is masculine/feminine. The orientation is masculine, but the sensibility is feminine, if that makes any sense. I could imagine reincarnating as a woman. A psychic once told me that I reincarnated from a more masculine, charismatic figure with strong intuitive powers.


I remember a professor, so undone by the treatment he received for cancer that he died of a cold. He had a sixyear-old son, the result of a late marriage to a younger woman. Once I saw him walk by, slumped with the burdens of illness and age, and then come skipping back in the company of his child, brought back to life momentarily. My mother, dying from complications of a stroke, paused in her dying, my sister told me, to listen to “The Book of Ruth.” My mother-in-law willed herself through the holidays so her grandchildren could visit her. Once gone, she died. I learned in my thirties that I can tell from looking that a person is mortally ill. This talent came back to me when I met a friend last autumn and found him to be visibly dying. I’d learned from another friend who was in grave danger at certain points that it’s best to let the sick talk, to reveal what they want to reveal, discuss what they want to discuss. I sometimes think he was as much of a messenger as my late cousin, but messengers have their own lives and thoughts. Place When I was an undergraduate, a friend who had an aunt in St. Louis sometimes took me on drives in the country or to different landmarks in the city. One of them was the Bellefontaine Cemetery, with its mausoleums and Victorian-era sculptures. Where part of my family lives in Norway, the community lives around a Romanesque church and a cemetery that extends down the hillside, with a walkway that’s a shortcut to the rocks where we went to swim as kids. Where they put the dead says something about the communities of the living. My father’s parents are buried in Omaha; my parents in Eugene. My wife’s parents are buried in Kensington. I’m unsure where my mother’s parents are buried. But the dead of a part if my Norwegian family are buried together in a nearby place. I think this was a factor in my late cousin’s visit. In my transiently clairvoyant state, I saw there’s an attachment between the dead and their graves until they move on. There was a perceptible warmth to one, like a fire in a hearth; the others were cold, deserted. My cousins’ graves are marked by stones. The gravestone of the oldest, who died at 17 in 1963, is overrun with lichen and hard to read. Those of his brother and his brother’s son are tended by his brother’s widow, so their names are clearly visible. That we make places for the dead is interesting in itself. My wife’s mother gave her body to the medical school, which will cremate it along with others, mixing their ashes and scattering them in the Pacific in a ceremony to which the families are invited. Yet she has a grave marker next to her husband. We had a ceremony for her there, as we had for him. The constant search for mass graves, the identification and reburial of the dead—these actions speak to a desire to give each death a respect that’s often elusive in life itself. The impulse is often tribal. (I learned from a brother-in-law that the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s cemetery at Gallipoli is untended.) That the dead have markers at all, let alone mausoleums, reflects a long tradition of giving them repositories that, when the survivors could afford it, included testimonies to their value among the living. In the Greek Hall, as I think of it, at the Metropolitan Museum, there are a few that honor women as mothers and as the beauties they once were. This seems fitting. Beauty is fleeting. The photos of women in the paid obituaries of the New York Times often show them at something like their height. The men blend together, as in life, but the women are memorable. I think I’d like my ashes scattered in the back garden of my house. Next to the upstairs view, it’s the ground to which I feel the most connected. As for a marker, near my cousins’ graves in Norway, that gathering place of family spirits, might be good—a bit of me in both places.


Family I have a friend from college whose parents and grandparents were like characters in a novel by Tolstoy. It felt like the weight of that history fell on her, and that to work through it, she had to recreate those events and dramas as a brief and personally dangerous ordeal. The Sufi guru George Gurdjieff called this “voluntary suffering,” from which her baby daughter released her. The families my wife and I combined also have histories. On my wife’s side, there’s Edmund Burke’s sister Mary. On mine, although I’m not sure by what route, there’s James Lawrence, the Naval hero who reputedly implored his men, “Don’t give up the ship!” My great-grandfather was a Knight of the Danish Court, someone said, in honor of his giant school-room maps. There’s a state senator from Del Norte, Colorado. There are also bookies, farmers, and engineers. The families gathered by my marriage are mostly bourgeois. My great-grandfather brought that part of the family into the upper middle class, a kind of aristocracy of merit that persists through its adherence to such givens as educating the children and prodding them to work. The work ethic looms large, although my wife’s father’s family, landed gentry in steep decline on the grandfather’s side, rejected it in part. (Her grandfather never really worked, but he married a woman with opposite instincts, a force of nature that my wife is said to resemble.) The bourgeoisie threw off the aristocracy. This happened in Japan, too, despite its isolation, led by the “arrogant merchants” of Osaka. In Hagakure, written by a samurai in the employ of a baronial family, these merchants are condemned. Aristocracy wants its privileges and will go to war for them; the bourgeoisie will also go to war, but would rather not. I’m bourgeois to the core, but as a child, living in a British Crown Colony, my nascent sense of loyalty and patriotism became attached to the aristocracy whose visits required me and my classmates to turn out. Aristocracy is family of a sort, especially if encountered in childhood. The attachment formed is emotional and irrational. When Diana and Charles married, I cried involuntarily while watching their wedding, to my wife’s horror. (“They’re just Krauts,” she memorably told our oldest son.) Vladimir Putin has let the Romanovs be rehabilitated by the Russian Orthodox Church. He casts himself as the Consort of Mother Russia, a Napoleonic emperor—self-anointed. The trappings are imperial. The latest election is a plebiscite meant to seal his popular mandate. It’s the opposite of Xi’s end game of party politics, eliminating his rivals in a corporate takeover. Unlike hereditary aristocracies, these autocracies lack the standing that tradition might give them. Putin and Xi rule by their wits, at considerable personal danger. They’ve accumulated enemies. Despite their ruthlessness, they’re innately vulnerable. They can’t show weakness, yet they have to be seen as human, parentally empathetic, compassionate in a tough-love way. Charles de Gaulle saw countries like China and Russia as being stereotypically themselves. Who’s in charge is incidental to their behavior in a larger sense: innate, indelible, predictable. This sounds like stasis, but it can also be a predilection to play a long game, to work doggedly to bring reality—or at least perception—into sync with national myth. It’s an evolutionary strategy. Aristocracies used marriage to cement ties and infuse waning dynasties with new blood. That their fortunes derived from land was a problem the aristocracy never fully resolved. Aristocrats were tied by blood to territories that they personify. Landless younger sons ended up competing with and then marrying their tenants. My wife’s grandfather, scion of near-landless provincial gentry, was accepted by a rising local family on the strength of his name. Their first son secured a bank loan at age 10 because he embodied the prospect of revival their union represented. Perhaps Putin also trades on this idea—Mother Russia a queen in danger, and this self-made Man of the Future as her savior, prodding their progeny on to greater things. Xi meanwhile has stepped into a traditional role in China, securing the new dynasty. But the kids may get restless.


Self Our sense of self is illusory, the Buddhists say, because our lives are contingent. Judging from my children, though, our natures—the raw material of identity and character—arrive with us. We are divided, I think, by sense of our lives as unfolding like a novel in which we’re both author and actor, with others who may come and go, but whose places in our story are never clear or final; and of our lives as discontinuous events in which others figure provisionally and can be shed. Although “one damn thing after another” is a cliché, I failed to understand it as lived human experience until I quoted the phrase, having just read an interview with Lucian Freud in which he said it to justify cutting off friends and relations. “That’s me,” one of my hearers exclaimed. She meant the discontinuity of things, not the cutting off, but it made me think about both. My memory is associative. When triggered, often by people who I haven’t seen in a while, our shared past comes forward. This makes it easy to pick up the thread because the emotional ties are still there. The idea of social capital similarly reflects an accrual of experience in which the good persists and makes anything less than good seem exceptional. My associative memory may bridge across intervening time, but the novel’s plot twists sometimes disrupt the flow.

Family “The Founders’ Dinner” is what our children jokingly call our anniversary celebrations. Families vary immensely, but ours is extensive and connected by unconditional affection. I learned as I grew up that this applies to parents, siblings, and cousins. The idea that there are family friends who figure in this picture I learned from my wife’s friends of that description, and my sister’s. A desire runs across our family to want each one to do well, whatever this might mean to her or him. It’s a desire rather than an expectation, but active support comes along with it. “Start where you are” is another Buddhist saying that speaks to unconditional affection. It’s a pragmatic admonition meant to bring you back to yourself. It points to Buddha’s ladder, as I call it—accepting that we unfold with everything else in a world that’s both organized and random. Families embody this paradox. History depicts their persistence and contingency. Unconditional affection is a kind of optimism about the family’s attributes, its ability to persist and improvise. It honors evolutionary traits like bearing and intelligence, and upholds traditional obligations, from marriage itself to the effort and money invested in the progeny’s education and upbringing.


That families do this in the face of the contingencies that dog most marriages and the fraught transitions their children make in their dependencies—is evidence of their dynastic nature. It also speaks to the world that revolves around families: relations, friends, colleagues and friends of friends, and acquaintances, initially of the founding couple and later of their adult children. I started reading the first of Anthony Powell’s journals—a writer for whom family in this respect was his principal subject. The outlook it depicts is novelistic: everyday life depicted as a series of linked encounters, with the narrator and his intimate circle as the link. (The Alan Clark political diary, in contrast, reads like dispatches to the future. It reminded me of Stendhal’s Memories.) “Novelistic” means experience is overlaid by speculation. Powell quotes someone saying that one consolation of old age is learning how careers, marriages, and reputations turn out. The affection the narrator feels is like a novelist’s affection for her characters. However deplorable, there they are, still a focus of her attention. Our memories of them are never entirely fixed. Not even death accomplishes this. Powell’s great work, which I have yet to read, keeps things open. Work I thought of myself as a workaholic. At certain points, I privileged work over other aspects of life. Relieved now of the exigencies of fulltime work, I’m less sure I was ever addicted to it. It was a lifestyle, in my wife’s view—one that retains its attractions. My work combined art and skill with a degree of influence. While all of it was ephemeral, it gave form to the ambitions of the firms that commissioned it. This was especially true in the second half of my career, when I produced a magazine and other “statements of intent” that helped my firm explain itself. Given its size and reach, explaining itself to itself was a big part of this. I’m not sure the firm’s leaders grasped that this is better done indirectly than propagandistically with an internal audience. Some argue that writing of one type—commercial, say—works against writing of purer types. Poets are recommended to be bakers, lest their day jobs sully or sap their creative forces. I can’t speak for others, but the main issue is facility. Writing commercially and for journals involves deadlines and limits what can be said. The creativity is in making things worth reading. Writing for leisure is nominally free of these constraints. Any constraints are directed at the work itself. Writing is the heart of my odd career, which began and has continued to be my means to be in a field— architecture and design—in which I had no talent. I can’t really draw, and while I have a strong spatial sense, it only serves my critical sense. To design at all, I resorted to drugs. Even then, the results weren’t much good, but my explanations amused the gods, especially the Chicago architect Harry Weese, who saved me from being tossed out of undergraduate school. In parallel, beginning really as a child, I wrote. The writing was largely at the prompting of others, starting with my mother. In high school, an insightful English teacher told me to absorb the New York Times’ house style, which I did by reading it in full daily, a practice that continues. This augmented my childhood in Singapore, where I heard English spoken by educated people (and spoke it as an absorbed variant on the standard American English spoken by my parents). The American East Coast to which I returned was marked by a standard way of speaking among the educated that was reinforced by newscasters, cultural program hosts, and talking heads. (The writing of my father and sister is similar to mine in form and word choices, I’ve noticed.) Writing for oneself is less about a distinctive voice and more about finding suitable forms. I write most easily in correspondence, short essays and commentary, and poems. Concision is a common feature, although one man’s brief may be one woman’s too long. As an editor, I prefer concision. As a writer, I unfold things—poems with extraneous preludes and essays with asides. My writing wanders discursively, yet somehow is relatively brief. When I edit it, I sometimes aim for the supposed heart, but more often I let it beat within the plumage.


Self Alexander Nehamas’ The Art of Living traces the care of the self from Socrates to Foucault. This is a simplification, but it’s what I retain from reading it. On the strength of it, I bought and read Foucault’s The Care of the Self, stopping when he gets to boys. I was a boy myself, of course, and mixing with my own kind came with that territory. When we’re young, gender differences are less pronounced. Then puberty kicks in. I wonder if the profusion of identities and the striving for a more fluid spectrum are a working out of this bodily imposition, which haphazardly makes us “men” or “women.” Three women friends have at different times noted that, as the first put it, “my figure didn’t come in.” Humans vary around a shifting norm; in high school, that nightmare of postpuberty, they try to get near it and fit in. Making something of ourselves, as older people admonish us, is one of life’s main projects. The criteria handed us are often ill-suited to our nature, talents, and inclinations, which means that the breakthroughs in this project center on our willingness, sooner or later, to embrace our differences, to vary quite distantly from what others want of us to pursue our own agenda. In a way, this repeats our early adventures, when real life hammered us with its lessons about sharp objects, gravity, and our peers. Dennis Winnicott says we build our egos early on. Later, tempted to push beyond the limits of common sense, we crack that carapace, but we learn again why we built it. This second time, we gain self-reliance or go under. Going under is one way to learn. Authenticity is crucial to the project of making something of ourselves. We can’t help but see how the terms on offer to realize our ambitions work against what we’re really here to do. We may acquiesce, defer, evade, or rebel, but those choices are reactive. The other option is to do what we’re here to do from the outset, but this involves a different kind of trial and error. When I was in my thirties, with two young children, a friend used to torture me by asking, “What’s your 10-year plan?” He had one, presumably, but then his marriage went off the rails. On New Years’ Day, I used to write out a kind of prospective. Some things reappeared from year to year, not getting done; other things took place, but rarely as envisioned. The supposed path through a life is really an accumulation of experiences from which we learn or not. Making something of yourself means staying open to life and learning from it. There’s no other way. Work When I was younger, the therapists claimed that marriages “took work.” I saw it differently. The household and its responsibilities take work, no doubt, but marriage itself as a close relationship that can be fraught or pleasurable or stagnant in turns isn’t something “to work on.” Anything involving love is a creative act first and foremost, to which the phrase “the art of living” speaks. We tend to divide life into the categories handed us as soon as we’re packed off to school. We may question them, even rebel at certain points, but it’s rare that we act effectively on the impulse to transcend them. Those who do—the fashion/street photographer Bill Cunningham and the artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz come to mind— seem as modest as they are passionate about living without the usual divisions. I see them as “working models,” not for how to balance but how simply to refuse to set boundaries on one’s activities or to categorize them. The divvying up reflects the way we allow time to infiltrate our lives for others’ convenience. We live factorylike existences, showing up here and there at appointed times, and being counted present because we literally are. The higher their status, the more people flaunt this convention with impunity, often with breathtaking hypocrisy on full but unconscious display. The frequent lapses into bad behavior in the workplace strike me as an untoward but logical extension of an attitude that assumes bodily possession of employees by those higher up. If we work as serfs for 10 or 12 hours, recovering from it is a tiny bit like it was for the real serfs Alexander Herzen describes in his autobiography: freedom is like staggering into the light.


So, most of us are proletarians of a sort, alienated from our birthright as the creators of our own lives. The working world is organized otherwise, and to resist takes courage, frugality, persistence, and imagination. It may also take insight that the world “as given” is a fragile construct, much more ephemeral than its overlords dare themselves to think. The paranoia the powerful often display reflects their unease about the hierarchy they’ve surmounted. And yet, like school, the workplace in its different forms involves relationships that, if not “close” are proximate. We’re among familiars and there’s a kind of camaraderie. In the end, we are all human, and the imbalances in power—also found in marriages and families—distort this. If there’s a fundamental reason for refusing to divide life up arbitrarily and work according to the dictates of the factory, it’s that it diminishes our humanity—the root of every creative act. We are exhorted to “work on it,” but work of this kind is spiritually toxic, equally for marriage. When the Zen reformer Dōgen was in China, he encountered an old monk gathering wood for the kitchen. “Aren’t you too old to be doing that?” he asked. “Who else should do it?” the monk replied. The episode relates to Dōgen’s contention that, taken seriously, being the cook in a monastery was the fastest path to enlightenment. I take this to mean not only that gathering wood for the stove is cooking, but that cooking—as life-affirming work—is a spiritual practice. It tempers self-awareness with a devotion to every other sentient being. Buddhism is a philosophy of transcendence. Marx’s “everything solid melts into air” is how it is. Solidity and melting are distinct, yet inextricably paired, the Dharma—the reality of life’s transience—our only refuge. If work fails to sustain spiritual as well as material life, then forget about fulfillment. We may choose to live a disciplined life within time. We may even choose a factory-like workplace as an easier way to organize works of interest. But these choices should be conscious, voluntary, and provisional. What we mean by discipline, how we deal with time—these are always in flux. “The art of living” applies to life in full. Each of life’s major categories comes with the vast weight of its tradition and the sheer momentum of its unproductive habits. This is why the true artists of life are so rare. Yet they alone accept life as it really is and live creatively within it. As it was when we were young, and as it still is in dreams, the world they inhabit is raw material for their work, its medium, and its audience. That world has life, as Christopher Alexander says.


NEW POEMS & SKETCHES THE FACT OF THE HOUSE, THE ROOMS The fact of the house, the rooms, curtains gusting out of frames, books, boots, cats, coats, an easel, lives present and lives absent, a tinge never quite dispelled, domesticity bespoke hour by hour: was this a narrative or a list? HAD SHE BEEN, THEN Had she been, then nine, sixteen, nineteen, twenty-one, the mother dead. ON READING BASIL BUNTING’S PASIPHAË Grant this sacrifice, oh gods, fill with heft this warped vessel. TWO SKETCHES 01 It’s only a few years since the last time, which went badly. She’s between lovers, unattached, and her desire is spontaneous and affectionate. I’ve landed here from later, freed from the terror of her turning opaque. We’re in an apartment in an old building I vaguely place, summoned telepathically, I suppose. She’s here to alter the narrative. It happens: on the phone, laughter; across a table, a look; in bed, lovemaking. 02 I tried and failed to remember what I’d just remembered—how amused they’d be and how it would die with me if I didn’t write it out. I read a series of haikus and one-line poems, then fragments of a longer poem that made no sense. (‘Stop making sense!’ I thought later. Was it meant literally?) Knowing the poet’s wife is an obstacle. Where did she fit? A fallacy to imagine this, I read afterwards. Art lies to tell its truth, an artist said. It sounds too pat, I thought, the sort of thing he’d say as his work went up, priced to sell as my wife says. If I shouted, who replies? A title sparks this thought. Somewhere mountainous, a nymph I think, inspired his display. Discursive feels untrue, so it must be art.


I STOOD NOT FAR FROM YOU. A GLANCE I stood not far from you. A glance, I think it was a glance, the way particles dissipate when chance spares them collision, a rebirth— the sort that warrants us to pray. Of prayers there was a dearth; just mirth of a funereal sort. A few preened, gossiped, until grief broke in. We can speak of it or something new, the measure of what we’ll miss. Musil pointing the crowd ahead, Berlin ambling toward an abyss, toward a nil, yet cracking jokes in the middle. We edge away from it, often unnerved if life proves too brittle. He had his work, future, promise. Saw him just weeks before, so thin, hopeful. Is it the work we’ll miss? Or is it up to us to write it? In my case, occasional talk, cigarettes and spare words, his wit, his surprising affection, like a dog or guide on a walk that turns and looks for attention. (For Rob Gayle, 1952–2017.)


IT MUST BE THAT WE FELL It must be that we fell (out of love?) (photographs, naked men having sex); it must be that I could (one act is like others: this is a fallacy); it must be that I left (twice, as if in a trance the first time, a reverse); it must be how it ends (again, again, again, but then there is no link); it must be that I fail (again and then again the thread leads back to me); it must be, it must be (out of love, singular amid the talk, laughter). THE WORLD ORDERED IN CHAOS The world ordered in chaos, foreseen in dreams and omens, spoken as oracles, swayed almost incidentally, a god’s affection captured without intending, a truth perceived without one’s knowing. We set the myths on the side and leave the gods’ altars bare. We treat their world as ours, dismal stewards throwing crumbs. Days we take for granted pass unrecognized, fruit rotting in baskets, friendships squandered. Hermes appears nonetheless. Charon’s ferry plies the Styx. Near Hades’ gate, gathered shades gossip as they wait, looking for what they thought they had, death leaving little trace. Life’s short, the Muses sing. Art is long. (This poem was included in Little River 8, March 2018, edited by Katherine Osborne.


Common Place—A Personal Journal Text and photos @ 2018 by John J. Parman complace.j2parman.com



Number 11 draws on recent poems, prose pieces, and photo-collages from several years before.


THE MIDDLE COUNTRY

COMMON PLACE NO. 11 / Summer 2018


In our age of hard yet porous borders, delimiting this long stretch of now-time, as Walter Benjamin called it, is difficult. We think we’re somewhere altogether else, but then our minds wander. I took notes throughout the journey, but I find that what matters more is what Benjamin also noted: the reception of the past in the unfolding present, its aftereffects. (Berkeley, Bastille Day, 2018)


THE MIDDLE COUNTRY “…this confrontation of one system of thought with another provided him with an analogy for what he believed to be the relations between different historical paradigms or mindsets or problematiques or conjectures within the Western tradition: stretches of our past are, according to Foucault, another country …”—Eric Griffiths, “Lists,” If Not Critical, Oxford, 2018, page 12. 1.

2.

I’m here, but where’s here’s unclear, a known/unknown, quantum place of false footings and sprung traps, narratives that kept spirits hopeful over seven years, unreliable recaps.

Your birch trees are not mine. Mine were river aspens. Fishing brought me there, I tell myself. Your wood lapboards are also another kind. Mine were painted, noticed as I walked to the rocks where I once swam. Your small meal isn’t the one I ate alone, an oat scone and dark coffee with steamed milk. It was here we met, the eve of our sabbatical year, tentative and then a dream. I write sometimes about you. The dreams I have are empty, but you figure in poems. These dreams I dream have phantoms, two of them to be precise. Sometimes one takes possession of my wife. I hear a curse of sorts, half of one, a fourth. They also figure in poems. Their small meals aren’t like the ones I had alone. Not that they stand out. Birches and aspens are similar in moonlight I imagine. Night joins us, equally possessed by sleep. Time divides and unites us. Our letters never sync. Space proves random, barely speak unless you’re ready. I wait. Across time I’m immortal, so never rushed. Beds are where the warp is felt, or one place.

From Mount Retrospect, distance obscures likenesses. The land the seasons color, wind shaped like the body my hands knew even as much else of you eluded me; minutiae surface, your hands, head, and lips close as they were once, like this— (my fingers press together)— and yet you walk by quickly or turn away, or won’t turn, resolved and silent. Blame falls on me for waiting half your life. Dying misleads. Occasions don’t repeat, as I learned twice, a June-in-January’s desire for winter’s end, amends, turns back, time again.


3.

4.

In the end, a terrace, drink placed on a glass-topped table, the sun at an angle, green close and distant, the ocean intuited, a long walk through a terrain of white deer and their predators—not yet, he thinks, drink in hand, turning his head vaguely north, squinting, puts it down to find his hat. Alone, no one left to love or one to love not likely here, although he thinks of her. She resisted description, he was told over coffee, declined objectivity as pinned down, a specimen. Although he’d foresworn the rites, spring’s fecund buzz caught him out. Possession’s a zero sum, a transient comet. And he doesn’t figure in her thoughts. Benign, a null. But then this was where it always started. Ex nihilo, as they say. He’d made a go with that, long the game, chancing, playing odds, and no one odder than him. Took her measure: a season insufficient proof of love as he conceived it, what we intimate between us, close as one flesh, exchanging genes. All this flashed by, the terrace platform to his reverie.

Reading prods connections. God has two names; one can’t be said. Amid fire, four letters like a billboard. So, they wrote and behind this were the words, slippery and contingent. A seven myself, saunter at a distance, uninvolved. When she speaks to me, it’s books, and dreams above my station. (The Angel of History a woman and translator.) The myth is plausible, yes? Destiny and consequence, falling in, then falling out, calling, not calling, never, not sever, entanglement’s a vine that persists, I guess. Union with all, a woman specifically, get with child, births non-duality, God nameless, paternity suit hard to serve, to prove. I am. Okay, let’s run with that: bits named yet claimed whole whose stone rolled, divine in triplicate, here and there—the accounts differ. The A of H whispers French like Baudelaire, first modern. We attend. We studied French. Watching as Zeus charms and scores, Nameless can only look on. Rules are set, flouted, a calf prompts massacre, simple folk, the credulous, are struck down. Nameless wants to see the swell. Seraphim mask the Virgin’s pleasure and her agony. This will repeat, will repeat. (The women beat their breasts, priests mark a cadence: their taking a tattoo of beds, floorboards.)


5. The Goldberg Variations were often playing. Gould hummed as he played, notoriously, a busker or an eccentric at the piano, possibly sick of it, the audience sent away. No crowd for him. I liked her balcony, almost a room, no view except the car repair and the sideways look. I remember it precisely, every book. This was later. Recently, I dreamt of her old place, another In her bed—reasonable, as she’d moved. There were two main rooms, I think, while this had one, colors reversed as dreams do. I took number 41, and wrote no poems as I rode. They all came with, hidden as prose, to end up on a Zurich terrace. Still later, when she laughed scornfully in a café, I wrote this, too. By then, the humming stopped.


6.

9.

Think but don’t think or rather don’t name (slanted light across shelves, reflections, depth in a reveal, my cousin’s dog next to the car). I resist and then the shades of Walter Benjamin and Baudelaire slip past, and I read how in Tokyo a writer toiled for two decades, then wrote up the accumulated lonely, each garbed in narrative. Mine are in several drawers and closets, fragments used to grind ink and spot the bathroom floor with blood. What do they see before expiring? Desired and yet panic, probably, misgivings. Not that I would know, could know. Write it and others may copy, it’s said. Red the blood in round spots. This can be named and thought.

How is it I think of her? Memories of her kitchen and her cats, blue fabric, a drama in seven acts, but then they go on, these lives. Others enter them. It’s odd how they invert the picture. A small marriage, someone said. I want to write it out, say how blue, a blue I chose, stays when much else was put away. Who’s betrayed if I think this? It’s all burnt anyway, save our late-arriving selves.

7.

10.

Oysters, she said, repeating the patois of the kitchen. She was an ocean creature. Another pried them open, a sea of longing, mourning, abandonment, abundance.

The urge to write it down, words suggesting rawness; organs spoken as demotic nouns and horizontality expressed. Yet identity is fixed in mind by such small things as gait or how she gasps. Words for the aftermath, too, a lexicon unique, worn from thumbing, no antidote for this strep life, alien to oneself, the tendrils torn from mouth to heart. It’s all gone and yet she came, the sheets stained off-white, the walls slightly marked. I was slow, my pen was slow, at a remove yet still close. Blood, sperm, and time were my ink. The particulars figured: each lover a universe that burned, became gravity in a fatal sense. No chance my pen encompassed her.

8. Always leaving, or we leave. Too much: we drift off, storm off; anger and regret follow. Who was close retreats from us or we from them; in the end, no difference—only ruins where her temples were; some call these remnants generative. One person’s debris, unseen, is another’s mystery. I wandered in my torn coat, then found remnants on the ground. I dreamt of Walser’s jacket, green and new, his sister’s token.


11. How we contrive to end up in sideways intercourse! Domesticity tries to tame this by conflating it with sleep, but we resist even as we acquiesce. We want and need the artifice, often supplied randomly by nature, the wind billowing the curtains to mimic briefly a pregnant belly, or the light moving across a bed. In these self-chosen scenes, we speak sometimes from and to our realest selves. We like a bed, but rutting’s what we’re there to do. Naturally, we deny this to each other. “Oh, no!” There’s no lie committed by this fiction. As a friend’s mother put it, “Not terrible either way.” For issue is a hazard of traditional horizontality. Arise! Arise! Vertical, we stagger from bed to crib or lie under siege, pawed or overheard, our quarters exposed as invariably too small. We must get away, we tell ourselves, but the pairs who flee may vary from issue’s parentage. We breed, not always by design.


12. Life’s relentless chronology tricks us into allowing later events to overshadow what went before. With biography, the completeness of a life and the distance from the subject flatten the narrative, although subjecting it to the biographer’s biases. In dreams, though, there’s often a remarkable immediacy.


Two Fragments from A WALK IN THE WOODS When I was 16, my sister and I traveled around Europe together. She was a junior abroad, studying at the Sorbonne, and I worked like a dog delivering newspapers to join her on our summer vacation. I think our parents doubted that I could do it, but I rose stoically most mornings at 4:30 and rode my three-speed black Rudge past the railroad station and under the trestle to where my route began. My memory of that route is caught up in the woods I rode through as dawn broke. Once a family of dwarf rabbits, tiny and brown, broke into a run before me—wildlife persisting amid suburban houses. Looking back, that town seems so bucolic, the opposite of suburbs as we’ve come to know them. In 1963, New Jersey was still often rural— farms, meadows, and expanses of woods. My father took me skiing once on some hillside, lending me his father’s wooden skis, brought to America from Norway. I arrived in Paris on 13 July, spending the evening with my sister on the balcony of Madame Mercier’s apartment on rue Bonaparte, which looked down on all the dancing. I spotted a cabin mate from the Aurelia, the Italian liner we took to Le Havre along with 1,100 other students. Madame Mercier was a friend of my mother’s father. She was small but imposing. Her apartment was filled with the furniture and art of another era, but her sensibility reflected everything she’d lived through. One of my sister’s friends, attached to the Embassy of the Cameroon, got us tickets to an evening performance of its National Dance Company at a huge and massively hot old theater. For hours, every kind of tribal dance was performed, even those of pygmies, as the audience set sweating and enthralled. After my mother died, I noted at her funeral that her life took in both the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union’s collapse. Her birth in August 1915 also preceded the Armenian Massacre, nine days of terror that cost a million lives. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, my mother studied Russian on public television, getting up early to watch the program. She had difficulty with foreign languages, but was able to thank a visiting Russian oil chemist in his language when my parents went to a convention in Texas. I knew my mother best in the period from the early 1950s through my high-school graduation in 1965. She was 35 when we arrived in Singapore and 50 when they quit New Jersey for Washington, D.C., where they rented a narrow townhouse in Georgetown and bought a 30-foot Canadian sloop they kept on Chesapeake Bay. My mother decided to secure the degree she abandoned when she married my father. We both got our B.A. degrees in 1970. Then she slowly went mad—strident at the outset. The political context in which it happened masked its seriousness. With each successive year, she got worse. On the plane, flying back to Washington in 1984 to deal with her, I read Ivan Illich’s Gender and wondered if her problems were physical or cultural. Faced with her full-bore insanity, it was hard to sustain the thesis that she was the victim of oppression. What struck me was how like a speed addict she’d become, unable to sleep and plagued by paranoia. Yet there were also moments of lucidity and pathos. That my father had fled affected her, even as she proclaimed her independence. We shared a lot of anxieties, but hers were amped up to max. Her values were inverted, too. A handful of dead leaves became objects of great beauty. Each trip in the car was like traveling with Don Quixote. My parents’ tiny house in Alexandria was a place of despair; every object felt like residue. Thanks to the help of my mother’s sister Sylvia and my cousin Cynthia—and my mother, too, who told the clearly alcoholic judge that my father was a secret drinker—she was committed and restored to sanity. In the annals of my family, this really was a miracle. My mother would have ended up a bag lady otherwise. Soon after her death, I dreamt of my mother as her younger self. She wore one of her fashionable outfits—in Singapore, she’d had her tailors knock off Chanel—and seemed entirely engaged and happy, in her element in a place where she felt modern and cosmopolitan, the most herself in her own view.


THE MIDDLE COUNTRY 13.

15.

The road south of Olema wound through dense, encroaching woods, straightening as I approached the lagoon. Bolinas forked west and Stinson lay ahead. Heat brings traffic; it was winter. I chose the cot on the landing to sleep alone. Waves all night, the sea down the block. Writing was my nominal purpose; to wait my reality. Coming, going: the way it’s said is this, but I doubt it is. Another time: Hood Canal, mountains across an inlet, a deck, a moment of certainty— brief, eclipsed by time, but there. Where life touches this other thing signs appear that we carry along. Waves all night, the moon rose and fell, their sum infinity or zero, full or empty. No shaman now to give them potency, no way stations, side altars, or relics, just the road, its hubcap shrines obscured, articles of faith scattered behind me.

A terrace opera. Love like a Russian gun: act three or five, a shot is heard. Bang! The dog is briefly deafened. He barks. The chorus sings. ‘Oh!’ from one wall, but no answer. Yet the question vexes. Love illusive, its quantum form evades scrutiny. The dog runs in circles, chasing it. But no, the scene has changed: one damn thing after another. Between the sexes, a screen. What you thought you saw, wasn’t. It was some other thing. Wrong is how it boils down; what you felt, love’s facsimile. A scrim, a crime, a good time. There is no truth, only sound mixed with movement, only heat and rivulets, the climax as predicted: ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ Again the dog is deafened. He cries, the chorus silent.

14.

16.

Where life took them both before it took them apart— this is the gist of it, true; in retrospect, suspect. He thought how love makes women happy. They come abundantly, their gift. Men are incidental, projected on. Years before, parting near, his tattered, paper heart in hand. Time unwraps the carapace or you let go. Across a table: no distance. True is on a terrace now. Where else no longer matters, yet he set it out like tagger art or a tattooed arm.

A grand piano, played on around the corner, audible where we sat, the surface flat, the gazes implied. Stanzas taken out would sing the whole saga: love’s acts mixed with reality, desire and the divides we cross to occasion it, how men lack what women have, to flip Freud’s theory on its head, how showered with gifts they are. We can’t believe it, then luck deserts us. I came back to this the other day, the song ragged in memory, pianissimo.


17.

18.

Dining room, monochromatic, companion kempt and waiter mechanical. Walk, train, walk. At market, two bags, a friend decades not seen, families recounted, grandchildren, one expected. At lunch, mentioned and I knocked for luck, the gods. This narrowed life, momentarily or maybe not, abandoning habits that took me a distance. “Hanoi,” a colleague told me earlier. “Better than China.” Narrow names the plants hereabouts, honors household gods, terrain with view, tilt, fault, and lions somewhere further up. Narrow is a memory, why I traveled once.

Greens. Kitchens are a leitmotif, domestic notes that speak to how passion’s corralled as conception or more simply as a marriage, untrammeled. Fruits. Preserves are laid in. What was spun is woven. Questions are raised, complaints made: “Don’t explain to me.” Dresses. A short, striped one derails without intent. Happens. Another’s house is another’s. Rooms. It’s so small a place the spines’ titles can be read. What favored quotes, then? In my mind, you moan them out. No issue, though, no harm done. Only my poems get with child.


19.

21.

The surrealism of imposed constraint gives each sound a meaning; instrument and player both, improvising on a score, but first preparing, tuning the body’s pitch, its voice, rhythm, timbre. If a torso’s taken on, one wonders, what songs are sung? Fifteen years. Seven years. I write them out carelessly, then reconsider: how beauty’s expected, but arrives without warning. I made a point of speaking up, raised by presence as spring rouses bees. Each offspring’s ornament passed along. She has her bearing. Her mind’s hand writes, addresses envelopes. Words too are desired.

At breakfast, you were, I was. I watched you walking home, your woman’s gait long-legged.

20.

22.

I was 29. She was younger. From Tennessee, country girl, we shared a class. She married an older man, big guy, had kids. A year before, finally talked. I got what he was about, a good man. I have the card from the wake. She’s there in her black dress, that smile of hers, her pearls. I don’t remember that she smoked. Mortality is going somewhere distant, maybe Patagonia (I mention it because my cousin wants to go there. She’s living in a bus in Dogpatch to save up money for the trip.) First Class on Czech Air, perhaps, or Air India’s DDT sprayers and torn seats. Everything comes undone, organs failing, radios silent, sinking, sleeping. On my phone, they suggest I pay upfront for the burial. Forget it. Cardboard boxes are cheap. Find me floating in the bay, aflame, Patagonia written on one foot.

Striations of my parenthetical life unlike an escarpment viewed or a great basin flown over, great swathes of time set out in public, whereas mine are self-contained, to be expressed as gestures, elements.

A child is singing who is not ours. Nothing is ours it’s said. Like cats we pass through, mostly silent, but yowling in heat.

They seem inconsequential now, the songs remembered but unsung. Tracing the ribbon of the scars, the blind may find a kind of sense. Where we were is so much dust behind us now, or lye. Acid in the face, a crevice dried up, these are time’s insults, some of them. Her hair’s a chestnut hue, as Stendhal named it. Bent slow, she regains youth as anecdotes form. That country’s not her native place, but then who claims to know where she belongs? Time has left her hair alone, an exception to its iron rule. If I touch it, perhaps a talisman like a Rhino’s horn, a lock for mortality’s key. A rise.


23. I like the way you pin down identity. Mine is in theory pinned: offspring, etc., but fluid, as I’ve written. Women anchor it. It may be that I’ve spent my life in their company, learning how I’m more like them in some ways, although a man, once a boy, never wanting to be other than this but aware how the borders shade.

It’s my lasting sense that women rouse themselves. Men are just straw dogs, to fuck then toss away if they make the mistake of bedding them, and few will resist. In this respect marriage serves a need: sublimate, as you put it, get on with other things.


24.

27.

Once all those sheaves, waved about, would be like displaying the sheets without the requisite bridal blood. Life compressed them. Thrown here and there, our sweet prose, and later condemned to the fire. Affection is the last to go, detached from hope. I thought I saw you. No. The bench solid but you an illusion. You’re away, leaving traces. “Who are you?” you used to ask. I don’t know. Not the words, or perhaps the words.

Oh, how the words (I think of you running up the hill) miss and hit. Outside, rain. The rug’s Iranian. When she wanted me (I think of crossing the road, an act of will), then it was fine. There’s no weighing to be done, no balance; there’s only (I was like a ghost) pain.

25.

28.

Eons ago, an airbrush age, My father went upriver with his anthropological lens. In my mind’s eye, a woman looks back at him, her daughter unclothed, staring, the ferry like a train passing through, only slow as a man’s gaze.

Time noticeably slows down. Conversation opens out like a film. An afternoon could pass. It takes that long.

26. Walking across the city in the afternoon, there’s no distance suddenly and then there is, time a concertina too when we grab it at both ends.

“Children are the end result,” I heard the therapist point out. In films, there’s denouement of some sort. We come back to it. “I didn’t catch that part.” “Nowhere to go,” the therapist said. It had no meaning, yet it did. She said it was the thing she liked.


Along with weaving, I sometimes make digital photo-collages. These are from 2014.


COMMON PLACE (complace.j2parman.com), Berkeley, California | ©2018 John J. Parman



Number 12 includes a set of prose pieces, Walking Cure, and recent poems that were written in parallel.


WALKING CURE & SOME RECENT POEMS COMMON PLACE NO. 12 | SPRING 2019


“Walking Cure” was originally entitled, “A Walk in the Woods,” but I realized that the flânerie it reflects on is both an urban phenomenon and a kind of walking meditation. Instead of woods, there’s the everyday with its oxymoronic demands, to gloss the Zen idea of a koan. At my age, I find myself with days of leisure and “time left” of uncertain duration—an old dilemma now hidden much less effectively. I’ve also included poems.


WALKING CURE My life has been a mix of work—my unlikely career—and various relationships and friendships, and considerable travel. I’m now at an age, the I Ching reminds me, when one puts one’s career aside and gets on with the work that leisure makes possible. It was said of Alexander Herzen that all his writing was autobiographical. Mine is self-reflective. This isn’t simply solipsistic: one task of memoir is to situate oneself.

To look ahead is to imagine it in a concrete sense. This may be the central issue or the main predicament of this juncture. I have a distorted view, perhaps, as what might pass for a routine has to compete with remembered decades of “career.” While they varied, they had a gyroscopic quality, observable again when I went several times to the office a few weeks ago to encounter again that specific atmosphere wherein one accounts for time but never questions how it’s spent because, in effect, others are paying for it.


When I had a job, I pursued my own work in a more compressed way, fitting it in amid the rest. Weaving, which I took up and mastered, was the closest I came to leisure pursued as a practice. I don’t think of my own writing as a practice. The poetry editor with whom I consult sets to work early, but I write when I have something to say. There’s a remark in the Tao Te Ching that I’ve taken to heart: “He treats his body as separate and thus it’s preserved.” It seems paradoxical that Master Lao wrote this, despite his reservations about carving things up, yet I’m sure it’s true: on every level, one is one’s own project. In my career, I was often the means for others to further theirs. Now I need to leave that situation and take up this other. This means to do it. Lethargy often hides out as good intentions or wishful thinking. It means preparation, some of it open-ended and intuitive to spark ideas that may grow into something. Correspondence with the anthropologist Vasilina Orlova, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas, Austin, writing from the village in Siberia that’s the site of her extensive fieldwork, brings into focus my reading this summer of an introduction to and an intellectual biography of Walter Benjamin. Talking with my daughter, I tried to summarize our recent exchange and elaborate on it. Benjamin coined the term now-time, insisting that the past is always actually in the present, but fragmentary— fragments as pregnant with meaning as metaphors, and like them accessed through resonance rather than through explanation. Past, present, and future in this conception are exempt from mechanical time. Now-time forms a territory that is within and outside of us, personal and impersonal, but impossible to transmit or share except in fragments. For Benjamin, the more fragments, the better in order to up the odds of putting something across. In her introduction to Illuminations, a collection of Benjamin’s writings, Hannah Arendt calls his approach poetic. In writing about my own past, poetry is the easiest way to access it as experience and avoid the need to explain that prose requires. Reading the opening of Umberto Eco’s version of Instructions to the Cook led me to look through papers I made in graduate school for a funded research project that, in an ideal world, would have led to my doctoral dissertation. While I assembled preliminary and final reports on this work, and an article good enough to be excerpted later in a reader, I failed to finish. Later, however, I taught a course, “How to Write a Thesis,” as part of a graduate architecture studio. I clarified the assignment by showing half a dozen different examples of theses that were acceptable to the faculty—a range sufficient to cover most possibilities. Mainly, though, I read what the students wrote. I’d proposed the course because the studio masters only did so late in the semester. To develop their ideas, the students needed criticism and support in equal measure. When I was a graduate student, I once published more articles in one academic year than any of the faculty. They were on point, too, but instead of rolling up conveniently into a dissertation, they extinguished any interest I had in the topic. I recently went this material again, marveling at the industrious person who wrote it. Having read enough of Eco to know that even turning it into a thesis, let alone a dissertation, would require considerable additional work, I’m wondering how best to write it up, as the content is valuable. (As Eco writes emphatically, “Do what you can do!”)


The writer and scholar Eva Hagberg once shared her list of 40 things that her students must scrupulously avoid. Like Eco’s book, it was written from kindness and generosity. I was quick to note how many of these things I did, sometimes simply because language has changed—modern no longer also means contemporary, for example. I used to read with a dictionary next to me; now I keep my iPhone handy. When I don’t understand a term, I look it up. My neighbor asked a visitor to explain “critical theory,” receiving an explanation that was cogent and memorable. I try to ask such questions without embarrassment—to acknowledge that I don’t know, if it seems valuable to know. There are words I’ve looked up many times, but their infrequency means that I only remember that I looked them up before. I’m unlikely to use these words, but academic writers do so because they have precise meanings.

My books elude me, even within the confines of my house and study. For two days, I’ve searched for Kafka’s diary. While looking, I found others by Adorno and Judd for which I’d searched even longer. The Adorno book was in a different lower shelf, a hardback not a paperback, while the Judd book was thicker and a different color than I remembered. Kafka’s diary in my imagination may also be at odds with the book itself.


Before we remodeled our kitchen, we had a cabinet in the dining room that I told the family was clearly the portal to the fourth dimension. Cameras stored in it would disappear for years at a stretch, then reappear unexpectedly exactly as they’d been. By removing it, we may have condemned certain objects to their fate, but I doubt ours is the only fourth-dimensional portal in the universe, so they’ll turn up somewhere. A lifetime spent acquiring books leaves me with too many. Should I should cull or reorganize them. Cull and reorganize, maybe, or the reverse. (I just read Eric Griffiths’s lecture on timing, so perhaps cull while reorganizing.) The books flow into hallways and bedrooms, doubled up on shelves in a way that reflects their purchase, privileging new over old and expediency over importance. My guess is that whatever process I adopt, if that ever happens, would need to be place-specific, ideally with some annotation. One quality of a library is to reflect the evolution of one’s interests, especially the paths anticipated, like journeys you plan and then postpone. Unlike these possible destinations, a book stays as it was (subject to external depredations). There are also a few books that I’ve reread episodically for pleasure, advice, or to lift a mood. William Morris’s News from Nowhere is the only book that will revive me when I’ve lost all interest in everything else. (As my friend Ray Lifchez said, it’s the only good utopia.) An old friend visits and I recall moments of discomfort he used to cause me by asking about my 10-year plan. Nearly 80, he’s turned his attention to life’s endgame. It’s clear that he’s making the most of it, involving himself in a variety of activities. He swims and bikes, he spends planned time with his grandchildren, he writes and publishes on organizational topics, and he’s involved in a primary school in his neighborhood. All this is worthy and leads me to wonder about my own largely unplanned, wandering life. It’s not that I don’t plan in a larger sense. For me, this consists of moving toward while moving away, and the latter is much clearer to me at the outset than the former. I tend to “move toward” in steps, letting the situation unfold, whereas the impulse to move away arises from specific causes and is weighed against inertia and sunk costs. I should interject that planning in the sense of “living in the future” is said by Claudio Naranjo to be one of the bad habits of Enneagram Sevens, of which I am one (based on his Enneagram Structures, a useful book on this system.) Citing Oscar Ichazo, Naranjo says that Sevens seek refuge in the future to ward off pain. But I also have elements of Enneagram Five, a detached and observant diagnostician. Paired together, they enable me to provide a pithy summary of what’s happening and then use my synthetic and narrative abilities to extract foresight from these insights. Robert Grudin’s Time & The Art of Living makes the crucial point that our lives can have shape in time if we pay attention to it, but we’re shockingly blind to this possibility. Byung-Chul Han’s The Scent of Time argues for lingering rather than rushing through our everyday, in particular dodging the force-feed of the Web, which has replaced TV and other time sinks. (I’m not immune to this at all, I acknowledge.) Yet there’s the counter-example of Walter Benjamin, ever open to experiences in all media, ever willing to push his synthesis engine further, yet orbiting always around the lodestar of his being.


Buddhism’s oxymoronic willingness to accept life’s bargain at face value is its main attraction to me. Being is transient and having is an illusion, but life is rooted in both. In practice, then, living obliges us to live well regardless, detached from the outcome but mindful of our actions, the need to live as the situation warrants.

Something here too of human limits, time as necessarily finite in regard to our capacities even as we test it. Most of our mistakes are bound up in the attempt. This is the “ground” in which we plan, which is why I tend to approach it intuitively—that is, as intimations from an unfolding present. We can learn from Benjamin not to abandon any ambition entirely. His death in Port Bou did not negate the reception he foresaw for his work, like Stendhal before him. Moreover, any great work is also a departure point.


I wrote a “personal synopsis” that, when I reread it, felt remarkably thin. Is this it, I wondered? My daughter meanwhile pointed to the English diarist James Lees-Milne. Having recently splurged on Anthony Powell’s three volumes of diaries, I bought an abridged compilation of Lees-Milne’s. In his introduction, the editor describes him as a slow starter—a failure in his own view who nonetheless continued to write. Powell, a far better known and regarded writer when alive, resented being considered less of one than his friend and contemporary Evelyn Waugh. Powell’s great novel series sits near my collection of Walter Benjamin’s works on a top shelf in the barn. Since I had doubted that I’d ever get to his Selected Works, Powell’s lengthy series may yet get read. Diaries and letters still occasion most of my writing, and much else I write lifts off from them. Even my poems are reflections by other means on the raw material life hands me. My photo-collages are a version of this strategy. Behind these activities is a sense of an immediate audience and another that is speculative. When I left the film Obit, screened at the University Art Museum, I noted some grim faces among the men older than me. We lesser mortals should know our places, but of course we don’t. Obituaries compress time, even as they try to register the ups and downs of life as lived. Those who take the most care to enforce their reputations when alive indulge in a form of hubris that invites reprisal. It’s better simply to acknowledge that we do what we love, as Swedenborg wrote. This at least is my own experience. Swedenborg wrote that it could land us in Heaven or Hell. But wherever, it’s our own doing, our desire. One point that the I Ching makes is the “law of least resistance,” which I take to mean, “Work on whatever come easiest and make it your own.” I don’t see this as a constraint, but as a reliable starting point. Virginia Woolf was a constant diarist and correspondent. Those diaries and letters live on as a window into her life and mind, a metanarrative or leitmotif to her novels, essays, reviews, and radio talks. It’s not a coincidence that Woolf’s formative education came from the library of her father, editor of the National Biography. Leslie Stephen wasn’t quite the eminent Victorian skewered by Lytton Strachey. Like an obituary writer, he assessed reputations. To be noticed at all was an honor, of course. The paid death announcements in the New York Times attest to the human impulse to redress: tributes from institutions, companies, and friends; and obituary-like synopses of the dead. Berkeleyside, a local online daily, now runs article-like obituaries of our dead. It’s an improvement on the display ad format. Freed from the clichés of funeral home writing, they’re often quite interesting because the writer knew the person and liked her or him. This resembles the memorable parts of funerals and memorials—moments where we laugh knowingly about the foibles of the deceased, and are moved by things we forgot or never knew, by the human fact of resonance expressed as grief, admiration, and love. Seventeen days of family visits ended at midday with the departure of my second son and his family. The older of his partner’s two sons will stay on with us for the academic year. I wrote in my diary just now that lethargy is my main problem, but then added that in light of these 17 days, this conclusion may be premature.


I don’t yet take advantage of my momentary abundance of time. I think this points to a lack of a working theory about leisure. It can be approached like work, but it has other aspects that, once under way, are evidently also worth doing. Like school before it, work is structured to spark action by scheduling it, demanding progress toward goals, and setting limits on “extra” time for leisure. That limited time is a microcosm of what happens as structured work falls away. Looking back, I see much squandering or, more accurately, much wringing of hands when the productive leisure I anticipated over a long weekend went unmet. Retirement puts this ordeal on repeat. If I were to write my own prescription, it might be to establish a weekly routine expansive enough to accommodate, concertina-like, productive leisure as well as life’s impingements. The corollary of lethargy is resentment. Reestablishing a modus vivendi that suits self and chosen others is the necessity of this moment. When the Buddhists say that death is the great question, I think they really mean that transience is a reality we should accept as our human condition. Just as we’re whirling along in space, we’re moving inexorably and unpredictably in time. Nothing we do can alter this, despite our nostalgia for the potent immortality we imagined for ourselves as children. I followed an online persona created, I eventually established, by an English poet. Although he stated clearly that Charlotte “is not a real person,” I began to see her as one. Hints around the edges suggest her creator’s affinity with Fernando Pessoa, who seems to have inhabited the different personae in whose voices he wrote. But Charlotte was never completely inhabited, I felt. That she came intermittently came into focus was part of my interest in following her.


I think sometimes about my own theater of gender and how I’ve navigated outer life in light of my oxymoronic nature. Gender is a placeholder for many different things that we bring along with us and loosely chalk up to our nature. Reading Stephen Batchelor’s account of Nagarjuna, I was impressed by his contention that life is entirely contingent. Gender’s fluidity reflects the influence of others as we fall in or out of love with them. I collected poems under the title, “The Middle Country,” that express how the years of desire and turmoil were territories I crossed, even sought out, only to wonder later how and why. Who is the self that did this? And who is the self that now considers the question? I have regrets galore about the mess love causes, but love has the purity of any calamity. Would it be simpler or truer to think of it as something that befalls us? This is some distance from gender. That seems right. Gender is the wrong place to start. Where are we carried when we’re carried away? And to what do we return? A friend recounted over coffee how another left her and then promptly poured salt into her wounds. I remembered how I became marooned in time or, more accurately, fixed on the status quo ante and mired in its contrast to current discontents. My friend used the word grief. When I searched for a cure, I read that what had me in its grip was narcissistic grief. Yet grief is grief, no less terrible when it arises from events that tore your ego off layer by layer. It’s said that part of the process of confronting death is a stage of bargaining with it. We look for a version of reality that can encompass the ways that we’re diverging from it—a more capacious reality that will somehow solve our problem, ignoring the fact that reality inevitably excludes parts of what we’re trying to maintain. It is the essence of being human that, falling or failing, we wonder how it could have happened. But I want to interrupt these thoughts and return to gender. In my own case, the only case I know intimately, the fluidity of gender has to do with: my body, which has varied; my internal sexuality; and my erstwhile lovers. “My mind is like the dressing room at the Kabuki Theater,” I wrote in a poem. As this suggests, gender is improvised but also ritualized, and a quality rather than a given. When we finally return to our dressing room, we find again that mirrored self who puts these props aside and finally just is—the same self who lives constantly in death’s shadow, I believe. I’m reading Eric Karpeles’s biography of the Polish artist and writer Józef Czapski. Last night, I read an account of Poland’s defeat by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union—treachery all around, despite the real resistance the Poles put up. Had its allies, Britain and France, intervened, it’s likely the Poland would have held out, although the Soviet Union still might have come in. I can’t bring myself to start the next chapter, which is on the terrible aftermath of Poland’s defeat for its officer class. Czapski survived, almost inexplicably, but thousands of his compatriots were murdered on Stalin’s orders. It was in this period, in 1940, that Czapski gave talks on Proust to his fellow prisoners that two of them transcribed. Karpeles made a translation that I also read. I haven’t read Proust. I’ve seen two films based on his work, and also read Alain de Botton’s book on him. Czapski gives an account of Proust that’s like a bildungsroman, explaining how Proust clarified for himself why he had to write what he wrote: to bring back to life


The entirety of what he’d seen. Before reading Crapski’s talks, I found in Galen Strawson’s Things That Bother Me the assertion that Proust was writing from fragments of memory rather than from a seamless narrative. Perhaps what Strawson says is that Proust wasn’t living his life as if it was a narrative, but instead recovered his past piecemeal in the fragments of it that surfaced. This is like Benjamin’s idea that fragments arise in the context of the remembering one’s unfolding now. Why do I write and what’s my aim in doing so? I write to explain myself to myself, I think, and describe the territories I’ve passed through on different planes.

At a certain point in a marriage, intimacy attaches to the household and extended family, recreating our past in an altered form. Adolescence rebels against the familial, a rebellion that sets the stage for later conflict by casting the desire for intimacy as a transgression of agreed-on boundaries rather than as a natural, even a necessary act. A woman begged Czapski to marry her, but he felt it would be untrue to his true desire for men, a desire he recognized but distrusted. Yet he loved her and they managed to become friends. This was difficult to live through for both of them, and rare to achieve. No longer acting on desire led me to a friendship in which it surfaces only in poems. It has to surface somewhere, I imagine. Poems are not to be taken literally, although the poet may mean every word. I can write, “her woman’s gait” and recall everything I read into it at the time. To act on desire is to want to know, down to the bone, what’s there. Friendship leaves this knowing to others. You could say this decision was forced on me by age, but it’s really experience that led to it—a sense that consummated desire, like thwarted desire, is an obstacle to friendship. But it’s a dilemma.


It’s a dilemma because lovemaking includes conversations of a kind that are unusual between friends—the transparency that loosened boundaries makes possible, one of the most remarkable, ephemeral things we experience as human beings. Quantum theory captures the way something so tangible can be so fleeting. We want gravity to turn off and yet we want solidity, ground beneath our feet. The teleology of desire in traditional terms is family and perpetuation. Everything else strikes us as improvised and unsatisfactory. Where are we when we’re carried away? Still looking for a mooring. I read Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematograph in two days, thinking the whole time how applicable it was to writing in general and to poetry in specific. I’m unsure about his approach to film, although I found Lancelot du Lac, the only film of his I’ve seen, memorable in its oddity. Bresson’s thesis, as I understand it, is that by having his non-actors repeat their lines without understanding their context, their own natures are revealed. And this, for Bresson, is the uniquely revelatory power of film. He is at pains to say that he respects actors but sees their realm as the theater. To him, film isn’t theater, and it goes wrong when it tries to be. I once saw the film version of The English Patient, which had one scene in which a woman gets out of bed in a way that seemed real—that is, unconsciously performed not acted. Is this naturalness what Bresson had in mind? My intermittent efforts to transcend the limits of time and space, to lead parallel lives to what now seems like the main one, have a mock-epic quality. We follow our hearts sometimes in life, driven not just by desire but also by hope and imagination. In a lecture by Peter Pragnell I heard once at Berkeley, he showed Corbusier’s sketch of a worker reading his newspaper on a balcony or perhaps a kitchen table in the Radiant City. “He saw us as gods,” he said, and I think this is perfectly accurate: we are as gods. Love carries us to their world, with its moments of eternity—slices of it, in reality, each lived as a slow-moving eddy within life’s normal rush. Briefly, we have all the time in the world, but we’re like two musicians—composers, players, and instruments all at once—caught up in the sheer pleasure of improvising. Caught up and caught out, when gravity reasserts itself, yet our human métier, perhaps, and another reason for being. If love and death are famously paired, it’s because the one shades into the other, that both exemplify passion and its extinguishment. In his gloss on Dōgen’s Instructions to the Cook, Socho Uchimaya’s How to Cook Your Life, he explains that mind in a Buddhist sense means the totality of our life as lived—the raw material that we try to express with all the means at our disposal, knowing it will come out as fragments. Poetry is my favored medium because poems are fragmentary in the same way that Heraclitus is the best kind of notes in a bottle. Floating imperviously across time, they are constantly rediscovered, inviting each reader to make them hers. When I consider the totality of what I personally lived through, there are things that are worth setting out. Some of it has to be transmuted, and there are aspects of life that elude all direct attempts to capture them meaningfully. Painting and poetry come closest—related arts, in my view, although I’m thinking of particular forms of them.



SOME RECENT POEMS Life-of-Jesus poems: Like a breeze? Or nothing, air still, his finger raised, I thought? Silent despite rippled silk, its color hard to place, eyes averted in the moment. After, I was ravenous, and later swollen and sick. He has these dreams, he tells me. In one, travelers gather around us, their words portents; another, a calming hand extends, points west, insistent. He stores things. We leave at night. A moon. The baby’s quiet. She seemed not to notice. Or if noticing, not caring. Enters rustling, glides over tile or dirt, never speaks. Thoughts take root anyway. We must flee, I tell her. He won’t also must be said. Poems after nature: Write about nature: many here before me. Anything to add? On the bridge, grey hues. We drove angularly west. Sun broke through amid redwoods. An incline needing first gear. A view, narrow Tomales. A left turn, barely a road I parked alongside. We walked. Humans now, talking paving, fire, taxes, volunteers, then eating. We left early. As we climbed, a bird spoke up. It smells like Norway, I said.

Close observation stirs up resonance, they say. A bird hunts for food across a deck. Myriad droplets of rain cover west-facing windows. Walking yesterday, the ferns drew her notice. Woods cut back bring them forward, she told me. The hills from here were outlines, dark against a lighter gray. Two corners away, more rain, though it had stopped when I left. With sport coat, no umbrella, a man crossed my path ahead as I neared the left turn home. Poems from life: And she married her old man, her intended, I call him. At the concert, came to mind, sun lighting a house, steep hill rising behind it, birds sang as he played Liszt, his left hand crossing the right one, upper notes plinking, the Yamaha unresonant, yet a prompt for accompaniment, birds and a bobbing dowager falling in, the sun lower, slicing the audience, I put on my dark glasses. I never remarried, the sin Paris fell into, choosing. License, I said, thinking how Heian aristocrats loved according to their tastes, not locked in pairs. We sat angled, sometimes eye to eye, that close to her, in mind writing this— our heads turned, voice quiet


but the consonants set off, an accent she remarked on. I wrote when she was away. She brought back calligraphy, a poem I propped up, seen every morning from my bed. The last character is mine, the mountain they climbed to view. Laughing on the street, passersby amused too by it, how she waves a bit, among men, the dance work lunch imposes if not alone with her thoughts, eyes fixed inwardly, reptile of a machine for sidewalk striding—they fall back, daren’t catch her gaze, its rays. But now it’s turned off, with the boys, out. ‘I am the King of Bread,’ said while waving a baguette, draws an appreciative chortle from young Simone, forgetting how her brother thumped her, cries rising from the next room, not one to suffer in silence, Simone. I predict great things. Poems mostly about women: Panoply of forms—she shifts, another writes in Polish. Shifts, is thin and thick, a race, a truce with love, a truce with them, student days coming to an end. Hope seeps into texts. Desire mixes with contempt. Men. What Polish words describe how women are in bed? Who is this, before a wall, floor held despite their gaze?

One wafts, I think; this other’s gravity turns off and on. My hand, each finger blurs, balled up and taken in, metronome, a coming tune: too much, too much. Form foregone, only rode it out. Horses roll, the Polish rider unruffled sits, some distance from authority, wanting (well, not him). Saddle sore come Monday, one confides. Heft rolled her close to death. The Polish rider looks away. Whose gravity, then? We must rewrite things to account, theorize when there’s no proof, touch the root, the spot, roof or seat, fount, spout. These are not Romantic words. Form follows function as night betrays the day. In red, I think of her, red or some other solid hue. She glances from man to man in search of bona fides. Who will bring her a future to justify the effort? Red like a flag, a banner, a parade of one, waiting for a car, a text, a sign. In my heart little has changed. How much else, marks apparent, slippage, a journey scattered seaward, foam below where two friends make their homage, another hand held, yet gone as going goes, circling back— trembling like a cello, that lives. How far away it must seem now. Folly all of it, that distance says, yet to my senses proximate.


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COMMON PLACE (complace.j2parman.com), Berkeley, California | ©2019 John J. Parman


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