“WE CAN GO ON LIKE THIS FOR THE REST OF OUR LIVES.” COMMON PLACE NO. 19: AN ORDINARY LIFE CONSIDERED.
The title quote is from the last chapter of Penelope Fitzgerald’s Innocence. The stoical Cesare, confronted by Salvatore, the distraught husband of his beloved cousin, Chiara, sets the volatile doctor straight. This is one of my favorite novels, and I read recently in the LRB that Fitzgerald wrote a longer version, which I would love to read. On a spectrum of life’s types, Cesare and Salvatore are two ends, both revolving around a beautiful woman.
A measure of bourgeois working life is the flow of shirts to and from the cleaners. Mine also tracked how formal work attire gave way to casual and then ultimately to the current tendency of men to dress like boys. When my daily round became irregular, the pace of cleaning slowed. I still wear shirts like this when I conduct business in town, some of it, but I shifted to work shirts and workmen’s jackets, sourced cheaply, trading one uniform for another. I’m still making a transition from working life to leisure. The bourgeois theme applies to both. I’m bourgeois to the core and long for a bourgeois republic or more of one than is locally on offer. (I’m reading an account of my class—a three-volume doorstopper that I may or may not get through.) Leisure, per Aristotle, is what I call “my own work” or “work on my own account,” as distinguished from the work I did for others from childhood forward. I’d separate the latter into two broad categories: work done for money; and work done at other’s suggestions. The two overlap, of course, but the second category was primarily reputational, when I look back at it. What you’re reading here is a product of my leisure. It may or may not affect my reputation, but this isn’t why I’m doing it. And I would have to say that I’ve been doing things like this almost my entire life, fitting them in amid the work I did for others—at their behest or suggestion. Some of that work I loved doing. I was lucky in this respect, finding relatively good fits between my talents and my activities, and patronage for developing new things. Several of these things outlasted my tenure. One is back from the dead and may do more than anything for my reputation. It almost cost me my marriage, but that’s another story. I may tell it, after a fashion. Leisure probably benefits from fitting into the cracks of working life, because organizing it is difficult. This is the main challenge of transitioning from one state to the other: how to give it a reasonable structure; how to allow for the apparent wastes of time that in reality are crucial to the productive use of leisure; and how deal with death as the leitmotif of a longish life, requiring you to conjure up the child’s trick of being caught up in the everyday, not caring how it’s spent and yet caring how it’s spent—wanting to fish, wanting the fish, and wanting to be the fish, in succession, and also wanting to be out on the water or beside it, marveling at the sunlight, sounds, summer’s heat.
The rhythm of leisure is elusive and I feel constantly that I’ve got it wrong. Zen has this contradiction, too, between advocating a kind of naturalness about the activities of the day and then imposing a schedule on it that no human would adhere to naturally. The workweek has aspects of this, made worse by commuting. I used to get up at 6 a.m. to hit the train at 7 a.m., before the crush, and then work until 7 p.m. to avoid the crush home, but this 12hour regime was defeated by the steady stretching out of rush hour, especially in the evening. I was so glad to stop. What is leisure’s rhythm? Does it even have one, or do the different strands of leisure have their own, like the tuning of instruments to whatever key things will be on a given day? I suspect the latter, and that what’s missing for me is a bit of deliberation about the time ahead, asking what it asks of me, to be used fruitfully. For time is fecund and fecundity has a rhythm of its own. Less of an ear than a nose for this or an eye, an attentiveness. And this is an important point, that fecundity shifts from the species to life itself. The Buddha’s comment that the grass, too, shared what he grasped at last, the essential sameness of every transient thing in this universal boat, possibly an accordion that hits entropy’s limit and then takes a really deep breath. Opening out to this other kind weakens the hold of our species’ telos. Life’s fecundity is the distillation of this other thing, a homeopathic. “Death is the great question,” according to some Zen adept I read once, but in fact there’s no question. The rhythms of leisure reflect how it, too, takes hold, a second, unavoidable telos. We do what we can while we can. As we’re told most of our lives to think of the future, its foreshortening is unnerving. No strategy earns us a pardon. Buddha’s ladder, as I think of it, is to savor whatever leisure life affords us, whatever savoring is still possible. I would say that life is the great question. Death doesn’t really need answers. Equanimity without terror is what’s wanted, death being the end of every story. I so admired a friend for making jokes before dying in his sleep. Life is the great question, and leisure is I guess section seven, following a master’s course in working for others. But we’ve been practicing all the time, particularly as children. We know quite well how to work for ourselves. I wrote a poem with a rhyming pattern borrowed from Rilke. It riffs on Natalia Ginzburg’s essay, “The Little Virtues,” brought to mind by something a friend wrote recently about translating her prose in a beginning Italian class because it was so simple, “ordinary” in the sense that the architect Joseph Esherick used it—an apparent simplicity that’s imbued with meaning because it’s imbued with resonance. Here’s the poem: No blame Simple language, much emotion figure in Natalia’s oeuvre. It reached me here, an ocean and two land masses distant.
A familiar city seems a redoubt compared to exile in a village. The vows made when we marry lead us to an unseen ledge.
To write is all that behooves her, she reports, a point consistent with prose that makes no claim to be more than it is. Ordinary.
Like a diary, the everyday; like alleyways we overlook that end blindly. Feel our way, hoping not to sense alarm.
As the I Ching says, “No blame.” We live without foreknowledge, which may prompt writing out those times we failed to tarry.
Looking back, the time it took; how it came anyway, the harm.
I wrote an article with Esherick in the early 1980s, summarizing his approach to architecture over the decades. His use of “ordinary” came back to me when I read Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. Esherick was patrician, a WASP Philadelphian, nephew of the arts-and-crafts hero Wharton Esherick. I liked and admired him, but his “ordinary” was bespoke, wealth hiding out in the minimalist, modernist vernacular the Bay Region favored.
Ginzburg’s “ordinary” takes these everyday words and phrases, and builds a human narrative. The best of Esherick’s houses do this materially and spatially, “making a place” for that narrative to unfold. The landscape and view figure, with the openings—windows and doors, and their extensions—connecting indoors with outdoors. He used William Wurster’s habit of letting windows frame views, not worrying about the façade as viewed externally. Not that the exterior appearance was entirely ignored, but views took prominence, being part of the experience. I read that an Elizabeth Hardwick novel, written in the wake of marital difficulties, solved the problem of her husband by omitting him altogether. In “The Little Virtues,” Ginzburg defers what should be the main event. It arrives, but not even as something foretold. She adheres to how it seemed to her, a hiatus that took on greater value in retrospect, but was lived through with certain reservations, a longing for urban life, “normality.” It’s “ordinary” as what we expect, in a general way—familiar and benign, yet still capable of surprise, shock, terror, and death. A friend’s wife asked how to rework her life. She invited suggestions. I wrote that I thought this was a chronic issue. Think back to other times when it’s come up, because how you dealt with it then is likely to be relevant to how you’ll resolve it now. “Resolve” is the right word. Life demands episodic reworking, up until the end. “New facts,” as Maynard Keynes called them, force us to revisit our assumptions. Resisting them is symptomatic of a mind that’s lost its timbre. I too have wondered lately how to rework my life. It’s an ongoing issue, part of moving from fulltime work to leisure dotted with obligations. Leisure is a commitment to oneself, but arguably also to an imagined audience. I do it “out loud,” this work I do at my own volition, a trail that others can follow if they want. The reworking is a freedom granted us, implicit in the time we have genuinely at our disposal. Disposable time is like disposable income, capital of a sort that we can invest or squander. In my previous working life, I fit it in. A certain amount of time was needed to recover from obligation. Now, relatively freed of obligation, investing time seems to want a structure. It no longer has another to which it relates as a leitmotif, but becomes the main event. I could reverse the field and make the obligations the leitmotif. My calendar suggests this, each obligation an island or hillock in a river or landscape of flat or fallow time, undifferentiated on first view. These less important things draw my attention. But for someone in a river trade or a field’s husbandry, the view is different. Obligations could shift in light of this to what serves these occupations, as opposed to what distracts. Abandoning what was is likely to be a good idea, lest it hinder me from knowing the river or the field, and setting out into it committedly. Following up on this thought, I asked the I Ching for advice on what to where to put my emphasis. It gave me hexagram 33, “retreat” and, via the fourth moving line, hexagram 53, “development (gradual progress).” I consult two versions of this classic, and the older one noted the tendency to remain attached to what we love, which I took to mean “what’s habitual,” habits being small vices and virtues in my view. But the main message was to proceed carefully, in a slow and friendly manner. The older version also noted that a tree on a mountainside takes forever to root, but—once rooted—is visible. Success in small things, the first hexagram declared. Retreat from what? One question. What’s habitual? What are my small, potentially destructive loves? Another. The hexagram distinguishes between a strategic withdrawal, giving way in order at some point to return, and panic. But still, from what? The holdovers of my working life came to mind—the risk of repeating what I’ve done before. A dream I had compared this to a river that meanders in such a way that you cross it many times. Make the crossing of it a theme, I was told. I wrote this instruction down, but it didn’t take hold. I took it to be a theme for poems, but it may have been directed at life itself, rivers as Zen barriers, and crossing always into new territory. In Michael Nylan’s new translation of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War I read a discussion of terrain. Whether one is retreating or advancing, terrain is a variable—familiar but different, unfamiliar but like others. We bring what we know, and the dangers of knowing are hubris and assumption. Terrain is best regarded as new. The encountered river is new. Bad habits consume our disposable time. “Resource” may be a better word for it than “capital,” reminding us that our leisure, finite in any case, may become a stranded asset if our capacity to use it effectively is impaired. It follows that we can judge the potential benefit or harm of our habits by considering if they’re consuming us or if, on the contrary, they’re prolonging our capacity for effective use. How we define “effective” is a separate question.
Much of our effectiveness is enabled by others. Human interaction constantly prompts thoughts, ideas, and actions that wouldn’t have occurred to us, or taken the form they took, without another’s involvement. My writing partner, Richard Bender, is often on one end or the other of this process. Over nearly five decades, it’s sparked a lot of things, including a chapter we contributed to a book commemorating the centenary of Giancarlo De Carlo, the Italian architect and planner. RB had met him, but I only knew him as a name. RB had a raft of memories of De Carlo’s contemporaries, many he’d also met. Paolo Ceccarelli, who instigated the project, aided us by answering a question we posed about De Carlo, and I incorporated both his invitation and his answer into our dialogue. In the same spirit, I started working with poetry editors. The first is the main editor of a press that specializes in experimental poetry, I read. My poems don’t fall into that category, but she has been helpful in conveying a sense of what she looks for in a poem and how she, a poet herself, writes and revises. The third time we met, over a two-year stretch, I understood comments that I know she made at our first meeting. The second is a working editor. She’s also a reader of poetry, speaking up for her desire to read poems straight up. I learned this the last time we met, when she told me at three different points not to divulge a poem’s background. The first is set against explanation within the poem itself, which is different; the second has less of an issue with that. Print solidifies the text, while its digitization allows endless tweaks. I made a selection of my own work recently and had copies printed—first three, then ten, then another ten, then three. Each order varies slightly from the last. Then I mail them out, some to friends and others as a gesture or speculation. The date says Winter 2020, so when that’s over, I’ll put a halt to this. But the impulse relates to a desire “to pass manuscripts around” as Diderot did. That impressed me, although he did it to avoid prosecution, printing being dangerous in mid-17th century Paris. Print solidifies the text, and the editorial team’s responsibility is to ensure that the text is as solid as possible. That end game, always grueling in the face of the printer’s deadline, is the challenge and a big part of the fun. It’s the opposite of leisure. Relatively little an editorial team does is leisurely, although a great deal of it is enjoyable. “Passing manuscripts around” is a different tradition, word of mouth and bespoke in terms of its audience. I don’t really know who reads the online versions of what I write, although I’ve met a few of them. The print copies I send out are a known world, however small. Like correspondence, sending them around has led to replies in kind. There’s a discursive quality to almost everything I write. I saw this, rereading a letter I sent to an academic. I sent two postscripts, which may or may not have helped her make sense of what I wrote. Is my life like this? The day unfolds as “rounds” that are prompted by whatever is formally scheduled, the weather, and what’s at hand. I went out to the barn and saw a book of lectures, picking it up and reading half of one. There are a dozen books of which this could be said. Yet this speaks to larger topics that float above the immediate ones. Discursive is a note to self.
A poetry editor said that the poems in a journal I like tend to be about one thing. I’ve written a few of this type, but most wander around in the middle and only remember and return to the opening theme later. Her assessment of the issue of the journal was that its appearance struck her more than its content. It’s beautifully designed, an aesthetic that makes me want my poems to be in it, but in their discursiveness, they seem not to fit. One poem that was published in an online journal surprised me. I submitted it on a whim, having just written it, along with others I preferred. When I put my own selection together, resonance was my criterion. Some prose made it in, but the prose was harder to excerpt, even if the original texts are fairly short. They’re discursive too of course. Agoraphobia strikes me as reasonable. It’s a desire to detach from one’s circle, as the innate desire not to offend is like Virginia Woolf’s angel in the house—a cohort of block wardens ready to pipe up at the sight of an infraction. The gambits of writing for the drawer and only handing things around are symptoms of the caution they induce. If I examine my beliefs, they are contradictory—sympathetic to several parties but loyal mainly to my interests. As I get older, the more widely publicized beliefs of younger others, their sympathies, run up against my personal history. Getting older has two basic risks: to ossify or to know too much. Both make one wary of change. The ossified are intolerant of it, while those soaked in experience have a heightened sense of where things might be headed. They often feel they’ve been here before, which makes them skeptical of the nostrums and opinions put forward. This looks like reaction, but is tempered by agreement on what’s problematic, given that problems are chronic. In Fitzgerald’s novel Innocence, the character Cesare tends to the family’s vineyard, which borders the Chianti region but isn’t part of it. His main preoccupation is with getting the definers of the region to include his fields. But coincidentally, according to some reviewers of the novel, he has always been in love with Chiara, his cousin. I missed this, despite reading the novel twice—the reviewers say it’s given away by small details. It may be true. Is it accidental that Cesare is tending a vineyard? Metaphorically, per Isaiah, this stands for courtship—a big detail. The idea is to attract a wife, but Chiara is attracted to her Sicilian medical doctor, a visceral man of action whose turn to medicine reflects an abhorrence of his father’s worship of the ailing Gramsci. Salvatore is a material man. When, at the end of the novel, Cesare encounters him, Salvatore is in a midlife crisis, looking to borrow a gun to kill himself. And Cesare is ready to lend him one, but then Chiara phones, bringing both men to their senses. The agoraphobia of Cesare may be a third kind, walling off the outer world to diminish his own suffering, but answering his phone and leaving his door open to these others, choosing in the end to nudge life in one direction because a loved one asks it. How lucky Salvatore is, Cesare may think as he tends a vineyard for a family that includes them both. Yet Cesare may realize that he’s won Chiara’s heart, also—a love rooted in the familial anchorage he provides her. What’s the metric behind your claim? I was asked on Twitter. Fifty years of observation, I said. The issue was the inner core of the Bay Area, which I believe is overcrowded because its transit network has been starved of funds over this same period. But the question points to a truism about the current regional debates: a tendency to push a reductive set of numbers, like density targets or blanket allowable heights, in an effort to get around delays in building new housing. That there are delays is true, a fact of life in the inner core. Many of them could be resolved if by-right development to existing zoning was possible, but the process is mired in politics and every last thing is case by case, a crap shoot between owners and neighbors at the smaller scale, and a war of attrition at the larger. That the average Millennial would like an affordable place to live is understandable. That comes out as “Build at all costs,” but my guess is that the boxy crap that results isn’t where that cohort will end up living. It’s an interim fix while they look for something better. Some of the new housing is good enough that others will move in as they move out. A lot of it is badly built and generic. Spot zoning in existing neighborhoods disrupts that fabric with buildings that are out of scale with them, a move justified by a putative “better future.” Opposition to growth starts there—a legitimate fear that some outsize monster will land next door. The latest legislation makes this more likely. “Let’s sell the house before we lose our view,” a member of my household said recently at dinner. The view in question is the Bay, Angel Island, and the coastal range as it rises north of the Gate. It’s easy to undermine a region by forgetting the qualities that make it what it is. This extends to neighborhoods, too. By coincidence, a friend tweets a comment that quantitative is yin, qualitative yang, in so many words.
My library surrounds and admonishes me. I read a reference to Thoreau’s Walden just now, remembering again that I started an annotated edition, marveling at the contemporary feel of the writing, but then set it down. Since then, I’ve read from his journals, finished a spiritual biography of him, and started a more conventional one. I also read Stanley Cavell’s The Senses of Walden, the book that first attracted me to him. So, not entirely a bust. But the main book remains where I left it on the shelf. Other books, authors or topics that I sought to open, are untouched. I’m not the only reader faced with this dilemma. Some argue that assembling a library doesn’t commit you to reading all of it. Sometimes, looking at it, I have an urge to cull it in the Marie Kondo manner. There are certainly some titles that could go, but others—an example is a collection of books on structuralism—retain their hold on me. To organize them would also be a good idea, as many are buried behind others in doubled rows. This could be a project, to reacquaint myself with my books, organize them, and skim off anything that that can be safely skimmed. But equally, I could commit myself to a reading program. I did this two summers ago, but then stopped instead of forging on to read the main works of my subject, Walter Benjamin. I read a few things, but not systematically. In any activity of this sort, time is the crucial dimension. This is the model of pedagogy, but I found it trying to jam a syllabus into 10, 12, or 15 weeks. I don’t read that way. So, I need to set out a syllabus and set the right pace. Buying books is a vice, a form of gluttony, eyes bigger than my brain’s capacity to absorb it all. I try to temper it, but every year, when I tote it up, books are big item. The literary reviews and the cultural supplements do their part of whet my appetite, but often the book disappoints. Many books are readily conveyed in articles and reviews. It’s probably best to acknowledge this. Books are also hyped as brilliant that prove otherwise when you read them. There are clues—endorsements by business leaders, for example. Virginia Woolf found contemporary fiction problematic, preferring the work of writers of earlier generations. The passage of time winnows the field down. This distance makes it easier to recognize generational tics and consider, on balance, what else is there. A writer like Natalia Ginzburg or Penelope Fitzgerald may have staying power because her mind was elsewhere or unclouded by ego, ambition, machismo in its male and female forms. If writing is an experiment and/or a need, then some distance in time makes it clearer what worked and/or what was worth the effort. Could I act on this? Looking back, a good deal of my “deciding” was in reality letting time pass in order to discover what did and didn’t have a real claim on my interest. Buying books is analogous to the way we’re always looking around us, wondering what we’re missing, adding goals and ambitions to to-do lists, New Year’s resolutions, and diaries. A library brings these impulses—expressed as purchases--along with it, whereas in life we eventually let them go. In short, a library embodies this looking around. That mine is overgrown and disorganized also says something. As the leitmotif of my working life, which was both focused and productive, leisure’s laissez-faire qualities were attractive. It’s only now, when leisure takes center stage, that focus and productivity arise as issues. Despite its impromptu nature, I got a fair amount done outside of work. Indeed, I owe my last 22-year assignment to this. But turning to it, considering what I have in mind—experiments and needs alike—it warrants rethinking. And yet this too is episodic. Despite the “laissez-faire” above, getting things done is a lifetime issue. I’ve always had a strong imagination that actively substituted for tangibility at different points. I connect it to poetry, which is the slimmest form by which something imagined or intuited is brought into the world. I’ve always written shorter rather than longer pieces, by preference but also by necessity. It’s odd that I’ve sometimes dreamt of entire cities, including what I believed to be the City of God that Augustine described, a place of uncanny beauty. Beauty attracts me and strikes me as the only reason for being—something that arises in countless guises. As a child, I was fascinated by the colors of gasoline floating on water, and also by the way pooled water animated small landscapes. I could extrapolate nature from the smallest instances of it, and beauty seemed to be their common feature. Beauty is tangible. So much hinges on this. It runs across the senses, and words run after it; the arts, also. It gets us in trouble and drives life forward. There are no norms for it, as we’re born into myriad individual relations with it that we replicate, vary, and extend. Words are primary for me, but my mind is suffused with beauty that was tangible in ways that I can only hint at by that means. Experimenting with them reflects a need: to set down a life amid so much beauty, even when it was pained or painful. We live in this manner, too. Or I have lived like this. I can’t speak for any other, but am desirous nonetheless to convey the whole of it. Strange, that desire, as if beauty demanded that we hark back to its indelible moment, etched in memory, and represent it convincingly for others.
Death is one of God’s gifts to us, a dispensation. This is contrary to how we tend to look at it, dreading it. I think this attitude is conditioned by our instinct for survival and our fear of pain. This is understandable and I share it, but I also see that longevity is wearing, and not simply in a physical sense. We feel the debilitating effects of aging, certainly, and the previews of them that the everyday discloses tears at our spirit, even as we empathize. Yet we can accept this stoically as the price of living, “consider the alternative,” etc.—the rationale for persevering regardless. What finally undermines us may be sheer distaste, especially our natures shy away from barking. To be obstinate is another option—to hang the priests who appear seeking deathbed repentance or rail on social media. To resist is to scratch at frustration with the aim of relieving it. At a certain point, though, there’s no relief. That dark night is like a backyard in summer, crickets audible, stars visible—a space of emptiness amid intergenerational provocation. What we take as tradition is far more malleable than we think. Often, it’s just what we grew up with, accepted as givens and carried along unquestioned. Gender pronouns are a good example, and their proliferation and the insistence on an individual’s right to specify them to agree with inner feelings is disconcerting to those for whom this is a considerable distance from their own verities. Yet when I examine myself, these shades of difference are real and meaningful, part of inner experience. It just never occurred to me to vary how I present myself, but exactly this is relatively common now, and pronouns are a sign of it. What they announce is the possibility. In the New York Times, a willowy young woman asserts her binary nature. In my experience, mere pronouns don’t do justice to the spectra we cross inwardly. We’re multivariant, and gender is a convention handed us, along with clothing and sanctioned behaviors. We grow up with it, learning how well it fits. I remember that I was incredulous at first that marriage could be extended. In my mind, it was wrapped up in procreation, but then mutual commitment came forward. When Gavin Newsom, then the mayor of San Francisco, first enabled gay couples to marry, the number of long-committed couples in their eighties who did so was striking. You looked at them and thought, how could anyone object to this? It’s a variation on “What would Jesus do?” He’s relevant to these issues, questioning tradition as he did. “Love your neighbor as yourself” covers a lot. On a whim, I bought Henri Cole’s book Orphic Paris. Its black-and-white photo illustrations are reminiscent of W.G. Sebald. Cole sets his prose narrative loosely on the arc of time spent living in a city. His mind roams back in time and to other places, like Marseilles. A rooted cosmopolitan is the self that Cole depicts, someone whose view is simultaneously here and now, a microcosm of the time and space we move through and temporarily occupy, and in the now-time Walter Benjamin described, an unfolding present in touch with a wellspring of memory and anticipation that it animates. But the transmissions are sporadic and piecemeal, often falling short of a narrative. Cole constructs one, herding these memories and impressions to say something more about where he’s been. A theme of the book is love between men, especially older and younger men, and the pain associated with having to hide it in the past or not to hide it, but to live with the problems this entailed. Also, the terror of AIDS. Cole is about nine years younger than me, in the cohort of several male friends who married the men they loved. A strength of the book is the way he conveys what he feels. He quotes a passage from Hemingway on Gertrude Stein comparing male homosexual love unfavorably to the love of women for each other, wondering if she really said it. What he describes is a deeper friendship. But what he depicts is how friendships are for me, a series of impressions and memories that accrue and come forward when I meet the other person. My sense is that they don’t accrue for everyone, but I’ve never tested this by asking. I’m not capable of turning away from another, once befriended. That thread is always there, for me, waiting to be picked up again. Literally decades can pass. Is this an oddity? Cole has this tendency, too, I intuit—a strong memory for the impressions people made on him, even in passing, even when their flaws and faults are unmistakable. Family is where this begins, our affections formed and kept like saints’ days in the calendar of repetition that is mostly daily life. Not everyone survives, I realized, going through a sheaf of old letters, including some from two women who were once taken with me. I remembered one but forgot the other. The remembered one was married to a near-classmate from high school. She was Irish, good looking. They seemed a good couple, but ended up divorcing. She lived in Woodstock, died of brain cancer, left a daughter. Her letters are still fun to read—colorful. The other woman put a lot of time into hers. I wonder if she’s still alive?
I married because I wanted children. The desire for children was sudden, like a light switching on. When I met my wife, I knew that we would marry, but what this meant wasn’t clear to me. It was a sense, and eventually I acted on it, prompted by her sister’s assurance that she wanted to marry me and by my wanting children. Marrying her and having children transferred the love I felt for my parents and my sister to her and our children. That this love has endured speaks to what it is, a bond that mixed with desire but was more than it. Let’s call it a familial bond. Desire reflects the so-called chemistry of attraction and its expression, set off between two people. I had a slow fuse on this score, my natural reticence overcome first by a friend’s death and then by the desire for births. Desire ebbs and flows in marriage. It can be impeded, causing a crisis to which the married couple responds without a real guidebook. The truisms around marriage are all true, it turns out, but of little practical use while living through it. The love desire inspires is the real thing, but its reality is problematic. It’s tempting to dismiss it in retrospect as a kind of intoxication, but this is untrue to its nature, which is transient but enduringly memorable. If married love endures in time, its tangibility renewed constantly by the everyday familiarity of the couple as a household, the love that arises from desire is wrapped up in experiential memory. Like other such memories, it’s like snippets of film, if films were in fact fully sensory. I could recreate in outline how it unfolded, but it would only be an outline. Correspondence gets closer in a chronological sense, but is still distant from the memories themselves. The letters have their own meaning, but when things fall apart, there’s a desire to deny them this, wanting to take them back or destroy them. I haven’t reread such correspondence, although I remember fragments of it. It was a propellent and an expression of desire felt when it was mutual; when it ceased to be, it too became problematic. It travels with us, this “real thing” desire spurs. It arises spontaneously rather than being something to which we return. Each time, what arises has a distinct meaning or resonance. Signs that invoke this person also vary in their meaning, even as they unerringly point to her. There’s a trail of association and each “present” adds to it. I once noted to one such person that the love we shared was real, despite everything else. She seemed to agree. An odd thing about such connections is that they can revive in conversation, finding the easy affection that intimacy enabled. It’s a brief glimpse that speaks to the tendrils love establishes, which never die out altogether. The fragments that surface have the same quality, an affirmation that what one experienced, despite its apparent failure to take hold, put down roots enough to bloom perennially when a mind or two happens upon them. No one sets out on Horace’s glittering sea with them in mind, the remnants that survive the heartache received and given. These glimmers of connection, when they surface, compensate for so much else by granting them some meaning.
My mother survived the Spanish flu pandemic that ravaged the planet in 1918. It immobilized everyone, she told me. It killed the painter Egon Schiele, his wife, and their child—a death he seems to have anticipated, painting a portrait of the three of them before his child’s birth. Now the coronavirus wends its way east and west. My oldest son brings me three big boxes of dried ramen noodle packages and a sheet plastic-encased pack of bottled water. My wife and I discuss buying masks. Earthquakes, wildfires, and plagues accompany ordinary life, along with more mundane hazards like negligent drivers and street criminals. My mother was three. She lived to be 75, dying slowly of a stroke—not as quickly as my father did, four years later, felled by his failing guts before leukemia got him. So, I have to throw in the perils of aging into the mix. At my father’s suggestion, I found a good doctor, but I follow her advice slowly, I notice, based on my reading of its priority. When I first met with her, my blood pressure was high. I knew it was, and I dealt with it immediately. Maintaining it is harder—it’s easy to let things slide. This is an aspect of the larger question of how to organize one’s life—a question that also requires maintenance. It’s a regime, I guess, that you put in place and then adjust episodically, with the doctor assisting in the recalibration. After my last visit, I increased the dosage of the medicine I take for high blood pressure by 50 percent—I split the tablets in half, which feels primitive and inexact. I use a splitter, bought at the pharmacy. While I was in Singapore in November, I told myself I should join a gym and exercise more methodically. “Don’t overdo it,” my doctor warned. I haven’t done it yet, always thinking that I can walk enough not to have to bother, but I felt in Singapore that I would be in better shape if I did it—shape in the sense of trimmer, that tautness that comes with working out and is absent otherwise. I’ve done this at different points, usually to counter frustration or because I was in love with someone. Separating the impulse from desire is one more bit of adjusting that comes with the territory of getting older. On this score, the Tao Te Ching advises, “He treats his body as separate and thus it is preserved.” Put desire aside, in short. (A friend once told me that she knew a colleague was having an affair because he was too fit for a man his age.) Like a time-capsule, a novella I started just resurfaced. I wrote it in the mid-2000s, seeking to apply a maxim of Nikos Kazantzakis quoted in Lawrence Durrell’s book about Province, Caesar’s Vast Ghost: “The great artist looks beneath the flux of everyday reality and sees the eternal, unchanging symbols. He takes ephemeral events and relocates them in an undying atmosphere.” Writing this out now, I doubt very much that I adhered to this, but the novella shifts back in time and imagines the world of my great-grandfather, born in the 1830s and by century’s end a successful publisher in Christiana, as Oslo was called before Norway broke away from Sweden in 1905. In an exchange with my daughter, I texted that I was surprised how much of it I’d written. Seeing it makes me think of serializing it here, as I thought to do with another novella, “Caucasia,” in the first number of this journal. That novella started well, but when I went to extend it, it turned into something else than what I intended. A third novella, “Cosmopolis,” also arouses my interest in revisiting it. Letting it be what it wanted to be now seems right. Other things surfaced—a letter and two things related to the correspondent; a paper my daughter wrote and two notes from her; and a one-page note-to-self that includes the Kazantzakis quote as an admonition and gives a prescription to my future self on “Art of Living,” “As a Writer,” “Journeying,” “Cultivation,” and “Practicalities.” I’m unsure exactly when it was written, but possibly in my mid-fifties, judging from a title mentioning 40 years and a parenthetical proviso, “Ever the optimist…” It mentions an ambition to learn Latin and its offshoots, and to find “a second root,” which is to say a second place that feels like home. My daughter and I recently discussed Madrid. “I have to learn Spanish,” I wrote her. “And revive my French and even my German.” But Latin figured, ever since I read the Odes of Horace in Stephen Mitchell’s translation, the Latin on the left side with its amazing concision. The note to self has small maxims of its own. “Perseverance in true things; openness to everything else.” (I agree. Only life itself reveals the truth of things, and even that truth is a constant subject of internal debate.) “To fulfill what was given me.” (In the end, it’s all you have, plus the desire to do something with it. “Fulfill” is to say, “Make full use of it,” whatever “full” or “use” might mean. Sometimes you have to come back to something to realize that more is possible than you imagined. In a talk I heard once at Stanford, one of the leads on a windshield of a Tesla—a remarkable feat of glass manufacture—said that the main thing about innovation is not make decisions prematurely. The longer you can delay deciding, all the while madly working on the thing in question, the better. Life is decidedly tipped against this, but it sometimes produces that rare thing, a departure from the ordinary.
Rebecca Solnit wrote how much she learned from younger women. It prompted me to write a note of thanks to a younger woman friend who patiently brought me along with her cohort. But Solnit’s article also made me think of people older than me, still on the planet, who have things to teach. In ordinary life, people are reference points. It’s often unwitting, but we observe them and take notes out of admiration or dismay. One human dilemma is to weigh what we observe coherently. Some appear to be comfortable judging others absolutely. But not much is absolute. It doesn’t absolve the bad things people do, nor does it preclude making pragmatic decisions about individuals when their untoward behavior is chronic. As they say in baseball, one game isn’t a season. A season, though, is a season. It takes a long while to clear the air. More than one, and I think all bets are off. But what does this imply for the rest of such people’s acts and works? Art, literature, and philanthropy are minefields of taint. Looking back, all history is subject to alternate readings, often done with relish to overthrow an earlier generation’s canon or order. I think it’s a mistake to reject these readings out of hand. Think of all those statue heads without their noses. The ups and downs of fame and reputation are how it is, a game played by scholars and by crowds. We may deplore the latest targets, but talent has a way of outlasting its deprecators. Room is made for others deemed more worthy, but they end up subject to the same intergenerational scrutiny. No one really knows whose work will last. The cries of youth signal changes in taste and mores. Each generation is convinced it has it right, but how could this be? Life extends backward and forward, barely anchored in the wobbly and/or contested present. Twitter exemplifies what happens when each instant is expressed, threads of competing views that devolve into spats. Even from these we can learn something, the way we sense another’s mood in the intimacy of a household: the mood of the crowd. A long life involves of the unraveling of much that seems securely packaged. The confusion and even anger that arises is in proportion with the scattering that results, the kind of disorder that induces dismay or panic. The decades of practice that are the heart of expertise can seem irrelevant as the objects of their application change, unless one can make a case for their value in the new order. The case can make itself if a longing arises for the coherence the older forms gave that the new forms have not yet developed. One becomes a bridge or a means. My novella needs two scenes that offer denouement. In a poem, I note that life seldom provides a proper ending. Not even death ends our controversies, but these scenes really form an epilogue to two strands of the protagonist’s inner and outer world. In Innocence, Fitzpatrick’s denouement jumps ahead in time. Denouement is a fancy word. It means “to untie” in French, I just read. One may want to use that ribbon again, it implies. “Unravel” is another form of denouement. Among the difficult things about a sharp break with another person is the abrupt end of the narrative we constructed in which we both featured. Narrative is a stand-in word for what we shared with the other, or thought we shared, and how the relationship buoyed us up, sometimes artificially. When it dissipates, life goes flat, but it’s the ego collapsing—the protective layer added to ourselves as toddler to compensate for the damage life did to us. Love lets us “just be,” A.H. Almaas argues (in The Point of Existence), but we don’t know how we got there. When relationships fall precipitously apart, the injured parties struggle to find that ground, not realizing they’re standing on it. They become stuck, unable to unfold with life around them. This unraveling is a denouement in the sense that it can mark an ending or a transition. The grief of heartache can cause people to renounce love and sometimes abandon life itself, but it can also free them to “just be” within ordinary life with less need for accompaniment. In Alone with Others, Stephen Batchelor contrasts the two main human states, having and being, noting that having is inseparable from not-having, whereas being is content to unfold with unfolding life, accepting transience with amazement and gratitude that we’re here at all. Unraveling seems necessary to get past the cycle of having and not-having, but it’s no sure thing that we’ll do so. We may visit on others what was done to us in some earlier cycle, wreaking the same havoc. Is that role also necessary? Should we be grateful to our tormentors for freeing us, however unwittingly? Ordinary life poses these conundrums. The grief is real, but it isn’t real. The narrative proves false, but time reveals its reality. It’s just that we failed to see the whole of it—how it was inseparable from the rest of life, filled with contradictions that we pushed aside. We see them now, but the weight we give them changes every time we come back to it. We construct narratives to explain or condemn or exonerate, but they never quite square with the whole of what we experienced, how it was.
My thoughts go back to some women from my past. I could write “my distant past” at this point. It’s a kind of mulling over of different memories. The death of one of them brought them all forward, an archive of associations. As I write this, I can picture her with her long blonde hair and horizontally striped, black and white sweater. It’s too bad, I think, that we were so profoundly out of sync while together, that I couldn’t match her expectations. Because she was good company. We slept together, which was a mistake, but I didn’t know any better. It forced the issue, and I wasn’t ready for it. I might have been, had we kept going at a leisurely pace. I might finally have been at ease. I was at ease with her as a close friend. We got on well. I’m sorry that she’s dead. I always hoped I’d meet her again, pick up the conversation where we left off when the static of youth caused interference. It’s odd what I remember. A friend would go off to class and I would stop by just before then sleep in in her bed. Leaving fulltime work was like leaving home for college. The university had a structure, but it not like school. The experience of school is more like the workplace. Both map to a factory model—students as workers, teachers as shop stewards, the boss in the office and the family at home exerting the pressure of its expectations. All things considered, I did better with the framework than with the university’s informality. Yes, attend, but it felt optional. Not every course warranted much attention, although I had a few that were riveting. As an undergraduate, I racked up a terrible grade average by this picking and choosing. It was possible to take incompletes, and I had quantities. Breadth requirements and the course load associated with the long semesters was also problematic. My abilities are as specific as my interests. In graduate school, where I somehow found a place, the quarter system and specializing helped, but I also found employment as a researcher—employment and a patron. It was a workplace. I did well. When I shifted to a so-called life of leisure, I had to deal not only with its lack of obvious structure, but also with its ambiguity and my own ambivalence. I episodically questioned my fulltime employment, changing things if I lost faith in my employers or felt what I doing was unsustainable. Leisure turns those questions back at me. The days are open, but life grows shorter. The apparent openness makes action seem less urgent. The knowledge that it’s illusory makes it more so. I often shuttle between these two poles. Like death, urgency is hard to contemplate at a remove. When I was diagnosed with cancer, the urgency was right there. I learned to manage it, and this was good practice for my current situation, which requires a continued, committed balance that serves my own work. Leisure slowly clears away other claims on my time. Its openness contains periods conducive to my own work, but understanding not just what that work is but how to do it is crucial. Like those riveting courses that got me out of bed and into the lecture hall despite the ungodly hour, whatever work of my own gets done has this power. This was true also in the workplace, I see in retrospect. My specific work reflected skills applied and the pleasure of it. I did it for money, but it a real sense I was being paid to do what I enjoyed. What led me to stop was the personal toll of fulltime work—commuting, which grew steadily harder; and the meetings and conference calls that come with work in organizations. It was also vital to make way for my successors, and as I contemplated stepping away, I gave them more and more responsibility until my presence was unnecessary. But, luckily, my own work tugged at me. This urgency was stronger when I was still working fulltime, and when I left, I had to regain it in the transition. Across my long career, I always did a modicum of work that I considered mine, fitting it in amid other priorities. Leisure demands a different kind of balance. My own work’s priorities are entirely self-set. They depend on me. I read an interview with the poet and diarist Joanne Kyger. She described her life in Bolinas, making no great haste to write whatever she was going to write. Most of her days were spent doing what “whatever,” but for a poet, this is arguably the main source. Her wonderful Japan and India Journals, 1960–1964, which I read a few years ago, capture her way of fitting work and life together, with her own work in large part to set down what she observed. This isn’t research or scholarship, although both may figure. I’ve done research and am currently a visiting scholar, but my native abilities are observational and synthetic: what I’ve absorbed, ambling through my life, not without purpose, but a purpose more intuited than premeditated. I tend to plunge in, if resonance or declaration attract. I know more now about the rocks and shoals, and the inherent limits of time’s ocean as we humans experience it. In her journals, Kyger records how her marriage with Gary Snyder, prompted by his Zendo, led her to desire a real marriage and a baby, but she couldn’t get pregnant. Their marriage subsequently fell apart. That kind of plunge.
Walking is crucial to my ordinary life. It’s how I gain impressions of a place, whether it’s familiar or not. Some of what I call walking involves transit. To attend a meeting, I took a local bus after figuring out that it stopped near where I was going. In fact, it stopped right out front. The route cuts diagonally through neighborhoods in a southwesterly direction—more south than west. Buses give more of a sense of the streetscape and terrain than cars do, especially on local routes that stop frequently and are often on secondary streets. In Singapore, I took buses often once I realized that my bank debit card worked like a pass. (It didn’t work on the metro.) My hotel was on Orchard Road, an area where the largest high-end retail stores (that I saw) are located, so many of the buses stopped there. Traveling to my several destinations, I’d get off and then try to figure out the walking route. Google Maps makes this easier than it was, but I had to connect the landmarks it denoted with the actual buildings and spaces. Often, when you come to a building, the entry is around the corner. I interpolate between the map and my knowledge of buildings, guessing where the entry is likely to be. In Singapore, the drivers sit on the right and the roads are the reverse of here, which made locating a bus stop back harder because counterintuitive. I could feel my mind constructing a map from each combination of walking and bus-taking—a very inexact map, but each increment of travel made it a bit more useful. In Melbourne, where I mostly walked, part of the process of familiarization was to understand the time involved, walking from A to B. I had a map of the immediate area that the hotel gave me, and Google maps gave an estimate of the journey. I walk slower than its estimate, I gather. I typically allow for a big margin of error, often arriving at my destination 10, 15, or 20 minutes early. Given the choice, I’d rather walk at a leisurely pace; and the buses and trains here are rarely on schedule. The Paris Review arrived with a Billy Collins poem on death. One risk of aging is that death becomes the topic. In January 2013, I heard Billy Collins talk at a literary festival in Key West. I had a bad cold that got worse, but Collins proved better than expected. I knew of his popularity, but wasn’t familiar with his work. He winters in the town, which I found to be something of a cautionary tale, filled with aging men with drinking problems. Not a good place to wash up, I thought. In the rectilinear cemetery, the graves were raised above the ground New Orleansstyle, as I saw in the film Easy Rider, decades ago. Key West is an island; in my slice of it, the ocean was a rumor, although Havana was said to be only 90 miles away. The festival featured a speaker advocating Cuba’s freedom from Fidel Castro. He observed that its break from Spain was plotted in the very hall where we sat. The audience was so taken with this fact that there was no reaction to his call to defeat the tyrant. He played the national anthem, now suppressed—the former national anthem, meaningful to a dwindling number of aging, exiled Cubans.
Music has figured in my life from early on. When I was five, our neighbor took me and his son to see the Singapore Chinese community’s cortège honoring the late King George VI. Traditionally decorated, it was accompanied by what to me sounded like the Cantonese operas I heard on the kitchen radio in our house. At some point I learned to whistle, and when my parents built a house in New Jersey, I joined the choir as a boy soprano. That experience was heady and humbling in turns. As a soprano, you carry the melody, hit the high notes, and are startingly ignorant of harmony. I still can’t read the bass clef and harmony eludes me. When my voice broke, my range fell and shrank. I could still carry a tune, but no longer in the context of a choir. Later in the 1950s, my father built a hi-fi from a kit that sat in a teak cabinet he built from the wooden crates our belongings were shipped back in. I listened to his collection of classical recordings—mostly symphonies, solo piano work, and the odd quintet like “The Trout.” These are still in some ways reference points, although the symphonies’ appeal has diminished. In the second half of the 2000s, I went often to concerts, hearing a wider range of classical music and some new music. I still go to concerts, but mainly to early music in smaller venues when possible. I prefer small halls where the performers are right there, the audience not simply a mass obscured by the spotlighting. The house and barn—the backyard shed where I often write—have several stereos. Streaming is in the picture, a way to hear new recordings. I bought two British music monthlies for a while, but the local bookstore stopped carrying them. So, I just peruse what’s featured, try it out. I look at my CDs—there are many—and wonder what will become of them. In my concert-going half decade, I heard U.C. Berkeley Professor Davitt Moroney perform four or five times. He would either accompany his performances with commentary or give a talk at the start, and I learned a lot from both. He tackled whole works, like J.S. Bach’s clavier partitas on one or several versions of that era’s claviers. A partisan of these plucking instruments, he argued for them as the better vehicle for Bach’s intent. I like Murray Perahia’s interpretation on a modern piano, but I appreciated Moroney’s enthusiasm for his instruments. The mother of one of my childhood friends had a gorgeous rosewood Steinway grand piano in her living room. She played. Her piano is another point of reference. It’s surprising to me how many grand pianos lack resonance. Recently a woman I know who’s involved with raising funds for the university’s performance enterprise moved over to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The performances are free, and many are by student musicians. As with the early music scene here, the talent is striking. The students are less polished, more worried. One played a convoluted piano piece and ran off the stage upset over a defect lost to us and probably to most of the audience. The ensembles are especially good, energized by each other’s presence. “The Trout,” which I heard in Tokyo in 1997, played by friends of friends from Zurich, seems to have that energy embedded in it. (The first violinist was from Tokyo, surrounded afterward by local students of the instrument. Her husband, Swiss, was the pianist.) A year later, I flew from Rome to Zurich to attend my friends’ wedding party on the lake there. They had yet another small ensemble playing. I intuited that the violinist, who led it, and the cellist were an item. The former was as flamboyant as his predecessors must have been. Such music was once contemporary and popular, I thought, and here it is again. My friends are still married, 22 years later, the husband in his 90s. They were musicians, too, but amateurs—he an architect-professor and she a psychoanalyst who worked with children. There was music on stands in their apartment. I don’t play, I only listen. Singing was my only musical talent. I’ve been to concerts with friends who appeared absorbed, even overcome by the music. My listening is less intense. Music prompts thoughts, and I sometimes carry a pen and notebook with me to write them down. At points, with luck, the musicians catch fire. This is the thrill of live performance, spontaneous and unexpected. I heard a famous violinist demonstrate his complete mastery, but nothing more. I had no desire to hear him again. Ordinary life is filled with incidents that can be read in several ways. I went to a lecture at a nearby museum and intuited that the space and time I found there was regarded as mine. When I partially abandoned live performance, it was because it felt unfair to occupy a small part of the space and time once shared with another. Estrangement makes this seem almost natural, but it isn’t. As in a Noh play, the ghosts cross the stage at a glacial pace. Imagine a droning chant and muffled drum, every last gesture speaking of the remnants of those fires. Cede them their altars.
Common Place No. 19 | Winter 2020 | Š 2020 John J. Parman | complace.j2parman.com