Common Place Vol. 6

COMMON PLACE NUMBERS 16, 17 & 18 | 2020

Volume 6 opens with a special, expanded issue, then segues to prose and poetry followed by a novella fragment.

Number 16 includes the writer’s own choices among poems and prose appearing in the previous five volumes.

Poems & Prose over Time

Common Place No. 16 | A Special Issue | Winter 2020

Poems & Prose over Time The Writer’s own Choices

Š 2020 by John J. Parman |compiled and edited in Berkeley, California |complace.j2parman.com

Some prose to lead this off.

We’d like to be cured of death—isn’t this really what we want? We’d like to be the gods that we resemble, in our own minds, but are not. Instead, we’ve done a reasonable job of extending life, eliminating the short order deaths like heart attacks and strokes, so that now we can survive to succumb to the slower ones, with their greater agony and expense. It’s enough to make you start smoking cigars and buttering your steaks with lard.

Citizens of the Cosmos At a conference on future metropolitan regions at Berkeley in 2005, the landscape architect Randy Hester said that “government should limit itself to regions and neighborhoods—focus on them, and everything else will take care of itself.” This may be utopian, but I think it’s true. We define regions by their ecosystems and neighborhoods by clusters of people who know each other. A city is more arbitrarily defined and its interests are often at odds with its region and with its neighborhoods. Cities will deliberately harm the ecosystem to achieve short-term interests.

Regions, especially if environmental stewardship is among their main responsibilities, have a harder time doing so.

Like families, neighborhoods are conservative when it comes to their traditional rights and prerogatives. And yet, like families, they can be remarkably enlightened about change when they see an evolutionary reason to do so.

In a marriage that transgresses racial or cultural taboos, the appearance of grandchildren often mends the generational rift. Similarly, regionally-beneficent changes to a neighborhood’s fabric that neighbors themselves see as a favorable evolution at their level will do much more to transform a city in the long run than any intervention that bypasses the steps that make this evolution possible. Such changes attract favor, not so much by fitting in, although that’s part of it, but by opening a door to a future that invites people in. Much that cities present to them as the putative future has an “eat your spinach” quality. Cities nag and scold. They also lie and their hypocrisies and self-dealing are often too much in evidence for them to command much moral authority.

In April 2008, I visited my daughter in the Alpujarra region of Andalusia, Spain. Despite its primitive character, the Alpujarra is a product of successive generations of people terracing the land and then building and rebuilding an elaborate system of channels to bring fresh water to every valley from the melting snowpack of the Sierra Nevada Mountains behind Granada. Civilizations come and go, but what is valued regionally is preserved, maintained, and extended locally. Cities once had the knack. The church near where we stayed in Granada, a former mosque adapted to the new order, is an example.

When my daughter visited us, we talked about how the relative simplicity of our life in Berkeley reflects how the urban affluent organize their days. In her valley, a great deal of time is spent simply subsisting, but it’s still possible for a naturalist like Julio Donat to pursue the kind of program of local knowledge there that Thoreau pursued in Concord, cataloguing what’s in front of him and understanding and documenting its value. Both found a world in these places that was alive to the world. There was and is nothing provincial about it.

Richard Olney, a well=known chef and writer on food and wine, ended up living and dying on a hillside in the French countryside. Planted there, he remained cosmopolitan. This is also true of my daughter’s friend Donat.

Born and educated in Madrid, he moves between the valley and the metropolis easily, although he chooses to live and work in the former, not the latter. Being a citizen of the cosmos permits this.

For my mother, being modern meant embracing modern conveniences, like instant foods. In the tropics, canned or frozen foods were a necessity to eat a Western diet, but my mother saw them as a time saver. I don’t begrudge her this, although over time her penchant for prefabricated foods fell out of favor. Pop artists made hay with this aspect of 1950s American modernism. As captured by the deadpan Andy Warhol, it was pretty funny. My mother was modern to the end. I never asked her about Pop Art, but I imagine she thought it was modern, too.

In Hell Work is tantalizingly close to done.

You eat your sandwich at your desk, munching.

Evenings and weekends always promise fun and your book suggests some weekday lunching, but then those plans fall through. It starts to rain.

On the train, one woman bores another.

“You’re not looking at me,” she says, her pain unleashed, but then she hurries to smother any trace of it, plugs noise in her ears and stares into the middle distance, dead to the other, like one who disappears.

(A still-permitted death let it be said.)

Life has an eternity left to run.

It’s raining out, but they predicted sun.

Prokofiev Prokofiev wasn’t so very nice. (“Like you,” you might have said, eyes turned away.)

His wife, devoted, kept the flame. “The spice of cruelty stays with you,” I heard her say, remembering his self-centeredness. “Tough luck if he was cruel; the spice of it rubbed raw the mind that animates the parts that fuck, and of course he was brilliant, as you saw.”

(Your eyes turn back, then look away again— at least they do so in my thoughts. Days pass between us, even weeks. Like a surgeon, time cuts things up: big, silent gaps, alas.)

“I light a cigarette,” she said, “and touch the parts that ache, though by now not as much.”

Over lunch, a friend told me that, despite years of separation and a current relationship of long standing, he and his wife are still married. Formally, there’s marriage and there’s divorce. There are also domestic partnerships, a halfway house toward marriage. Meant to extend some of marriage’s rights to those excluded from it, the category may disappear as marriage grows more inclusive. But it’s possible that a married person, living separately with a different partner, might embrace it in order to afford that second relationship more rights and standing.

I mention this because marriage and divorce are usually seen as a binary pairing, a black-and-white rendition of a landscape that we know full well is resplendently colorful, textured, messy, and in flux. When you look back in history, especially across cultures, you see a lot of variation. Looking across a table sometimes, you see former partners breaking bread. Time is a factor here, but when you consider both the tumult and the reconciliation, life can prove bigger than these partners imagined. Certain ties still bind them. Often there is good will toward each other, even if the situation once seemed impossible. This is not an argument for any particular outcome, but for modus vivendi—the ability to take a larger view of things and use one's imagination.

Empathy, if one has it, makes a mockery of any insistence that there's only one course to follow. This is the basic fallacy of a black-and-white view of life. Most of us are boiling pots of desires, fears, limitations, and smarts.

We slowly acquire wisdom, but slowly is the operative word and though hard-won, it can be gone in a flash. Subject to our volatile natures, we make our way, and marriage and friendship alike have to deal with the carnage. There are times when we’ve had enough, but then we remember that we can be just as impossible ourselves.

Oceania Memory, the title read. Noticed a cleft almost hidden amid the tropical points of reference. Nominally he was in his dotage, yet the flame still lingered: the oceanic concubine fingered in moonlight, her moaning against the buzz of whatever the lizards failed to cull.

Wet the way women get, his fingers deft with practice, the one means he still had left.

Thinking back, it seemed almost comical to be reduced to this trick, how it was in youth when some pliant schoolgirl lingered long enough to be felt up, her head cocked, feet apart—no lizards, but the memory.

Neck Long legged with dark slippers, tatami cushioning the blow, hair clipped, wedding ring a bronze band, and a boy's face. Can’t you see?

Her neck is how her lovers view it. Sing, oh muse, of how her back would arch, taken dog-wise, wet from earlobes caressed, parting lips somewhere along the way. Mistaken as we sometimes are, drifting, departing all too soon, those cries still echoing, walls marked, sheets torn by hands grasping. Holding still until taken, taken until spent, balls aching as they sometimes do, no ill will, mistaken as we sometimes are, depart too soon, drifting, humming, playing one's part.

Poppies The paper flowers, the father, granddad, the graves like Chinese cities, all the dead arrayed. What a war they had! Not so bad until it plowed them under. What was said went mostly unspoken. Silence, a sound often written, slices through time and space.

The dead either hear us or not. Goes around, the silence between us; face to face it would be different or else diffident, depending on your mood. How are you, then?

I ask each time, less and less confident I know how you are really. Well, amen.

Mass is over and we’re both still alive.

We could talk. I could see you, raise you five.

Here In one sense, visceral, then burned, scattered; in another, each and every, imbued— how quickly memory attaches, grips one's sideways glance of things, raises places from their background status. One picks them up; one picks up on them. Present here, one says, telling a story that overlays death with what lives on. I used to picture it slipping between time's folds, a shimmering into and out of material life.

It’s not quite the Noh play I imagined.

Despite the flames and ashes, so much persists: not just what we trash or give away, nor what we think we see. Being here, he, too.

Hints Signs abound. We wonder which pertain to us.

We know the telltale ones our bodies make, stigmata of desire, clear or hidden.

The god Eros is indiscriminate and we have only hints of what we seek.

Mars too may be like this, strewing the beach with false hopes, each abandoned with a cry amid rattling of guns, cannon fire.

Alone within the crowd, they beg the god to spare them. Thus, the usual process is narrowed to the depth of a beachhead, and when it’s attained, there’s no turning back— those who live press on. Above the beach the luckless dead lie buried in long rows.

Curlews Once Karen said, “What the gods give us cannot be rejected, being their gifts.”

I believe we have some hand in our fate, choosing its broad outlines. Perhaps karma does this for us, so eventually we are content to be, accepting as given life’s real nature and our place within it.

Moving in and out with the tide, curlews haunt the beach, not questioning its bounty.

They find sustenance with alacrity and did so even then, despite the dead— the last living things glanced by some of them.

We often affirm how lucky we are.

That luck begins with being here at all.

Three diary entries from the mid-1990s.

In a conversation over coffee, I was told that I was selfish and that my diary was replete with references to money— evidently my central preoccupation. She asked repeatedly if I was offended by these criticisms, and interjected that I was also generous, but that what wrecked things was the need to schedule every encounter. “I could never just see you!” Of course, I could only agree with this. Then I mentioned the text of a postcard I sent her while she was away, in care of her old aunt: “Maybe we would have gotten along better if I’d been a woman.” She half-screamed and said, “You wrote that? I hope no one can read your writing!”

I thought last night of a novel, set Woolf style in a single day, called “The Marriage.” It follows the protagonist through his day as lived and through a series of flashbacks that illuminate his current situation and his own part in it—a satirical novel in which I’m the object of satire, in fact. The novel would chronicle my many contributions to my current semi-unhappy state of ambivalence and to some extent of sorrow.

Two paintings in Venice: (1) The woman stares at the viewer. She holds her baby to her breast. A piece of cloth lends modesty to her upper torso, but her exposed belly suggests a recent birth. (2) The Virgin sits at her desk and reads. The angel’s red sandals are wrapped around his feet, his robe elaborately folded, almost defying gravity.

Gifts are their own category I caught a glimpse of him in his workman’s apron, the hallway filled with boxes.

She’d come back with her children.

“Couldn’t you be happier to see me?”

—a question I used to ask her, with no answers.

The last time he wore it, you handed me Montaigne.

I may have said I wanted to be loved.

When I heard the word, I wondered.

Not so much insular as unhindered, possessing as momentary, a gift, but gifts are their own category, to which I’m partly blind.

Each has its correspondence, like the rug brought back from Greece or the mountain poem, written out, descriptive of the room itself, solid and precarious, with its view, the bed where we lay once in plain hearing.

Leave taking Never was the word you used, that chasm drawn with chalk.

Small birds sang along the walk, their haven green and dense.

Not far away, you struck something like a longer chord, not purely sound. The women two doors down kept talking.

Not far away as I measure time, and never, she said that, too.

Dharma is like headlights as the cars turn, the chalk faint on the walk, the trees green and kempt, barely shelter. Not far away.

Leave taking, melancholia: death alone registers at odd moments.

In some seasons I can’t go in.

Will death establish that I’m really gone?

Chalk X below my skull, Y for where desire lived, circle for my empty head.

Not far away as I measure lives.

At MoVida’s bar Women touch their hair as they get ready to be loved.

They laugh as the men excite them with their muscular arms. Their mouths open and their eyes widen.

Later they will narrow.

Here at MoVida’s bar she rehearses love’s sixteen steps, starting with her hair, her hands, mouth open, eyes widened, closer, closer, leaning over, hand in her hair.

My version The deep throb of ships, cats asleep, the easel standing, how I slipped in and out, how it disappeared, how it’s folded now into memory.

Descartes was mentioned, the split: I or he, you or she, the ships in their channel, the line we made together visible, arguably a stain, then crossing yet again that momentary bridge.

This is my version.

The curtains billowed when the wind came up.

I’m fairly sure that happened.

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.

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.

This 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.

Most of us are proletarians of a sort, alienated in the working world from our birthright as the creators of our own lives. To resist this takes courage, frugality, persistence, and imagination. It benefits from the insight that the working 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’re all human, but 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 to do so—to buckle under—is spiritually toxic.

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.

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 often is in dreams, the lives and worlds they inhabit are raw material for their work: its medium and audience. They have life, to use Christopher Alexander’s phrase.

Domesticity 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?

Recounting (1) Had she been, then nine, sixteen, nineteen, twenty-one, the mother dead.

Recounting (2) 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).

Two poems derived the Gospels and another from Milton, vaguely.

Gospel (1) 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.

Gospel (2) Jesus appeared, it’s said, spade in hand, to the questioning Magdalene. “Don’t touch me,” He warned her, being halfway there, fresh from harrowing and still toxic or otherworldly.

“Just a pinch?” she asked. He held out the spade. “In heaven, a bed, a garden, windows, children.”

He looked at her. “A woman will write that man’s desire alone permits his knowing if she knows it to be true.”

When they found her, spade in hand, the grave empty, her account omitted the second part.

So much else left out. To France, some say, with their son; Daughter of the Church, some claim, a spade mistaken for the true cross.

After Milton Minions skating on an icy plane.

So many violations, one more fresh gasp at its rasping sting, this thing he grew, falling. Blood to be licked up once they’ve met their match. Tinder’s real, ain’t it?

But bon mots mean less and less.

I crave the bourgeois life, he thinks: a country house, a wife and kids, a dog perhaps and nothing dead save a grouse in season or a fish.

Walked or tramped Memory is matter and spirit, alive in our heads, Bergson said. Birds mating seasonally, their differences, revived an old narrative: all things unfolding from a source. Finches retold Darwin this story.

Surfacing as sensed, nature seemed to be given them and then unfathomably stretched out.

Minds took it in, hearts quickened, hands set it down reflexively, hoping for enlightenment.

Walked or tramped, then wrote while others sketched or dug to coax it into consciousness.

Ikkyü’s coda We went angularly west. The bridge, grey hues, and later into shade, redwoods briefly alight above us.

Ascended in low gear, Tomales glanced, narrow where it starts.

Descended, more trail than road, found the house, earnest talk: winter’s rain and fall’s smoke, the weight of all that fell on us.

Left early, climbed. A bird spoke up.

“Smells like Norway.” The scent, damp woods close to the sea.

Ikkyü’s coda, another bird.

Ours warbled territorially, not so much woken as aware.

For Rob Gayle, 1952–2017.

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 Henry Urbach, 1963–2019.

Sometimes invited, endings and caught out every time, drawers spilling contents in loose order. A mind gone to its poles, his family wrote, that was gentle, even feckless when I knew it. Talking once in a car, and then his reply crossed my path last night, one poet quoting another.

The sense revolutions make comes at the end, if right.

The tiger’s stripes visible and the leopard’s spots magnificent, and my friend cartwheeling through time, landing at my feet, a cat’s smile, not smug but kind.

The warp 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.

This other thing 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.

The question vexes 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.

Puts it down 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.

Joining in At the concert, came to mind that she married her old man.

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, a Yamaha lacking resonance, a prompt for accompaniment, birds and a bobbing dowager joining in, the sun lower, slicing the audience. I put on my dark glasses. I never remarried, the sin Paris fell into, choosing.

Souvenirs derived Falling in with regret or falling out of love, regretting this.

(Love fares badly under siege.)

Regrets fall silently, reproach for all reproachable things brought from love, carried. Time we swam in once or waded through, soaked in excess then caught out. Regrets aren’t even texts, there being no recipients. Ruled out. Numbers only come to mind, of phone, year of birth, the day, month.

Names drift. Somewhere, pianos are untuned or, tuned, evoke the memory of tuning.

Time (1) 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.

Time (2) Time noticeably slows down.

Conversation opens out like a film.

An afternoon could pass. It takes that long.

“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.

Forms of knowing No longer acting on desire led me to a friendship with a woman in which desire only surfaces 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 it meant 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.

But this is a dilemma since lovemaking leads to conversations with a transparency that its loosened boundaries make possible. Quantum theory speaks to how something so tangible can be so fleeting. We want gravity to turn off, yet we want solidity, ground beneath our feet. The teleology of desire is family and perpetuation. Anything else strikes us as provisional and unsatisfactory. Where are we when we’re carried away? Still looking for a mooring.

When we follow our hearts in life, we’re driven not only by desire but also by hope and imagination. In a lecture I heard, Peter Pragnell showed Le Corbusier’s sketch of a worker reading his newspaper at a kitchen table in the Radiant City. “He saw us as gods,” Pragnell said, and I think that Corb was right: we are as gods. Love carries us to their world, and its moments of eternity—slices of it, in reality, each lived as a slow-moving eddy within life’s normal rush, are what we experience. 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, and yet our human métier, perhaps, and one main reason for being.

Four digressions from De Minimis

Driving east Sometime in March, driving east, we stopped at Little America, four a.m., heard a waitress tell a truck driver she was pregnant with his child.

And later, somewhere in Wyoming, a woman wouldn’t sell me cokes because “Indians in your car.” No, they’re Chinese. “Oh, in that case.”

And before that, in Salt Lake City, the boys pumping gas did their work then, finished, rolled tires at us, godless hippies in their estimation.

Later, we lived off Telegraph, Dwight near the corner store. I dropped acid.

This was summer, nineteen seventy.

Mostly local Coming is their signature In the archive of memory, a gallery’s set aside for it, shelves for motion, drawers for touch, hooks to hang categories of grasps and splays.

Like Thoreau, mostly local, but a room for hotels and streets there to the right, just past those big jars of sheen, salt and sweet.

How the sound of it is like a dog the way it cuts through all else.

Only the sound, not the scent, and how beds are like boats pitching in the waving rooms, each windowsill a jetty’s edge.

Marriage Across a counter, that connection, instances of which run life to life, find their line. How smitten I was, how doubtful such a one could be courted. Yes, her sister said, write.

Offspring were desired, so marriage loomed into view. I wrote the letter, projective prose, one could say. Sent, it garnered no firm commitment, but she returned in May and we married in late August, wanderers in the east.

August found us living on the hillside above the stadium, a brief vestibule to marriage that gave us a first son, wanderer with his parents, imbiber of our wedding day champagne, who made his presence felt on the train near Edmonton. “I’m pregnant,” said with the certainty of an oldest sister.

My whole life Facts open out to poetry, as they will.

Wave and wave and wave and wave: what terrors, then, in the depths?

Feet dangle, a phrase set loose, drifting toward a made-up abyss.

A pen thrown sticks into a wall, nib and all, or penetrates the heart.

Fifteen feet of grey cartilage, teeth visible in shallow water; grown men postpone their exercise. Don’t surf!

(My whole life has been like this.)

For years, I dreamt their dark shapes shot sideways in the rolling surf.

The air is warm, not like here, black forms evident from above.

A borrowed staircase Oh marriage! What’s real and what isn’t? What lies between these poles, honesty and deception? Overrated, the one, and the other’s misconstrued that was mere awkwardness, the way ghosts emerge from walls and the dog though put away lingers, scents, sounds too prevalent to ignore.

A borrowed staircase, anecdotes mingled with my own. How far we went on a fruitless errand, despite ample though belated coverage, a romp, pilfered wine.

I gloss rather than copy prose, these phrases hitched together as a preface. Long runways end in wrecked and burning planes.

A borrowed heaven, afterlives doubtful and we daren’t write.

Names are dropped, fathers scorned. No issue. An ending.

The path seems evident. Trudge another day amid stolid trees, winter coming, alone but for letters, visits, the spells broken then restored, the breaks, chasms, basins, geologic time inserted just because.

Seems evident. Solidity is life despite sleep, sunlight.

Barely a flicker, this thing haunting us then pausing, then manifest, cutting through in its peculiar way and taking over and over.

In Aix Blooms incongruous, thoughts arising the way bliss too appears.

I used to want it, wrote it down among early January’s desires.

In Aix when I felt it everywhere, despite loneliness. Words draw.

It was May, fifteen years, some months away from now. The way bliss too disappears, cold descends in life.

We build our huts. Wrapped in furs like old people, shamans, traders, amber in our pockets, bits of it floating in a kind of glass, once so viscous two fingers slid in, angling.

There we were A yellow sofa surfaced and traffic, especially the buses. Not the ocean of another room. Distance is relative with another body. She liked kings but there we were, there it was.

Under the bathroom light, a hole.

The universe is rent and warped, the odds coming to mind, weighed.

How to square these two things?

Melbourne poem A layer of white, crimson amid galleries your arms make. Eyes curved, gesture for the wings like Kabuki, a lip’s point, provocation.

At the restaurant the maitre d’s tattoos overflowed formality; yours float and drift. A walk loosens the grip of things.

Buildings tell time as we pass.

The new ones will, you’ll find, future provisional, their stories your own, but my small chapter.

Marked on the skin Winter counts, time marked on the skin, in dreams, times awake at four to the strikes a hammer makes, a spring of sorts that sings distantly.

Winter counts, the streaks of chalk white that passion leaves, the human sounds, ends after starts, the beds made and torn, rented to use, one flesh again then separate and gone.

Winter counts, stirring, ordinary time slowing minutely. A beach wet with foam then bleak, littered, windswept.

Winter counts, ripples the day left shadowed.

About Common Place.

I started this personal journal in 2008 to collect things I wrote. Over time, it’s come to focus mainly on poems and sets of short prose pieces. The prose forms enough of a larger whole to be difficult to excerpt, but I’ve included a few examples. Diderot inspired me with his penchant for handing manuscripts around. These are manuscripts.

John J. Parman—pictured on the right in Singapore’s Botanical Garden—spent his childhood on that island. By the age of six, he had circled the globe by ship and train, an experience that made him a citizen of the cosmos, despite putting down roots in Berkeley, California, where he lives and writes. Educated in architecture, history, and city planning, he worked for 40 years as an editor and writer for successively larger design firms. In 1983, he founded an award-winning quarterly, Design Book Review, with his sister-in-law, Laurie Snowden, publishing it until 1999. He and his daughter, Elizabeth Snowden, are partners in Snowden & Parman, an editorial studio. He and U.C. Berkeley Professor Richard Bender have been writing partners more or less continuously since 1972. He is an editorial advisor of ARCADE, the Seattle design quarterly; the AR+D imprint of ORO Editions; Architect’s Newspaper; and Room One Thousand, the annual publication of graduate students at U.C. Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, where he has been a visiting scholar since 2018. (Photo by Emily B. Marthinsen, FAIA.)

The photo-collages and photographs, with one exception, are made or taken by the writer.

Number 17 combines a set of prose pieces with poems salvaged from the distant and near-distant past.

RITES & WRITS + SOME OLDER THINGS COMMON PLACE NO. 17 | WINTER 2020

The only claim of affinity to be made for these short pieces is that they reflect the seasons of their writing—an arc extending from one decade to another. I’ve also included some older work, partly from a manuscript I wrote around the start of the millennium that one of my cousins in Norway recently found in her attic and mailed to me.

RITES & WRITS (PART ONE)

Writs are instruments of authority, I read. Rites, to me, are petitions we make to the gods, acts of propitiation.

So, two aspects of the same impulse. This set of short pieces was originally titled “Rites & Privileges,” but I wasn’t sure about the second word. Writs are a form of privileged speech, proclaimed. The word narrows privilege down, even as it empowers it. In current usage, privileges are an affront, although the word still figures in ad copy for luxuries of different sorts. In the ad copy, you deserved it, whatever it is, but in the wider world, it’s likely you didn’t, nor did your forebears and their forebears.

Rites and writs are paired whenever privileged speech wants the weight of tradition behind it. In China, Chairman Xi has turned to Confucius, like so many before him—poster boy of stasis, even as he proclaims good government. It would do Xi good to study the I Ching, leavened by Taoism as it is. As it stands, his rule is onesided, its writs out of sync with the populace and tone deaf; its rites empty. We have our own version of this, of course, but with the other side more visibly and vocally present. It’s less clear how our rites and writs pair—even the so-called majesty of the law is tarnished now by politics, and patriotism only very rarely feels genuine. Tweets are now among the entrails studied, along with the records of their conversations and exchanges that trail behind the mighty, sometimes to their undoing.

I read Robert Graves’s account of matriarchy. Male authority was delegated, and the usurpers kept the outward signs of the queen’s power, originally lent them. In its early forms, kings were sacrificed to ensure a good harvest.

As I read this, I thought about a story I started, Cosmonaut, that is set in a matriarchy. Matriarchs chose close male relatives, not husbands or lovers, to lead battles, per Graves. They married boys who they promptly divorced, then took lovers, including commoners and foreigners. I set my story in the 2600s, believing that a matriarchy would likely exist by then, probably for some time.

The desire to die at one’s birthday party or while singing in a choir—to be an object, however briefly, of everyone’s attention and comment: this same impulse led me briefly to think of placing an ad in the New York Times obituary section that I’m still alive, because after all death is wasted on the dead.

If people are flamboyantly negligent it’s because it’s hard to take seriously an existence like this. Yet they tend to maintain the standards of their set—habitual, unquestioned behaviors that are overlaid by the variants that were introduced to keep things going. Novelists and filmmakers sum up humanity as a gallery of such tics. Gathered, given bodily form, a voice, and agency, these characters cross apparently normal territory like aliens or monsters.

In a novel, we can inhabit such creatures, whereas in a film (and in life, too) their inner worlds are all inference.

Thus, existence is segregated into two primal forms: inner and outer. Our self-knowledge is inexact, clouded by delusion. Our inference is guesswork; a guess is always for our own sake. We’re never outside ourselves really.

The segregation is nominal, even illusory, but it holds. At night, we lock the doors and close the blinds. We could display ourselves, and some do. Love is given to display and licensed to defy convention, as children do. We slip our leashes.

What are the odds, I wondered? If I calculated right, they’re 1 in 19,636 that two persons, significant to me in a specific way, would share the same East Asian and Western zodiacal signs. Both systems have 12 aspects. Robert Graves wrote that the Mediterranean lunar year had 13 months. The 13th zodiacal sign is said to be the serpentbearer Ophiucus, whose dates are 30 November through 18 December.

Walter Benjamin’s circle made much of dialectical unfolding. Does it apply to life? I don’t think so. Rather than progressing dialectally, life as lived is more often like the children’s story in which a man consistently and comically applies the supposed lesson of what just happened to him to the next event to which that lesson has no actual relevance. (This relates to probability: whether events are dependent or independent.) Toward the end of the story, he walks through a town carrying a donkey. The sight of this makes a deeply depressed princess laugh out loud. His reward is her hand in marriage, as her father the king had vowed. The story is about life’s associative randomness, one thing after another. Yet he gets the girl and half the kingdom. (A recent study showed that half of success is due to luck, I read.)

When finding your way is based solely on intuition, life becomes freighted with destiny. The term “successive approximations” is germane here, because intuition is notoriously inexact. When you look back at it, you see more precisely where and why you went wrong. My sense is that the others in this process are there for their own reasons, that their separate destinies are equally in play, overlapping yours but then proceeding on their own paths. Blame attaches to this if for example expectations are raised and unfulfilled. These journeys can be unhinging.

Destiny is a kind of inner necessity to act on what you intuited and make as much sense as you can of the sequence as it unfolds. Who is this other? The question becomes only harder to answer. You try to abandon your initial expectation only to discover that it’s here again, but you meanwhile have changed—changes that make possible something that feels oddly intended.

The sequence has all kinds of aftereffects. The feelings that arose make their current claims. They’re fragments of what was true between you—love, for example, which feeds on moments and is oblivious to larger questions until they impinge on them too much. We have to give love its due: an everything that lives on only in

memory and as bits and pieces of expression, it is practically nothing, laughably nothing. At certain points in life, we can’t seem to do without it.

When love is uncoerced, then I think attaching blame to an unhappy denouement is unfair. Nothing is more human, of course, because unhappiness is injurious and seems to wipe out the memory of happiness for some.

Perhaps it renders love false in their view. “How could it not be, because I was left injured?” The whole episode is fed to the fire, the other put out of mind.

I’m not capable of this, despite injury. If I loved another, I can’t extinguish love altogether, even as I see that it has no real standing here and now. Distance and estrangement take a toll, but memory comes alive in me when invoked. There are occasional glimpses of connection.

Fire weather arrived, sort of, and the power gods played games. There was a preview of this a few weeks ago, when a substation blew and we lost power for half a day. This time, anything deemed to be at risk had its power shut off, including the university campus five blocks to the south. Turning the power back on is no small thing, and the campus will be closed tomorrow while they do so. For whatever reason, our neighborhood was unaffected, but it was unnerving at first to think the power might suddenly be turned off. The local politicians sent emails full of platitudes. They’ve treated it like an Act of God instead of pushing back forcefully to limit its impact. San Francisco, in contrast, got itself exempted. I’m trying to find out who managed this.

A Dutch couple and their young son stayed with us for a few days and then decamped this afternoon for an apartment across the street. The man came by with the keys and praised the sunset view from their new upstairs window. It was pretty striking, probably because there are some fires burning and particulates in the air. One thing the forced outage did was concentrate minds on the seasonal fire risk up and down the state, a byproduct of climate change, it’s said. It’s also a consequence of institutionalized negligence by our public and private monopolies.

In the space of a day, I was invited to a conference in Singapore and received word, after a long delay, that my professional advice is sought. So, the autumn will be more eventful than expected. I’ll give a talk at the conference, based on a paper I helped write that will appear in a book, the fourth in a series (although the first and second books are versions of each other). I hesitate to go into town now if I can possibly avoid it, and yet I’m prepared to cross the great water, as the I Ching puts it, the minute an invitation arrives. I think I’ve always been this way.

A visiting friend raised the topic of human limits, prompting me to write a poem in reply, posted on a different social medium. Off and on, what she wrote comes back to me. In mid-November 2019, I traveled to Melbourne and Singapore. While in those cities, I saw several friends, including two who I only knew through social media and correspondence. These interactions count for something, I think. Correspondence is as a good a way to connect one mind to another as conversation is, although the connections it establishes are different. (I distinguish correspondence from social media, which is incremental and accruing, and texts, which are more like conversation or maybe banter.)

When I first met the friend in Melbourne, I felt the difference, but then we met again the next day, first looking at a part of the city I would never have seen otherwise, and then joining up with a friend of hers to walk some more and then have dinner at an Italian restaurant we chose by successive intuitions, hers and mine. Conversation at dinner broke the ice, I felt, and part of it was the presence of a third party who brought us both out of ourselves. In Singapore, I met another friend who organized an excursion that again took me to new places. We’ve only corresponded about poetry, so our conversation was more focused on our backstories—topics we hadn’t touched on. In both cases, our friendships began with intuitions on my part about them. Sympathetic is the word, I think.

The word friend might be questioned, yet it’s accurate. Something is bridged that makes more of it, and what affords this is time more than space.

I was raised by parents with a cosmopolitan outlook and the self-confidence of people who were tested by wartime and its responsibilities. Spending the formative years of my early childhood traveling around the planet by ship or train—at that pace, with long sojourns in Singapore and Western Europe—left me with a sense of having lived my life in reverse, of experiencing a world that no longer exists.

When I was 11, the Soviet Union and the United States exchanged shows. Nixon famously debated Khrushchev in a mockup of an American kitchen in Moscow, while I visited the USSR’s show at the Coliseum in Manhattan. I kept the catalogue, which smelled of pine tar, for years. A few years later, as part of a program encouraged by the U.S. government, we invited a visiting professor of philosophy from Moscow at Columbia University. He came out twice to see us, both times with a minder, a woman named Ludmilla. He told me his father had been a biologist, and that he’d chosen philosophy because it was safer. When we took him and Ludmilla around, she commented constantly that they had better examples of this or that in the Soviet Union.

The Berlin Crisis occurred when my father and I were camping in Superior National Forest or whatever it was called in Canada—the North Woods that my father had visited with his parents when growing up in Omaha.

Turning on my transistor radio, we heard President Kennedy address the nation on the risk of brinkmanship that the situation had created. “Will the Russians bomb New York,” I asked? It was always assumed to be the number one target. “No,” my father said.

Brinkmanship continued until finally it didn’t. It’s easy to forget that period, but we were episodically convinced we were about to go to war—a form of war unlike any other. Fallout from testing drifted across North America, and we worried about that, too. Not constantly, but it was there the way the Hayward Fault—up the road from my house—is there. The Vietnam War, which Kennedy involved us in and Lyndon Johnson escalated, marked a transition back to plain-old warfare, napalm and Agent Orange substituting for nuclear winter. We all fought it.

The marches on Washington led to Johnson’s resignation and Nixon’s ascendancy. He and Henry Kissinger weaseled out of a war we weren’t winning. Brezhnev took over in the Soviet Union. At some point, competition became mainly economic and warfare took the form of regional, even local conflicts with an overlay of deterrence, always vastly expensive. Missiles on trains was the last of it, by which time Gorbachev and Reagan were in power.

It may not matter how an era ends—what counts is what follows, how the underpinnings of things give way and something else emerges that’s both better and worse that what it replaced. People look back at the AustroHungarian Empire now with a certain admiration, because—like Yugoslavia, arguably its only real successor—it convinced a contentious array of citizens to cohere and lead productive lives rather than squander them pursuing their historic quarrels.

It may be that we oscillate between eras of concord and divisiveness. In the midst of one, some long for the other—for a concord that’s more narrowly drawn, for example, despite the strife this creates, or for an end to that strife, at whatever cost to individual sensibilities. My life traces a version of this arc, marking the end of British power, the ascendancy of America, its slow eclipse, and the emergence of other would-be hegemons, each with its claims. Politics too play out the collapse of any real or pretended consensus, inventing new tribal imperatives.

“No bourgeoisie, no democracy,” I read last night. It may be true. Just now, I read 1848 described as the “failed bourgeois revolution.” I hadn’t thought of it as such, but then Marx extolled the bourgeoisie for overthrowing the monarchy and in Central Europe they had to do it again. They value culture, individuality, private life, and commerce, I read. My career too was wrapped up in commerce, initially with a firm closely identified with corporate modernism and then with a firm that embedded itself in commerce writ large and also discovered niches of it in everything else. Culture radiates from wealth or repudiates it creatively, but needs servants.

The bourgeoisie, the third estate, are in trades and professions. These are hereditary more than is acknowledged, families moving between narrow bands. Individuals break out, but the genetics dog the line. I am an example, trained as an architect, became an editor and publisher. We propitiate our forefathers and gravitate toward what comes naturally to us. Things follow. Things like marriages, houses, children who fill them and depart, furniture and furnishings set off by art, a style that defines us to ourselves, working its way back in time and referencing distant memories of places noted: like this.

The progress others proclaim rarely strikes me as a gain. It’s an imposition on me of something they want for themselves. Appropriating what they want is quite often on the table. I don’t see progress as a zero sum, theirs or mine, but as betterment in a public-realm sense: the betterment of public goods that are communally shared and supported, a greater sum. What’s parochial needs to find its own world.

Squaring the circle appears to be a theme of Agathe, part of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. It makes me think about the imbalances present in close relationships. Marriage’s other shore is a détente or more accurately a withdrawal from the shifting front at which the conflicts play out that these imbalances cause—front in the sense of two forces arrayed against each other, in love.

The book’s introduction speaks of the effort to break through the constraints arrayed against any relationship that departs from orthodoxy. Musil wrote in the late 1930s and early 1940s, long before a dystopic mood was ushered in by mobile phones and surveillance devices. Our lives are subject to replay if not instantaneous tracking.

If 15 years ago you had to break into her email, now you can attach things to her car or just track her phone or her watch. Trust is the cover story for these untoward acts, with its call for a near-obligatory, not always mutual acquiescence. The demand for confessions is similar.

What’s happening is often telegraphed on the home front. It can take opposite forms, cold and hot. Pregnancy produces something similar. Real life is heterodox, and orthodoxy, while it provides plenty of fuel for outrage, is almost useless in resolving anything. If tradition has any value as a guide to behavior, it is either at the very start, steeling you to resist what you desire and in fact know from the outset to be doomed, or much later, when you’re drifting in the wreckage. Tradition can save you from plunging, but only I think if you’re armed with experience. It can tell you where to swim, but whether there will be anything there to find is mostly luck, although aided by the talismanic magic that tradition sometimes gives its objects. This is a long way of saying that I don’t think the circle can be squared, but trying to square it is almost a tradition in itself, although every pair in their heterodoxy see it for the first time.

INTERLUDE

Marriage is an on-the-job kind of thing. About six weeks into it, you hit snow on the path and remember that your jacket and sunglasses are back in the car. This continues. Nothing is as you expected—the lows are often much worse, the highs often totally different than what you expected. Nothing prepares you, for example, for a first child’s birth. The path can be irrevocably altered if someone leaves it, falls off, arrives hobbling. Nothing is for sure. Yet marriage has its rhythm of days and nights, of work, school, and domesticity. It has its tasks. Its sameness can mask its oddity and pain or make them bearable. It can make its joys seem so ordinary they escape our notice.

Questions about love are more about the future than the present. They reveal our knowledge that it’s mostly conditional. “I will love you forever” is a nice sentiment, but it’s not a promise we rarely make legitimately. Nor is it really possible to quantify our feelings. Yet love is crucial to marriage—perhaps the most crucial thing. Love in marriage is bound up with desire and its sexual expression, but is independent of both things. Of all things in a marriage, it is the most vulnerable. We say, “love dies,” but what has died is usually desire—any desire for the other as a lover. This is a catastrophe for most marriages. But love’s starting point is our acknowledging the other as “beloved” and, by implication, as our companion in life. We have no idea where life will take us, but we agree to live it out together, and our love for each other leads us to take this step. It means being attentive to the other. If love turns to hate, this begins with neglect, distraction, reflexive self-assertion—anything and everything that comes between you and your beloved. On the train platform, I saw a couple waiting for a train, he reading his paperback, she trying to get is attention, to engage him. What he conveyed was that it was his choice to engage or not. When he chooses to engage, she’d better be there for him. Imagine how he’ll feel when she’s not.

Love is total. This is the truth about love. You take it on and live it out or it’s not really love. This is not to say that love is unconditional, but that it demands commitment and “right action.” When a young couple marries, there’s often an effort made by the officiant to look beyond immediate infatuation to depict the realities of what may lie ahead. The language of the Christian ceremony, for instance, reflects this, stressing life’s vicissitudes.

Seeking Cures

No one really knows

Narrow is the gate and straight the path, they tell me. I wonder if I’m but a messenger, “The grace of God,” my mother told me.

The real moon in its starless night, snow behind, the pitch of earth before.

This feels like the hinge of the world, with your island on one end of it.

In my dreams, the marriage bed floats miraculously above the loam.

My wounds were etched on my heart.

I went so far away, seeking cures.

The path I took doubled back.

Even our memories, it seems, will end.

No one really knows how near or far.

No sound escapes and yet a hundred hundred heads are turned. A pulse, the hinge itself swinging, the fields made fertile by this glistening river.

Time’s arrow

Krakatoa

Which target then? A field divides us or is it the space of a hair’s breadth?

We feel our way and call to each other as night falls, arm in arm like an old couple.

Out in the sunlight, we strip off our clothes to examine our wounds. Children, husbands, lovers, wives—we pause to trace their history, tear back our skin to show our beating hearts, tendrils that root us as surely as our wounds.

“Life is short, the journey bittersweet.”

As long as it needs to be, its pain searing us with its hapless truth. We lurch flaming, our hearts ablaze, faces blackened, we watch with half an eye, incense clouds our sight.

These others walk upright and stare at us.

How unseemly this pulled-back flesh. Yet there’s a kind of bliss amid the bittersweet.

Husbands and wives stand outside this circle and we work such magic as we know to pull them in. Sometimes we walk the streets and a stranger meets our eye, a second’s worth of eternity, parallel world if we could jump.

The circle seems like this, a wall or chasm.

We look at it disbelieving, the children, too, wondering how it came to be. Our eyes meet, you and me, but of course we’ll never know.

Ellipses of eyes, her brows two black strokes, a shock of hair, lips pressed, bowed to form a Borromini curve.

Their season Paths have their ferns, scenes of her walking on a tightrope to the pier. Clouds part, mountains appear in layers, blue and grey.

Their season, the season of their world.

A dog follows them to a rock-strewn beach, chases the terns, acts like a dog would act.

Later, they sit and he pretends to read.

Blown away, she says, and he thinks no, it’s him, clinging to this table by a thread.

A romance He saw her palace wrapped in fog.

No bower, those roses, the same that walled her beauty in. They say a flower opened to a kiss, sunlight glinting off the thorns, and threads were banded lines, golden where it touched bedclothes lying on her floor.

(The prose piece and the poems were written in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The bowl is by the master potter Miyajima Masayuki, bought at his studio in Motegi, Japan. Miyajima is in the lineage of Shoji Hamada.)

RITES & WRITS (PART TWO)

In the winter, I live mainly for the spring. I know that winter is the earth’s necessity, even mine. I no longer have to slog through it as much, and I therefore see how I pull back from it, even the barn behind the house getting short shrift compared to the “winter palace” of my upstairs room and the kitchen’s late afternoon light and warmth. It rained hard earlier, and then cleared. In the midst of it, I saw a small bird light on the deck’s north enclosure, as if taking stock of the situation, winter. I remembered the bird feeder visible from my parents’ living room, attracting the gamut of winged fauna of those parts. The deck must seem to them a platform, safe from cats, a vantage point to survey the garden and surrounding yards with their beds, grass, bushes, trees—sources of whatever it is they eat.

Early spring arrives, as it once did in Tokyo, in winter. Not even in late winter here, things revive and bloom.

Gradually my expanse of space and time enlarges, blossoms marking the path with color and the sound of bees. In Tokyo, it snowed on that announced first day, a storm I ran into coming back to Roppongi by taxi from a dinner.

We went out, I remember, because my friend’s house was unheated in February to save money. Heat in winter is a feature of bourgeois life. The lack of heat is one reason why homelessness is such a curse. Shelter is a human right.

Berkeley was at one point a place for San Franciscans to get away from its dreadful summer. Some old houses are just shacks, and many are completely uninsulated. Over time, we’ve rebuilt parts of our 1902 house to make it bearable in the winter and cooler in the summer, but for a long time I found it uncomfortable in the coldest season.

The fog in San Francisco in July and August means that the heat of midday there gives way to something like winter in a plunge of 20 or 25 degrees in the space of 30 minutes. The fog crosses the Bay also in those months, and my house is directly in its path, pushed by the wind through the Gate. The “writings in a bottle” in the interlude spark a specific memory of making my way back from a dinner just north of downtown, walking south on Montgomery to BART in my linen jacket, freezing the whole way. I should have remembered, but my mind was on other things.

Looking back, it’s obvious that my marriage took precedence. This reflects the order or chronology of things, but in unfolding time, I often lost sight entirely of the woods I was traversing, let alone the path through it. I was unhinged by love, even as it healed certain wounds. I was bereft. In retrospect, I think one has to be bereft to break through to something else. I suppose that poems and novels are written in an effort to chart this, identify its shoals.

Sometimes I think that I could write a novel of fragments. Perhaps this is what I’m writing, in a way, calling it a memoir or reflections. Some autobiographers call their works novels. A life provides a handy plot, but mine, such as it is, seems as discursive as my writing, A sum larger than its parts is said to be the goal in life, but isn’t each part a microcosm of the life itself, no more nor no less than it? We think of death as terminating a narrative, but being is a cosmos bigger than we can see or know. Hence Walter Benjamin’s idea of reception: the narrative continues.

What causes us to fall in love, to commit to another, even if this commitment falls short of some other or we find ourselves adrift or deserted because the other’s commitment fell short, is a mystery. I chalk it up to destiny. My theory is that love is the main game in life, and that we play it across time with the same cohort of players. Blame can attach to this in life, because love is prone to transgress and to ignore fundamental rules and traditions as it seeks to be the exception. It would be better to absolve everyone in some kind of regular ceremony, to let people get on with their lives unhindered by guilt or regrets, to reverse course without being nailed for hypocrisy. Love has its own integrity, however flimsy or ephemeral. I edited my bottled-up poems, which in the original are filled with the language lovemaking produces. A disinterested reader suggested at the time that I find an editor, but the elapsed time has qualified me to do the work. It’s helpful to have it raw, though, as a reminder how every phrase that survives is loaded nonetheless, like “her woman’s gait,” as I’ve remarked. At a certain point, you just imagine.

Agathe is a Jungian novel or construct, I wrote my daughter. We’re both reading it. It seems to be about the desire of anima and animus to conjoin within one person, but there are two—siblings—so, it’s displaced. I often think about this desire. Twins are a more conventional way to present this, but Agathe has an older brother and younger sister. This corresponds to my own sense of anima and animus, one taking precedence and both distinct.

(Later.) There’s something incestuous or transgressive about this desire for them to conjoin, and yet that impulse is an ancient one, the polymorphous perversity (as Freud called it, in Norman O. Brown’s translation) that is a hallmark of childhood. In Agathe, the desire appears (from what I’ve read so far) to be amoral in the sense of being outside or beyond the dictates of convention. “West of gravity” is how I once described this. In another way, their conjoining is a form of self-reliance, to borrow Emerson’s term. It could be criticized as a Hinayana move, a lesser or ungenerous use of the whole we make of our several selves. Mahayana in this case would be the outward and socially useful forms of reconciling these dichotomies. Musil is externalizing the Hinayana form, posing a dyad that forms in opposition to society’s traditionally collective or communal, self-sacrificing demands. I never thought of this, but Hinayana is a radical assertion of self. It seems equally valid if the dharma is in fact the only refuge.

The state of the realm here is a topic of dinner conversation. Last night, the one across the table recounted the homeless breakfasts she helps run and how those who appear there aren’t deranged, but appear unable to cope.

We talked about the need for asylums, sheltered workshops, and other places that could give stability and support to them, not “shelters” and certainly not tent cities or arrays of tiny homes, but havens that would offer tenure and safety, lifting the terrible burden of abject poverty and providing ways forward that could benefit selves and others.

Banned on Tumblr: A year ago, when Yahoo still owned Tumblr, it took down images it deemed pornographic.

Some 20 of my photo-collages were removed. There’s an example on the previous spread, and I thought to include others that speak to a silliness inexplicably maintained by Tumblr’s new owner. I’ve blogged on Tumblr for 10 years and my poems and photo-collages go there first. Much as poems find their beginnings in a word or a phrase, photo-collages riff on things seen. Tumblr is still a good source, but not quite as good, because some who pushed boundaries surfaced content that lent itself to collaging. (My process is similar to Kurt Schwitters: I collect things and at some point, put them to use. This requires a lot of sifting, so, the more material to draw on, the better.)

I asked the gardener how things looked. “The deer are eating the vegetables,” she said. We went back to check the fences I’d had put up. They were intact. Returning to the vegetable bed, she pointed to the kale as exemplifying the damage the deer had done. I remembered that my wife made something that features “homegrown kale.” I noted this and the gardener’s eyes widened. She reached over and carefully removed a leaf of kale so that no trace of human intervention was visible. I kept a straight face. “Destroyer of Worlds,” I wrote my daughter later. Kale is evidently just a variant of the goddess’s name. The gardeners—there are several—worship at a different altar.

Another Chinese retrovirus threatens to become a global plague. “Only a few weeks ago, we thought a missile from North Korea would take us out,” I wrote a friend in Portland. The impeachment trial is in motion, gathering the headlines, but this is steadily supplanting it. Quarantines in 10 Chinese cities caused the price of oil to tank. I read in the dissertation of a friend and neighbor that quarantines were how China dealt with epidemics in the past.

(True here, too. Chicken pox and measles both resulted in the house being quarantined when I was a kid.) China’s Xi finally spoke out and sent army doctors in, but, as some epidemiologist said, “The horse is out of the barn.” It’s probably debatable that the penchant in China for roosting chickens above pigs is the root cause of retrovirus mutations there, but that’s what I’ve read. If it’s true, then it’s probably time to ban the practice.

“Serge Chermayeff,” a friend of a friend wrote when I told him I planned to write on urban density. I owned one of his books and bought two others. That he and his collaborators—Christopher Alexander and Alexander Tzonis— are relevant to the topic is absolutely true. I’d never read the best-known book, Community & Privacy, although I think I bought it when it appeared. When I was an undergraduate, Chermayeff gave a talk that I attended. I don’t remember it, but he impressed me and we had a conversation afterward. At the end of it, he said, “You’re much too smart to be an architect.” That was an interesting take on the matter, as I found designing buildings difficult. I’ve always had a strong spatial sense, and can immediately imagine a space from looking at plans and sections, but it only works in one direction. This made me a good critic, and some of my classmates used me in that capacity. An oddity of architecture as a field is that relatively few architects engage with it conceptually, especially in big firms.

Yet the study of it continues to emphasize design and the licensing tests still have a mandatory design component.

My undergraduate program was led by followers of Le Corbusier, although its graduates went off to Miesdominated Chicago. Later, a colleague in a small Berkeley practice told me that it didn’t much matter what school students followed as long as they were grounded in its precepts. In my third year in high school, the English teacher told me to absorb the house style of the New York Times in order to give my writing some order. It was wonderful advice. He could see that I wrote by ear, drawing on my childhood exposure to expatriate British English and parents who spoke in full, well-formed sentences—a background that made me articulate in speech but less sure with prose. (If asked now, I’d point younger writers to the Financial Times.) I took my colleague’s remark about schools in the same vein. The faculty who admired Le Corbusier were true believers, intolerant of dissent.

Apostasy in architecture takes different forms, all linked by skepticism toward the received wisdom of the day.

Chermayeff is startingly relevant to the issues of urban density, which were as present when he wrote his books as they are now. No less concerned than Jane Jacobs was with reviving the vitality of cities, Chermayeff declined to rule modernism out, as Alexander did later. Like Team X, the impulse was to save modernism, not transcend it.

This raises a separate question: Is Alexander a postmodernist? Is he a new urbanist? The Pattern Language emerged from work Alexander writes about in Community & Privacy and developed in his dissertation, but that work brought him back to premodern traditions. Alexander also strikes me as fundamentally a polemicist whose elaborate but improbable rules and theories, rarely demonstrated convincingly in his own work, rest nonetheless on an intuited truth—equivalent to Dōgen’s famous “Just sit” summation of Zen—and a remarkable eye for beauty and urbanity in the world. “Does this have life or not?” is Alexander’s basic question. He knew it when he saw it, which is not the same as being able to generate it anew. The appeal of tradition is that the beauty and urbanity it produced emerged from everyday variations to widely understood rules, patterns, and constraints—ordinary people in dialogue with the community as an organized place that took in the surrounding countryside (as Jacobs noted).

In a dream, set in Poland, I was sentenced to death. The woman who announced this to me and some others is in real life a human resources person, and she put it “as nicely as possible,” the way that people in that profession do.

“I’ve done nothing wrong,” I pointed out. “Can I apply for a pardon?” No, she said, although I think her no was conveyed by a look of surprise that I would even ask. I woke up, realizing that the dream was about life’s innate and unavoidable hazard. I recounted the dream later to a friend, noting how the tech elite approach death like Egyptian pharaohs. First it was cryogenics, but now the fad is to upload your brain to the cloud, as if this were possible.

Cloning must also figure, but it shares the same drawback that the successor is something or someone else. The appeal of an immortal soul is its persistence across time, retaining just enough to intuit things in the current life.

Swedenborg wrote that souls are the offspring of married couples in Heaven. “We arrive intact,” he said, and so of course all aspects of our humanity continue. The good grow younger there, whereas those who embrace evil are revealed as their real selves—there’s no dissembling in the afterlife. But as a dispensation, they don’t see each other as such. Do the evildoers also have offspring? I don’t remember Swedenborg touching on this. (The source is Heaven & Hell, his account of visiting the afterlife thanks to a warrant from Christ, who appeared to him several times. The first appearance was in London, Swedenborg recounted, when Christ told him to lose weight.)

Swedenborg asserted that couples find their intended in Heaven, correcting for the errors of their actual lives. In Conjugal Love, he also argued that adultery is morally justified if love deserts the marriage. Swedenborg believed that relatively few people are actually good; most are self-serving and deluded. In the afterlife, the Lord is merciful, condemning no one and aiding all comers, but people seek out what they love. Hell is a conscious choice.

Phone solitaire must count as time entirely wasted. I win 12 percent of the time the app tells me. I’ve taken it off my phone only to put it back. It regularly invites me to join a community of players. I don’t. Not for nothing is the game called what it is. I started playing it with real playing cards as a kid. Back then, my game was clock solitaire; now I play Klondike, according to the app. I used to play some hands over, but now I don’t. Despite often scoring several hundred points, I realized finally that only winning counts. This loosened my attachment to individual hands, even when I saw clearly where I went wrong. Another factor is that I never won a repeated hand. Somewhere in this there may be an iota of insight, but clearly even if it’s there, once absorbed, there’s nothing else to gain. Oh, but I could count the constant reminder it gives of how I squander time and how it leaks out at the margins, too.

Some poets write first thing. Others hold out as long as possible. Joanne Kyger told an interviewer that she might get around to writing something late in the day, although her wonderful Japan and India Journals suggests devotedness, which may be more useful than timing per se. Waking from a nap earlier, I looked at the top shelf of the bookcase, which has several impressive sets of books that I bought intending to educate myself on their topics.

Will it happen? I tend to read in sections whenever possible. This seems to relate to my ability to hold on to what I read or, alternatively, to savor it. Since leaving school, I mostly refuse to read at the mandatory school pace. Some writers feel similarly driven. A few days ago, I saw a quote from someone that writers should be focused on their masterpieces. How would they know, I wondered? Writers should just write in whatever way works for them.

Postmodernism and new urbanism both sought to get past modernism. The postmodernists were grandiose and funny; the new urbanists, true believers, were never funny, and their work was often formulaic and sterile. The postmodernists drew on art, while the new urbanists drew on kitsch and twee, but without its spontaneity. Modern architecture rolled on, despite the efforts of academics to declare it an historic category. Every aspect of modern persists—minimal to maximal, industrially form-begetting to banal—at the behest of its hegemonic backers. We live as if in a catalogue of forms, and anything that deviates is a target now for urban activists and their enablers.

Girlfriends who broke up with you appear when they appear, certain of getting a hearing and a ready response to whatever errand prompts their visit. And yet there’s a measure of shared enjoyment to these encounters, also, as you both remember whatever it was that kept you momentarily enthralled when you were together eons ago.

The heart of urbanity is a variation on themes that reflects small but telling differences traceable to the variety of their owners, builders, and residents. Neighborhoods make urbanity possible by setting the stage for it. Today, cities and districts all but rule it out by encouraging site consolidation and “sculpted” height and bulk. Even a superblock development like Hudson Yards opts for the safety of a laid-out pastiche of towers and pavilions that form a “destination” permitting commerce to rake off custom from commuters and day-tripping suburbanites. It is a suburban idea of Manhattan, reachable directly and secured from the city proper, traversed by the High Line that is itself a defended passage, ending at The Whitney in a progression similar to reaching MoMA via Fifth Avenue.

Rockefeller Center is the model, although a more consistent assembly of towers, plazas, shops, and entertainment.

Inner-city Melbourne shows how porosity makes for urbanity. The side streets are subdivided into even smaller alleys and arcades, all lined with cafés, restaurants, and shops that are open from morning to late afternoon. A few stay open into the evening, so people out walking can find a bar or a restaurant. Trams circle the area and are free.

One maddening thing about Singapore, despite its excellent transit and overall walkability, is the lack of obvious passages through walls of buildings. Usually there is actually a way through, but it’s often far from obvious.

Transit and housing should be joined at the hip. If you have to choose, make transit the priority. The Bay Region’s inner core is overloaded because investment in transit dried up after the big push in the 1960s. We have nascent urban centers within and outside the inner core, but they’re underdeveloped because you can’t get there quickly. If this failure to invest continues, it will destroy many of the region’s existing residential neighborhoods.

A friend’s tweet makes me think about the duration of guilt. Anything untoward remains on my conscience, I find, and are a source of regret. I think Jesus got it right when he asked the crowd who among them would cast the first stone—who is truly without sin? He was also saying that it’s enough to live with our regrets. I agree with my friend that they cannot be erased. I’m less sure that another’s sins, as we judge them, can be placed legitimately ahead of all other considerations, as my friend proposed, not least because this applies a kind of automatism to judgement itself, which to me is necessarily provisional. How many people do we actually admire unreservedly?

AFTERWORD

Richmond, Indiana

Two Vignettes

I bet you never knew the daughter whose mother tried to kill her who killed herself, the daughter who became herself the mother.

I think you don’t remember. You think of horses grazing, grey afternoons, but I passed by in the rain. I knew her. We passed one night together.

Shall I tell you what I would tell her?

First, I would thank her for her kindness.

Second, I wouldn’t speak for fear of hurting and would be talking always in a circle around the feeling I carry for your daughter.

Did you know I went twice to see her?

So, she repaid me for visiting her after her mother tried to kill her.

I saw a girl just now as beautiful as you.

When she passed, we were, each of us without breath, not even a word.

What pleasure He saw he was approaching sainthood, an assemblyman bargaining for fish.

It was a matter of pride with him to know the borders of his knowledge, borders like walls and gentility like a knife, and to be moved by the sight of grass.

Yet what was the pleasure, what pleasure in this sidestepping? Strange though how the civility of his existence sustained him until the grass replayed how the moon stirred up the floodtide, the fertile earth.

A woman stood by a table littered with Marx.

I noted streams of indifference. She replied, “I have the strength of the entire working class.”

The leader of her party, I forget his name, had a newspaper. “In jail. Want to buy one?”

Remembering He stood and prodded the mollusk with his scalpel, its folds giving way, writhing in the pan, slowly running down as they did. I am anonymous myself, the Emperor thought.

The throbbing of their organs, the breath and movement of their bodies, blood congealing on stairways where they fell.

We are anonymous ourselves, he thought.

We were with the mollusks, touching the wall and peering at the sky. It was all arranged.

(Written in the late 1960s and early 1970s.)

Common Place No. 17 | Text and images Š 2020 by John J. Parman | complace.j2parman.com

Number 18 reflects my finding a manuscript among some boxes that had been in storage elsewhere in Berkeley.

LOVE & MARRIAGE: A NOVELLA FRAGMENT COMMON PLACE NUMBER 18 | WINTER 2020

In February 2020, my wife brought home some boxes from the property where they were stored and I found the manuscript of a projected novella begun in the mid-2000s. The setting is Christiana, as Oslo was called prior to Norway’s independence in 1905. The protagonists are based on my great-grandfather, Georg Kristian Parmann, and his circle, but it’s not biographical—I chose it because it’s a place I’ve visited episodically since childhood.

LOVE & MARRIAGE: THE TURNING OF THE YEAR

E benedetto il primo dolce affanno Ch'i' ebbi ad esser con Amor congiunto, E l'arco e la saette ond' i' fui punto, E le piaghe, ch'infino al cor mi vanno.

— Francesco Petrarca 1. The Solstice Damn! Magnus lit a cigar and looked out at the water. Smoke rising, the sun warm for once, children running and yelling, but his eyes were on the ferry. Two rings of smoke—nothing to do but wait— and then a sigh. Hot suddenly and what was all that noise? The whole day had been like this, and now half an hour before the next boat. He leaned against a wall, feeling its heat on his back. Fingering the cigar, looking across the pier, how many summers was it now that he’d headed out there, supper at four, Charlotte in her country attire and him still in his city clothes? The boat, the launch, the cart up from the jetty past waterside houses, the cemetery, the old church, the barn with its slat sides and sod roof, woods to the right and fields to the left, to an allée of linden trees where he’d climb down and walk up to the summer house with its porches and gables, the yellow house, the house his maps had built.

Nothing to do, no runner to cross the fjord like Jesus and tell Charlotte I missed the damn boat. He pulled at the cigar, shifted his back, finally looked for a place to sit, the boat off in the distance now, smoking too. A beer, he thought, or tea, the manuscript. I could give myself a headache, reading in the sun. Squinting, he leaned against the wall again. Another sigh, two or three more rings, wafting, growing larger. Two children stopped to look.

Magnus obliged them with another. “I missed the boat and now I have to stand here and blow rings until the next one comes.” A hell. Oda would like that, an eternity at the pier while small demons surround him demanding rings.

Somewhere out there, one boat was passing another. Young men, probably, were on their way in, while he was trying to abandon the city, his work finished, or parts of it, the rest stuffed in his satchel. A week, a rare week during which the sun would hardly set and he would sit out on the lawn and read close to midnight, a cigar lit to hold off the nits.

The devil, Oda more or less told him. He pulled on the cigar and let the smoke curl up from his mouth.

Well, yes and no. At dinner, she’d cut him off in mid-sentence. Would it be like this on the Styx—two or three millennia of his anecdotes cut short? More smoke, like a horse in winter. Her anger seemed to bring her to life, but not as she’d been—mouth open, that half-angered look, or was it bliss, up above him, her long hair falling around her head? Or that look of ice she gave him on the road? Everyone adores her, and so had he.

Like layers of the earth with fragments of himself scattered through it, bones with no marrow, and yet he was standing here again—he, Magnus, with his cigar between his fingers—another summer, the ferry slowly coming into view that would take him to Charlotte in her summer clothes, to Charlotte in her element—the garden, her children and her children's children. Still standing, he thought, the green light Karin said she saw pouring out of him like a lantern.

He ground the cigar out in the wall. He could see the other boat now off in the distance, with its varnished seats, its smells of food, coal, and human bodies, overdressed and ready to shed it off, find each other in the summer twilight. By August, the women would all be pregnant. Like Charlotte, pulling him on her, no sign of night, only the hard knot of her sex, and the hunger of winter finally slaked. Then in April or May a child.

Maps, books, all this got stoked up, the rest of the year spent paying for that swollen bud and the flood six weeks later when, ravenous, she would keep him up all night. Into autumn by then, in darkness, without a word or a cry from her, arms wrapped around his neck to hold him so close he could hardly breathe or move.

So, another summer, Oda angry again, but his heart afloat in it and the riverboat approaching. Tarot might be the game, cards laid out on the table. The stakes? “There are children, Magnus!” Oda had hissed.

You bear down and place your bet. The cards face up and down, but no broken tower for Magnus, only the hanging man. The men falling from the tower don't look happy. There are always two, and now he knew why.

Five minutes more, Magnus guessed, lighting a cigar. People gathering now—men in suits, youngsters with their mothers, the priest and his wife, who nodded at him when he caught her eye. Does she know? Will she also cut me off, my anecdote left hanging in midair? He leaned back against the wall, smoke wafting, the smell of it mixing with the summer afternoon, and winter over. ^

^

^

The men slid the wooden walkway from the ferry to the dock and the passengers disembarked, mostly young men, dressed for an evening, but some families, too, heading in for parties, weekends in town. Standing to the side with the others, Magnus nodded to several of them—friends of his children, children of his friends.

He felt for his ticket, hauling it out. It always felt like a race, everyone heading for the same wide portal. Two ticket takers stood guarding it, their blue jackets stained with coffee and grease and God knows what.

He pushed through with all the others and found a seat. Most headed for the upper deck to enjoy the sun, so the cabin was emptier than usual. He put his hand down on the bench and looked at it against the wood. It was all like this, wood planks and strips trapped in amber like leaves or insects. His hand always looked the same, hair growing to the knuckles like a monkey or a wolf. A smell of sausage from the shop between the stairs, and he was tempted—dinner still a long way off. Children and their mothers crowded around to buy ice and drinks, and the men to get beer to drink out in the sun. Magnus walked over. "Coffee and a sausage, please." The woman nodded, her hair knotted above her head, the sleeves of her blouse rolled up from the heat. Winter and summer, here she was, someone's sister, probably. By now, the boat was some distance out, the castle behind them. Soon they'd pass the lighthouse and, halfway there, the returning ferry, the one he'd missed. He sipped his coffee and ate the sausage, a small feast of salty juice.

Six weeks since Charlotte had gone to the summer house. May was warm, so she'd made an early start.

On Saturdays, he left his office at one and took the boat, but today he'd lingered, trying to wrap things up.

Company, she'd written. I dread it, he told Kat at the park. I dread it, but then I end up having a good time.

In his satchel, the afternoon paper, still folded up, a book, manuscripts still to be read and acted on, and her letter, handed to him, which he'd sat down and read before walking to the boat. His heart would race, going to meet her, so he paused to calm down. She’d given him her conspiratorial look and a quick, almost furtive kiss. Her letters rehearsed her days in all their texture, so that he could feel how they were or would be. He thought how her eyes would sometimes catch his as they walked, her expression warming.

In the spring and summer, Christiana had its beauty, even its modest glamor. They’d walk near the castle, into a new district with its cafes, aquavit, smoked salmon, the oysters Kat ate by the half dozen, those times they ventured there. He loved the proportions of the buildings and their spare elegance. Modern, he told her, the rage in cities to the south. Everything will change. Its harbingers were in the theaters and galleries. The frankness of the times will tear away the gilding and free the women to live as they please.

Magnus rose and climbed the stairs to the upper deck. The point and pier were visible, and, distant, the entry to a favorite sailing haunt, with its cottages and summer inns. He longed to take Kat there, a proposal that always drew a sardonic, indulgent smile. Men and women alike had shed their clothes, the sun most generous. The rich chased after it in winter, to Sorrento or the Canaries, but the rest stayed and slogged along, an hour of sunlight at the solstice, and now it was all reversed, with just a bare hint of night.

He wrapped his hands around the varnished railing and looked out the water. Sailboats dotted the fjord, along with a steamer headed in to port. Closer in, there would be double-enders, and children fishing. He cupped his hands and lit a cigar, the smoke billowing back. Charlotte would be in the kitchen at this point, the doors and windows open, her recipe book open on the table, glanced at once, and the smells of cooking.

They had some money, finally, but Charlotte wasn’t comfortable with servants. She had her entourage, here and in town, along with her children, when she could get their attention. The older ones were off, especially in the summer. The house in town was their base, but they were hardly there, either, Magnus knew.

Magnus drew on his cigar, listening as conversations hummed around him. Like bees, he thought. He loved the fat black ones that flew slowly through the garden. The dog liked to chase them, occasionally suffering for it, his nose swollen like a balloon. As the city warmed up, he and Kat would sometimes sit together near the pier, talking about their day and their families. She’d reach over and take his hand, or hold his eyes. His whole world then was suffused with her, brown and radiant in the summer sun.

At a dinner in town, an argument broke out about a politician, his career eclipsed by scandal. Was he to blame for the deplorable things that followed? No, it was beside the point, he’d said, but felt as he said that he was defending himself, in reality, with Oda saying in so many words that he wasn’t far from scandal. Their world was so small, and all of them friends. The cause was Kat. "Anyone else I could tolerate.”

He thought how some painters left in what others left out. If they portrayed a couple, you’d see his jealousy and pain, and her loneliness and anger—or was it the other way around? People who spend their lives unwinding from each other and also from their selves. You could see them performed in the theater.

Sometimes he and Kat sat off by themselves, hidden in markets, in cafes filled with a crush of travelers, sailors, students, hidden by anonymity, even in this backwater. And yet they might reshape the landscape.

Someone, near or distant, might pull on this thread, open a drawer to find more than one sheaf of letters. In the midst of conversations, that smile of hers. How often did it come to mind? Musician, logician, solver of problems, an old soul watching after the young ones—her notes to him took his breath away, the ink aflame.

He thought suddenly of the child he'd been, small and spindly, taking the measure of the world he'd been dropped into, every last attribute of it. A little hedonist, admittedly, but there were feuds and quarrels, friendships and crushes, liaisons that were so charged and full of risk. All this before he was 10. And the beauty, and everything alight with it—their meeting point, he knew. Some novels, poems, and paintings spoke to it, but so many were oblivious, and hostile often to those who saw it and drew attention to it.

Now the pier was clearly in view, horses and carts waiting. Magnus looked for the launch that would take him to the parish dock. It was tied up, its pilot trying his luck with the fish. People roused themselves, the women’s tanned arms like Kat’s in her light dress. It will all be new, he told her, as she ate her sixth oyster. ^

^

^

The priest and his wife were ahead of him, with several others, but the launch pilot’s back was to them, his attention elsewhere. Soon they would be in earshot, and his mind would be dragged from his imagined fish.

The priest cleared his throat, and Magnus could see the sound registering. The captain reeled his line in, stood up, and faced his tormentor. The priest helped his wife aboard and then stepped on, nodding to the captain. "No luck?" The pilot stared at him. "Maybe it's too hot," the priest ventured. The pilot grunted and began feeding the fire. Magnus stepped on and sat down. "How is Charlotte?" the priest's wife asked him.

"I've been in town these six days, so you've probably seen her more than I have. How is she?" The priest's wife laughed. "I see your grandsons, but Charlotte I haven't seen." He nodded. "Probably gardening."

The priest lit his pipe. "Two funerals this week. "Any births? These things havetobalance out."

"Weddings. It's the season," the wife said. “Right. So, March before we'll see any replacements." She colored slightly. "It's like a play," Magnus added. "People are always coming on or going off."

The launch rounded the point, forty or so feet out and parallel with the narrow shoreline along the steep hillside. Here and there, roads zigzagged down and a house or cottage jutted out. Small jetties marked these moments of settlement, often with boys fishing and swimming. Wood smoke and pipe smoke blotted out any other smell. He thought of Oda’s waterside cottage, Christian's easel in one room and their bed in the next.

"I think Charlotte has company," the priest's wife said. "A man with a red face. The cart driver said he took him to your house." Magnus looked at her. “He paints barns.” She shook her head. “He didn’t look like a worker.” The priest nodded gravely. Magnus laughed. "He's professor at the academy. He paints country scenes, but prefers them to be close at hand. We're handy, and we have a barn. More to the point, we have food, drink, and conversation, so he'll be staying for a while, I think." The priest's manner shifted. “I’d be honored to meet him." Magnus looked at him. "He’s an atheist. Perhaps you can convert him."

A barn and a field with a horse--Magnus could see the painting. Then another came to mind, Peter in evening clothes, and in his cups. It was hard to square the one with the other, and now here they both were.

Peter would be chatting Charlotte up, laying siege to her larder and the wine cabinet, but then he would be out walking and sketching. He rose early, working until mid-afternoon, then eating, resting, and carousing.

Magnus admired that energy. He taught his mostly female art students by day and haunted what passed for the city’s demimonde by night. He was courteous and familiar with these women, evasive with their fathers and with men in authority. He hid behind his society face, closeted in his evening clothes, but in the countryside, he was himself amid animals and farm folk. “I think he’s only an atheist in town,” Magnus said. “Nature brings out the best in him.” The priest nodded, still angling for an invitation. “I won’t try to convert him.”

By now they could see the priest's dock, close by the rocks where the children swam, where he sometimes went to sit and look out at the fjord, watching the skiffs and double-enders pass. He’d spent most of one summer a few years before contemplating this scene while struggling to loosen Ota’s grip on his spirit.

The pilot slowed the launch down. The cart driver was out on dock, waiting for them. "Maybe the fish will bite later," Magnus said. "Maybe," the pilot answered. His mind was still at the pier. A theory had formed, about five minutes back, that the electrical magnetism of his body might flow better if he stripped the cork off his rod. He could lead the fish on a dance the way the fiddlers did at solstice, the girls dancing past midnight and falling for the hooks. He snagged the priest's wife's maid last summer, so why not a fish? Picking at the cork with his thumbnail, he thought of looking for his knife, but now the jetty needed his attention. ^

^

^

Two horses to pull the cart, dappled white-grey, one pawing the ground with a hoof as the driver fed them apples. He averted his eyes as the priest's wife shifted her skirt, then clambered up to take his seat, shaking the reins. The road from the jetty turned and angled up to meet the road that came down the hill. Straight on would take them to the rocks, past the white clapboard house with its wide lawn that looked out at them.

A swim would be nice, he thought, as the cart began its slow ascent. The hillside was thick with trees and ferns. Here and there the edge dropped away so the tips of the trees were at eye level. In early spring, the road still dark and wet, this could be an unnerving half-hour. "Charlotte wrote me a letter, Magnus,” the priest’s wife said. She waited for him to ask about its contents, but he just nodded. "Strange you haven't seen her, but her garden takes all her attention until she is happy with it. After that, she'll be round for a visit."

"That's exactly what she wrote! You know your wife well!" This reverberated among them for a moment while he looked at her. "What does he say to these couples when he marries them?" The priest answered.

“The verities—faith, hope, and charity. The parents love it.” She nodded. “You may have an opportunity to try it on us,” Magnus said. “Our oldest son is headed for marriage.” Smiles broke out. “Such good news! But surely the wedding will be in town?” He shook his head. “The young woman loves it here. She’s a romantic like our artist friend.” The priest’s wife turned to her husband. “You’ll have to write a new piece for them!”

The priest felt his text slipping out of his grasp. He was especially proud of it, a theme begun at seminary and then expanded. Like funerals, weddings were a real chore, especially when he had no real knowledge of the families. The couples stood there, anxious to be off, yet wanting to hear themselves named and honored.

His piece did the job, even if every young person attending found it ludicrous. And he knew it by heart.

At last the road flattened out, the church on one side and the priest's house on the other. The cart stopped and they all got out. "I'll walk from here," he said, paying the driver. "I'll talk to Charlotte about a dinner," he added. "I'm here for a week, so you'll see more of me than you can stand, probably." The wife smiled and shook her head. “Perhaps I can help you write that wedding piece,” he ventured to the priest.

Later he remembered once, after making love, saying to Charlotte that the act was so freighted because the couple bring their entire ancestries, generations upon generations, "like two colliding constellations." ^

^

^

Magnus glanced sideways at the cemetery wall and its low gate. In town, they keep them at a distance. The long sleep of death, or is it Swedenborg’s nap and then more of the same, stripped of its illusions? Ten years since his father died, a door slamming behind him, a brick wall in view. You end up pressed against it, only the sense of touch to tell you where you are, crawling or laid out like a corpse, what's left of your hair grazing the wainscot. When your father dies, your first instinct is to bolt, but that door is already shut behind you. Yet how life quickens from moment to moment—from your mother's swelling ears right through to that last tinge of orange! And those women! When you die, maybe they'll tell you who was who before it all starts again.

Would Kat be with him? He pictured them in Heaven—Charlotte, Kat, and Oda—along an inlet with gardens and jetties. At dinner with all their children, they'd laugh at the folly of their quarrels. Charlotte would cook and Magnus would host. Later, he’d retire to his room and Kat would join him, loosening her hair, her eyes meeting his. The thought aroused him. That will survive death, Swedenborg assured him.

At the rise, the woods opened onto a field, an old barn at the far end of it. Like the woods, the field was his, farmed by a tenant. And there, at the edge of the road, Peter sat, painting the barn. He shifted slightly as he worked, a bucolic figure in a straw hat and a loose, long sleeved shirt. If a subject pleased him, his endurance was remarkable, but it was also penance for a winter of earnest if partial dissolution.

He crossed the road. The sun was still high up, warmer here than at the dock. Moving out into it, he shaded his eyes with his hand. "Peter," he called out, and his friend slowly turned his head, nodding an acknowledgement. He quickened his pace. Reaching him, he put a hand on his shoulder and glanced quickly at the painting. "Supper is delayed, am I right?" Peter laughed. "I’ve painted for hours, with time off to piss.

Don't tell the farmer!" "It's my land, piss wherever you want. How do you like painting my barn?" Peter looked around appreciatively. "It's a revelation. I dreamt about this all winter."

“And now you can take it home with you." As a child, Magnus imagined that he could step into paintings, slipping into their world. He thought of Christian's painting of Oda, the aloof look he encountered later.

"Too bad we can't do this with people." "Isn’t that the point of portraits?" Peter asked. "This place is exquisite. Ruskin was wrong. Your barn is worth ten times Venice." "Is this what you tell your students?"

The painter shook his head. "I tell them to follow their instincts. Not that they ever listen." ^

^

^

Across from the tenant’s field and barn was a long pathway through the trees, the summer house’s back entry.

The land had originally been part of the parish, sold off or hacked off in the Reformation. It stopped at the main road, but took in the woods and fields across from the old Romanesque church, now Lutheran, and its remaining fields and jetty. The priest and his wife lived off their land, supplementing his stipend. Magnus got some cash and crops from his farmer, but the summer house and their livelihood was from his business. A ship anchored in the wood, he thought, its larder below decks, a trap door in the kitchen with a ladder, a front porch with steps up from the formal entry and a veranda out back surveying all he owned—a private joke, as Charlotte ran the house and garden, chose the yellow, gave the dinners, did everything. Only the dog was his.

Small birds flitted along the edge of the road, tawny and finch-like. They made small towns in the trees and bushes, invisible except for their chirping. In the city, they’d boldly land on a chair or table, demanding food. Here, there was no need. Once they found a baby bird in the garden, covered with ants. They brought it inside, raised it in a box and then in a wicker wastebasket turned upside down. When it came of age they taught to fly by throwing it gently back-and-forth. Once airborne, it moved out to the garden, but sometimes flew through the house, greeting them. Like his grown sons, he thought, only rarely seen, yet somehow close at hand, present in brief moments, flashing their smiles, giving Charlotte a kiss. Their outside lives figured now, but the house was still a desired place in summer, for some of their young women, too.

A week ahead of him to catch up. His office was a hard place to do this kind of work—reading and editing manuscripts. It was good for setting books in motion, meeting with authors and distributors, planning, exhorting—all the things a publisher did. The success of school maps was unexpected, and he was made a Knight, with a medal and sash Charlotte made him wear to the grand social events. Her estimation of him rose when he was awarded it. He more and more fit the part she foresaw for him when they married. Working like a dog to support their platoon of children when Leon appeared with his wealth and confidence, Magnus saw him as a necessary man, embodying what Charlotte admired. And now belatedly he’d reached that point.

Charlotte's family was aristocratic on her father’s side, an old noble family in long decline but with a name that commanded respect despite the foibles of its later holders. Her grandfather, selling off his land, shrewdly married a daughter of his creditor, and her entrepreneurial spirit revived the line. Her father, larger than life, conflicted, alcoholic, nonetheless helped launch a trans-Atlantic shipping business that made him wealthy enough to keep his widow and children comfortable. Charlotte invested her legacy in property, proving to be an engaged and adept owner, managing her buildings and their occupants much like her garden. So, although Magnus connected his success with school maps to the summer house, it was just as much her doing.

There are two poles, masculine and feminine, and you and Charlotte are each moving from one to the other, Karin told him. It was true, he felt, thinking of Charlotte and looking at himself. They made a go of marriage, but other partners brought out their polarities out and suppressed their native ambiguities.

Twenty years since Leon captured Charlotte's heart and upended things. A daughter inevitably arrived, owing to Charlotte’s palpable fecundity. For Leon, older and childless, she was irresistible. For her, he was an excursion back in time, just as she'd been drawn to Magnus as she first imagined him. Or so he surmised from Karin's account of their lives together. Clairvoyant, a leader of his people, he’d loved another more than her, and the spurned one’s heart had burned with anger. This residue of the past was the only explanation for his marriage that seemed true. And now their house was in view. The bees Magnus loved hummed across the garden. He wanted to touch it, to feel its texture as well as hear it, but it was enough now just to breathe it in. ^

^

^

Charlotte looked approvingly at her garden, framed in the open doorway—layers of herbs, flowers, and vegetables that formed a square within a square, separated from the house by a terrace, and from the woods by gravel paths and hedges, "like the French," as Peter had put it. She’d nodded exuberantly, pouring him another cup of coffee. This reference set her mind wandering. She pictured a conservatory at the back of the garden, another square carved from the woods, like the Dutch reclaiming the sea. Another gravel path to tie it to the house, and four quadrants of beds, like a park. "Magnus will take it over," Peter laughed when he told her. "He’ll be out there all summer, surrounded by your orchids." She considered this, wondering what this would do to his writing. He wrote constantly, but the gist of it eluded her. For her, writing was a talent like cooking—you were born with it. It had passed through her to their second son, "a writer like his father." But then her youngest daughter was a writer, too, like Charlotte’s sister. It was a bond between her and Magnus. ^

^

^

"I missed the boat," Magnus said, but he could see that Charlotte was running behind. "Peter's here," she answered. He nodded. "I saw him at the barn. 'Better than Venice,' he told me. Who knew it would achieve immortality?" It was true, he reflected. His maps would be dust, and the barn would be part of a museum.

"When should we sit down?" To him, the solstice made supper almost pointless. "Peter is likely to paint until the sun sets. He's finally under way. I had a sausage on the boat, so I'll survive." She nodded. "There’s another guest expected, a friend of Gunnar's from Oxford. He went into town earlier to meet him." We must have passed each other, Magnus thought. He made his way upstairs, to the room he used as a study. Glancing out, he saw the Charlotte was out in the garden, wearing her hat. In her element, he thought. He took a nap.

Out in the sun, Charlotte surveyed her beds. Each summer, she had a renewed sense of possibilities, informed by advice from all quarters, and from own reading and observation. In the winter, the house in town and her buildings occupied her, but a piece of her was always here in the garden, picturing how it could be, what could be added or taken away. How eager she was to get here, when winter finally eased its grip.

Only certain things mattered, she felt, and the garden was one. She placed it in the realm of family,

together with Magnus, the children, the houses, the properties, the furniture, the whole realm that 30 years of marriage had produced, much of it through her efforts. Magnus had risen in her eyes, finding recognition, earning a real living, and staying with her despite everything. And she had stayed with him, despite the pull, the terrible pull. Charlotte shook her head, dispersing the memory. Leon was Leon, with his black eyebrows, his wiseacre grin, his unambiguous desire. Every woman needs her stalking wolf, raw hunger visible on his face. But how many of her friends who'd taken the plunge, leaving one marriage for another, were really happy? She’d understood this, finally, and arranged things otherwise.

Ruthlessly, she thought, tearing out the weeds—she’d done exactly as she liked. Like Magnus with his woman friends, his endless work, his self-centeredness. Her anger at him had carried her along, but she could see the toll it took on him. They both pared things away so new things could grow. So much left unspoken, yet it was in the open, the souvenirs of a last trip with Leon spread out on her sewing table, and in his study, his daybooks, tied-up letters, folios, the life he lived and then wrote down. So, it was not such a surprise when Tor appeared one morning, waving a sheaf of letters. She recognized that small, indecipherable script, and the paper Magnus used. Tor was beside himself, demanding that she rein him in. He's a writer, she told him.

He gets carried away. Don't take it seriously. Tor had looked at her incredulously. “The devil,” he said.

So, Kat was the object of this quarrel, Kat who she liked, who enjoyed gardens and gave her advice and books, with a husband who saw himself as the center of her world. It emboldened her to spend nine days with Leon, their longest trip. Did Kat want to marry Magnus? She hoped not. He was married, after all. And now her garden was taking form, the house and grounds her canvas, the summer her chance to remake them, drawing on the places that she and Leon had visited—gardens, spas, houses of his artist and dealer friends. It was all stored away and then replayed, her mind weighing what might apply or relentlessly be pared away.

What remained of their often-separate lives was really theirs, Charlotte felt, and the house and the garden made their contribution. It was always her sense that if you made them beautiful, everything else would follow. She said this once to Magnus, at a moment when the full weight of her love for Leon was pressing on their marriage, and it was clear that much else mattered more to him. Yet it was true, their marriage was bound up in these two things, and her love for him flowed through them, the true source of their happiness. ^

^

^

Magnus awoke still in his dream, the clothes in his closet and the books on his shelves swaying gently, as if a hidden current ran through the room. He struggled to hold on to it. Slowly, the room became itself again. He could hear Charlotte talking to herself, among other sounds in the garden. He thought of Peter’s small, efficient brushstrokes as the barn took shape on his canvas, every board’s nuance observed and set down.

Magnus was with Peter when he met Kat, standing on a train platform. They were returning from a lecture at the university. It was as if he recognized her, he said later. Away, visiting a son, he realized how much he desired her. On his return, they met again and then she sought him out. In his mind, his heart had several chambers. Charlotte had staked her claim early, but others were admitted. Oda came and went, not without considerable pain, but Kat seemed to have a place there already, as if he’d expected her. It felt as if he had.

No such intuition preceded Oda’s announcement of her love. He watched his desire for her uncoil, wondering if Charlotte saw Leon similarly, as a pure type that demanded that of her, a complete opposite.

Later, incensed, Oda took their time together and threw it in his face. “So soothing,” she mocked. He was reminded how the cremated dead end up as ashes in pots, all their beauty and substance burned away. And which version was true? Perhaps they both were. Even ashes have their value, as Charlotte knew. We arrive with our inheritance. Writing from his father, intuition and devotion from both parents, his love of women from his grandfather. And a compass to cross the ravines and deserts, often in darkness. Bleak and yet as radiant as Charlotte in her garden or Kat's face in the setting sun. Where did that come from?

A wedding set-piece came to him: “Life unfolds. Little is assured but this. You follow the rules until they diverge from life, really diverge, and you understand that what convention tells you is irrelevant, that it’s finally just you and your compass. Meanwhile there are children to raise and work to do. If love is there, you see it. What's real persists and what isn't falls away. Life answers so many questions, and you learn to wait and trust your own ways of knowing. Marriage has primacy because so much orbits around it, but how we honor it can’t be prescribed. This is the one truly private thing, about which no one can venture an opinion, although of course everybody will. Ignore them. Now kiss, enjoy the party, go forth and multiply. It will be fine. You're not the first.” I should pass this along the priest, he thought. No more of his verities. ^

^

^

"Magnus?" Supper was in the air, and he roused himself "Yes, coming." He saw someone setting the table in the garden, and heard Peter's soft voice, talking with a younger man with dark hair. Their conversation was in English, so likely one of the expected friends of the son who'd studied there. He brushed his hair, then went downstairs to hear Charlotte in the kitchen talking with the other of the pair, voluble and high-strung.

Light poured in through the windows. He made his way to the garden where Peter sat enraptured by this young and handsome visitor. "Mr. Grant," he said to Magnus. "He and his friend just arrived." On the table was an open sketchbook. He shook Grant's hand. "He’s painting my barn." Peter beamed. “Extraordinary!” he said to Grant. "Especially in this light." Magnus sat down, and then got up. "In my haste, I forgot the essentials," he said. He went back into the house, this time to the kitchen, introducing himself to the other one, listening as Charlotte held her on the matter at hand. He fetched two bottles of wine and his cigars.

Charlotte's garden, visible to him now in its entirety, was a work in constant progress. Things appeared in her mind and she gave form to them methodically. Writing wasn’t like this for him. Instead, the barest hint of an idea floated in, prompting him to add ideas and more ideas, with no apparent thread. Yet a thread would gradually emerge, tying one idea to another. This always amazed him, when the piece finally took shape.

Charlotte never expressed amazement when things came together, only satisfaction. The way she cooked was closer to how he wrote, the ingredients of a meal not readily at hand, the family sent scrambling to obtain missing items, and then the dishes emerge from this chaos, delicious. His chaos was of the mind only, his desk in constant order. Her kitchen was in disarray, but the garden reflected her mind’s evident serenity.

He set the bottles on the table, and then stepped back to light a cigar. "I'll have one later," Peter said.

"So, what's new in England?" Magnus asked. "Surely Victoria's death has been helpful." Grant nodded.

"Yes, and our fathers won’t get over it." It was like a door opening on to a new world, Grant thought, the university its antechamber. Now here he was, off in this rural place with a friend who loved him. How could he staunch the wound he was about to cause him? His mind was already on to someone new. He still loved his friend, in a way, but he'd sketched and painted him so much that only his shoes and gloves were left. ^

^

^

Magnus surveyed the table, with its plates, crystal and silver, linen, and platters. Bourgeois, this heaping up of things, but its aesthetic played off against the simplicity of the house, small by the standards of the times, and wooden as against stone or brick. The painted walls, with their portraits and landscapes, the flowers on the credenza, the old brass sconces with their candles—these were part of the world of here, wrapped up in the endless summer light. The others made their way to the table. Magnus poured the wine, then sat down at one end, with Charlotte at the other. He thought of her in that instant, passing with her hair tied up, talking softly to herself, and giving him a meaningful look on the eve of her departure for France, to spend 18 months away.

"How are his children?" Magnus asked the visitors. A year since one of his English authors had died of cancer. "They're selling the house," Grant’s friend said. "Their brother is trying to find husbands for the girls." Magnus thought of the father with his long, morose face, and of his daughters. As with Charlotte, Beauty descended through the female line. “I wouldn’t think they’d lack for suitors,” he said. "They shun society," the friend said. "I can imagine," Charlotte commented, thinking of their overbearing father and those two girls. "They're lucky that it’s now possible to resist that pressure." Lucky their parents were dead.

The mother was just as impossible, she thought, pandering to that tyrant while sacrificing herself to the poor.

Grant thought of his father, the General, ex-India, and the family's expectation he would follow in his footsteps—a commission, colonial duties. Quite a row when he'd announced his intention to study with Nessa at the Slade. But then old Watts rescued him, predicting that with his talent he’d be a national treasure. Ha! "They plan to live on their own," Grant said. "They're buying a rowhouse." Charlotte nodded. "Very sensible. Their brother must be in a panic,” she added, smiling to herself. "He moans about it, but they pay no heed," Grant said. Magnus saw their father as a transitional figure, abandoning religion but clinging doggedly to the mores of his class. His daughters, this new generation, would finally cut the cord. He could imagine them and all those young men, drawn to that flame. And their poor, bewildered brother, sensing without knowing why that the whole edifice—the very order of things that kept his world aloft—was lurching.

Not a good place to be when something that big begins to topple. It might be felt elsewhere in Europe. ^

^

^

"I'm going to visit the Slade in the autumn," Peter said. Grant looked over. "Nessa hopes to break Watt’s grip." Peter nodded. "We have the same ambition." He’d been wondering if painting as he thought of it made any sense. "It might be better to leave the barn to the photographers." Magnus could see in its gilded frame. "As long as they have eyes," he said, "that barn will have painters." "As long as they have hearts," Charlotte added. Peter nodded. Grant thought about that visit. James was that kind, feminine in his masculinity, his long legs like a girl’s when he played tennis. He’s heard that Peter had a harem of young women at the academy, and he and Charlotte had an easy familiarity that spoke of harmlessness. He knew the type, mostly chaste but catching the odd fish hooked almost incidentally. Could a friendship be cultivated?

Magnus’s mind was on the painting. Photography had its place, like the panorama of the family gathered for his and Charlotte’s anniversary, arrayed across the summer house front porch and stairs. Printed on thick stock, such photographs were handed around, proof of descent or lateral ties. They had their own collection, relegated to the attic, but one or two of them with their children were displayed. Peter’s painting mattered.

The barn had waited for eons for him to discover it, bring out the grooves and striations visible as you looked.

Magnus too had looked, but he had no talent for sketching. His namesake son had it, but not like Peter’s. ^

^

^

Grant, his friend, and Peter went off together on a walk. Charlotte and Magnus cleared things away and then went out into the garden. It was half past 10, but it felt like late afternoon. From her chair on the terrace, Charlotte looked out at her garden. Six weeks of work were paying off. A low hum of bees mixed with the sounds of birds and the distant barking of a dog. Soon it would be time for the summer party that brought out neighbors and town folk, a blend that seemed to work despite the social gaps between the guests.

Magnus breathed in the solstice and its fecundity, the whole smell of summer. Kat might be knitting, he thought, her children running around excitedly, free of parental restraint. How often she recounted her daily round, with wry observations and those sweaters that to Magnus were the pure expressions of her heart.

2. Christmas

Christian was happy with his new wife, Magnus had heard. The party unfolded around them, and a former student introduced him to Tine—smaller and prettier than the photograph Oda showed him suggested.

They'd moved to a house not far from his, so Magnus introduced her to another neighbor. As her husband and daughter had wandered away, Tine soon headed off to look for them.

He thought of Christian's easel, prominent in the large room of the cottage they took the year he spent painting in a fishing village in the west. There was a different painting both times he visited. Based on Oda’s comments, he'd pieced together an idea of Tine. Christian was honest in all things, including his growing love for her, his conflicts about ending their marriage, and his desire to start again. When Magnus arrived, Christian would stay with Tine in another village up the coast. These were artists’ colonies, really, although few of the artists stuck it out when summer ended. Christian had wanted a break from city life, a sabbatical.

Kat and Tor would have been at the party, too, but they were at a concert, Magnus knew. This was their world, Tor had warned him, but it reminded him of the early years of his marriage, when their children were young and parties like this were an adventure. Christmas brought a slew of them, but there was less necessity now for him to go. Yet this one attracted him. He walked around, sampling the feast and encountering first this and then that old friend, some he hadn't seen in years. Odd that so much time had passed. Odd how life came full circle, that Tine stood there and they spoke as if nothing had ever happened, just neighbors now. ^

^

^

The moon mixed with December's snow to light up the branches of the trees. Magnus stood waiting for the tram—its bright lamp visible in the distance. He'd stayed longer at the party than he'd planned. Kat might also be heading home, the concert still floating around and through her.

He’d sent a letter recently to Oda: bittersweet to find things thus. She’s written back that his letter was an affront, coming so quickly after their latest rupture. Never was the word she used. Once, encountering her on the road, she told him off and then added that her mood would change. Never was a sometime thing.

Early one May evening, they met for a drink. The conversation rambled and it was hard for him to guess what prompted it when she suddenly mentioned visiting Christian and Tine at their new house. "That was hard," she said, and started crying. Was that the purpose of their meeting, he wondered later?

(To be continued.)

Postscript My projected novella borrows from two sources, my numerous visits to the old National Gallery in Oslo, and the Bloomsbury writers and painters. In reality, their overlap in time is inexact, and my models for some of the characters may not have formed a cohort, even as representatives of different generations. Nor is it clear that any of them would have known my great-grandfather, although he may have known of them. I borrowed him as my protagonist. He was a publisher in fact, his pull-down school maps a runaway success.

I heard somewhere that he was knighted by the Danish Court. Who really knows? But he pulled my family into the upper middle class, in what was then a subset of Sweden, soon to have a self-chosen King. Again, the dates of the story are inexact—around the time Norway declared its independence (1905), a declaration met with indifference by Sweden, to the surprise of Norway’s Parliament. It was viewed as a poor country, won from Denmark after the Napoleonic Wars—a dependency, not worth fighting over.

The topography and features of the summer house and its environs are the other source. It still exists.

The cemetery has overtaken the old church’s fields and orchards, most of them, to house the local dead.

Several generations of my cousins are buried there. It was once a scene of temporary clairvoyance, among the odd events that have happened to me, evidence of the usually hidden aspects of everyday experience.

This fragment surfaced some 15 years after I wrote it. Whatever one can say about it, it showed me that I can write fiction at length, which I’d doubted. I remembered writing this, but thought it was at most a few pages, like two other novellas I began, both promising but halted when I couldn’t shape them as intended.

One of them ends the very first issue of this journal, and bravely promises continuation, as promised here.

What’s here was edited and sometimes briefly elaborated as I brought it over from the manuscript.

The passage of time simplified things, as it was easier to see what I was trying to do. As I did this, outlines of a continuation came to me. Since writing it, I’ve read several novellas by Fleur Jaeggy. A memoir of like size by Stendhal is also a favorite. It’s a good length, more an extended short story than a novel. But it’s much longer than any other story I’ve written. I rarely write stories, and had all but rules it out. I make no clams for this one except I managed to write it and when I read it again, I decided to keep going. “A socalled coincidence,” my cousin Øistein called such uncanny episodes. He wrote a bestseller on a healer, and his guest bedroom was where my clairvoyance arose. “Ley lines run through it,” he explained. Ghosts, also, who arrive without ceremony, delivering a message. Without meaning to, bits of their world rub off.

The era of the story has long interested me—the transition Europe made from the century of Victoria and Metternich, an arranged and constricting marriage, to modernity. Walter Benjamin said it was there all along, like Peter in his evening clothes. At the National Gallery, I saw narrative’s hold loosen as painting gained expression, finally becoming pure form and color. In a lecture, I learned that late Hans Hofmann still painted from terrain, each block a feature, viewed as if through a massively unfocused camera lens.

My great-grandparents and their family at the summer house on their anniversary.

Common Place | Text and images Š 2020 by John J. Parman | complace.j2parman.com