Common Place No. 21

DIVERSE OBSERVATIONS | COMMON PLACE NO. 21 | SPRING 2020

Writing expresses how my mind processes what the senses tell it, an unfolding inner and outer conversation in which thoughts and dreams also figure. I write to set out my takes on it—successive approximations that build on, loop back to, ignore, and contradict each other. In doing this, I may aim for consistency and coherence, but the contingency of experience tempers this. There’s also my native discursiveness to consider. Hence my title.

DIVERSE OBSERVATIONS

A friend writes from Tokyo that he’s about to retire. I reply that it took me 18 months to make the transition from fulltime work to leisure as defined by Aristotle: my own work, taken up consciously and purposefully at my own volition. What threw me was the falling away of the structure implicit in most outwardly organized activities.

Not all of it falls away, but what was there in school and at work disappears suddenly. The closest equivalent for me was undergraduate life, which continues the familiar structure of school but depends on self-discipline. That was fine until distractions arose, and I also found the semester system’s course load daunting.

Instead of retiring fully, I worked two days a week for 18 months. This arrangement was initially interesting, but the assignments diminished and eventually I felt I was drawing a sinecure that required me to keep up with the entirety of my firm in case something arose. Things arose, but the possible futures they hinted at never panned out.

But this transition was helpful in that it made me aware of the paradox retirement presents. On the one hand, I was into my 70s, aware of the foreshortening and uncertain nature of my future. On the other hand, I had quantities of time at my disposal in the everyday. My first impulse was to try to fill it with activities that continued or resembled what I did before. Occasions for this appeared, each presenting its own issues. I had a valuable lunch with a friend, simply talking about the kind of work of this sort that interested me, and then I did some. In one case, the change in scale—the last three decades of my career were spent with large, multi-office architecture and design firm—was telling. While firms of any size may be equally sophisticated, their assumptions are likely to vary unless people are involved who have experience in larger firms and are interested scaling up or applying their practices and insights.

More often, there’s mutual incomprehension. This also occurs among much larger firms, because scale is relative and scaling up requires quantum leaps that involve much more stress than people realize or want to keep in mind.

(I was lucky to work with a rare genius at this process, who grasped intuitively that you have to upgrade leadership consciously to make these transitions successfully. This isn’t Jack Welch’s “lose the bottom 10 percent”—I always doubted it, along with “up or out,” the McKinsey mantra, because it lacks nuance. It’s recognizing that scaling up means finding a core of new leadership that knows how to run organizations a quantum leap larger. Others will follow, but they can be brought in organically. There may be times when organizations are breaking new ground, but every level of scale has more in common organizationally with its peers at that size than it has differences.)

(A long aside.) Part of the transition I made was done by elimination: this activity didn’t work; this other one worked in part, but aspects of it didn’t; a third activity worked well, but it required a time-consuming immersion.

Leisure—the pursuit of activities for which I’m answerable only to myself—looked better and better in comparison.

But leisure has its own demands. It took a while to grasp its rhythm and structure my time productively around it.

One spectrum of humanness ranges between two poles. Pole one is a sense of life’s continuity; pole two is a sense of life’s discontinuity. Humans vary between them. Another spectrum, possibly related to the first, has as its poles a sense of life’s innate reciprocity and a sense of that favors are always obligations, to be granted or called in.

A third spectrum, also potentially connected to the others, rarely turns queries down flat, seeing their possibilities, or often turns queries down flat, denying they could have any possibility for them. The shading between these polar opposites gives rise to indecision and second thoughts.

In navigating people and interactions, I find it helpful to keep these polarities in mind. Although they’re truisms, in a way, I only learned them by experiencing behaviors I found baffling and even unnatural. But I see that my own behaviors may baffle others or be misinterpreted by them. Interestingly, many of the conventions wrapped up in manners and etiquette tend seem to be aimed at keeping peace across the divides. Politeness in general is a device for social distancing that tries to achieve its ends without angering others. Remaining civil in the midst of litigation is an example. As this suggests, it is part and parcel of working life, especially in those professions that involve delivering unwelcome news, observations, or proposals. Entire cultures—Japan, e.g.—have elaborate ways to suppress a message’s delivery and decline or parry it without doing so directly. But all of this only gets you so far, especially in the so-called close relationships and their afterlives.

It is in such relationships that polar opposites are most likely to mix without grasping the basic differences in their worldviews. It follows that ruptures are made worse by such differences if they exist. Part of “worse” is the mutual disbelief that the other fails to see what the situation requires. The stronger the disbelief, the more emotions like anger and anxiety are triggered, clouding judgement and overriding such buffers as empathy.

Knowledge of what amounts to a human divide is of little use while a rupture is occurring, but may be of use later, either in reconciling one person to the implacable resentment of another or getting past resentment by understanding how underlying differences, unrecognized, shaped the way the relationship unraveled. That we were beastly to each other in our different ways can be forgiven on grounds of duress and self-preservation. That we are all beasts in those states goes without saying, as we learn as children and then again raising them. Only the sages and saints appear to get free of it, but that’s likely hard won. They too were monsters once.

It follows that enduring human connectedness may rely on what we share. Life seems to show this. There are other forms of connection, given by fate and possibly by destiny, but despite their freighted, even cosmic provenance, what we share as two humans is of more practical value in such close relationships as marriage or friendship. Although family asserts enduring if not dynastic connection, much hinges on the individuals.

Whenever possible, I try to “work out loud,” to share what I’m doing and not worry especially about its reception. I once sent a draft to one of the gods and he wrote back, “This is worthless.” It wasn’t, in reality. He just didn’t like the future that, at his request, I’d pictured. Most organizations resist openness, even within their own doors and walls. I was always struck by how the gods would argue among themselves, finally reach a decision, and then announce it as an afterthought, forgetting that no one else was party to their discussions and the decision, lacking context for its recipients, often seemed lunatic.

“Nothing is hidden”—said or written by Dōgen Eihei, the founder of Soto Zen—is true. As we tradeoff privacy for the benefits of digital connectedness, openness is a preemptive strategy, but how we deploy it is up to us. Not every tic is worth belaboring. Much can be said indirectly; candor has unique dangers.

Life reveals who and what mattered to us, and—only as hints—how we and our works resonate with others. As we learned from Walter Benjamin, resonance has a tail. Life rolls on and the record is never closed. Every day, something resurfaces while something else sinks beneath our notice. Morgan Forster’s “Work as if immortal” speaks to this. Its real message is to continue to work regardless, to do so for your own sake and against the possibility that others will find and appreciate it. Pursue those others in whatever way seems right to you. Preserve what you produce, if at all possible, in forms that others can draw on. Openly sharing work exposes it to engaged and interacting others whose active reception makes them the most valuable sort of audience for a creative person.

We fall in love, it ends badly, and we deal with the aftermath. The strategies differ. It takes longer than it should, if we were rational beings, but then would we have fallen in love in the first place, had this been so? Socalled chemistry, if in play, ignites everything it touches. Our flimsy boats burn out from under us (or similar metaphors that point to the marooned quality of our bereft existence. Life keeps unfolding. At any point, we could rejoin it, but we’re too raw, unnerved, grief stricken in our exile from this elusive, angry, or indifferent other, the one we have the misfortune to love unrequitedly even as we see the impossibility or our reservations mount. We deal with it often without any real preparation, despite signs visible from the outset, warnings that flash, “This won’t work.” We lose ourselves and then we have to find ourselves again. It takes inordinate time.

Something is lost, I think, when we take steps later to guard ourselves against this. That we take them is an act of self-preservation, but it may also reflect a certain immunity, antibodies that resist love’s intoxication. In this, we may be out of sync with another, surprised by the asymmetry that arises when this happens. It can be a divide impossible to bridge—yet another, only this time we find ourselves watching as the other falls away. If we are human, we are wrenched by this, empathetic, wanting to rescue the situation. We may offer friendship, but its chemistry is unfulfilling to the injured party. The divide grows wider and wider, so that neither sees the other.

It takes inordinate time to clamber down such canyons or, wandering around their rim, randomly encounter the other at a moment when encounter is possible. These meetings, when they happen, are worth noting for their emotional diversity. There are often incendiary fragments, potent in their ability to spark unexpected feelings, again asymmetric, sometimes out of proportion. We seem always to circle back to the rim, even as we look across a table and remember how it was. Distance varies and we don’t really know where we are, yet are somehow hopeful.

I never fully let go of these attachments. The others cross my path as feelings that signs of them prompt. This has nothing to do with them, I realize. Association is wrapped up in attachment, endowing things with meaning. I could write them out, a small lexicon. Life detaches these others from their phantoms—this is the theory. In his short book on obsession, Stendhal writes that his other is dead and yet he’s as attached as ever. He ends with an account of an afternoon in England, spent with a friend and two women who are pleased to find their patrons want to make it enjoyable. He praises their English beauty, their chestnut hair. Life unfolds. It probably always did.

We fall in love. This is said to be destiny, the work or sport of the gods. Viewed in retrospect, this explanation is more satisfactory than other post-facto explanations of it—part of the Great Divide, Truth being a pet dog over which the couple squabble. What’s most remarkable is how desire gains force exponentially once sparked and fanned a little, even as you know—set down on paper—its transient nature. How tangible, these bodies alive with passion, coupling and exchange their larger sum, whole afternoons shading into evening. This can’t be sustained, although it has its running text, its unspoken prayers for dispensation. The gods are unreceptive. Only Hestia is loyal; her loyalty is to the household, the children, breakfast on the table. Love to her has one purpose: family.

Attributing love to the gods is to say that it’s out of our hands. Or perhaps that it’s in their hands entirely. We are sport for them, wagering as they will on each small event, the larger one being a foregone conclusion. Will she come six times or five? Will he curse, sinking his ravaged torso in the bath? We’re as blameless as thoroughbreds.

Looking for something else, I found two folders, each pointing to a past relationship. In one, it’s beginning; in the other, it’s over. The contents of the folders fall roughly in the space of two years, and there’s another, related to them, that triggers memories of that time. When I look back in time, what strikes me is how much is bound up in a life if we leave everything in. This is my nature, of course, to leave everything in. It expresses a hope about others.

Self-confidence is a sometimes-narrow path through doubt and self-sabotage, on one side, and delusion and grandiosity on the other. Remembering the path, finding it again (and again), and staying on it more often than not are tasks we take up on a daily, even an hourly basis, at points. Equanimity is a certain gained faith in self, enough faith to carry on. We learn to persist even as we falter, recognizing faltering as a passing thing, like a cold or the flu.

Age shifts the frame. A pandemic adds to the frisson of having an overdue seismic fault up the road. I offer thanks at both ends of sleep—to be here, more or less intact, for another day. My niece Rachael Carnes wrote of my father, “He seemed to manage falling apart physically as well as anyone might be expected to.” A few days ago, Michael Sorkin succumbed to the coronavirus. He was born a year before me—a writer on urbanity, among his other hats, who contributed to the quarterly that Laurie Snowden and I founded, edited by Richard Ingersoll and Cathy Lang Ho. Cathy wrote movingly of him—no one expected this, how death sidles in. But it does. Plagues give us the De Cameron and other books—Dafoe and Camus along with Boccaccio. My friend Peiting Li, commenting on the pandemic, reminds me how tuberculosis was a slow-motion version of it. In my grandfather’s youth, families were thinned out by it. He lost two favorite siblings, a cousin of my father told me, leading him to quite Norway. My father was born in New York City, the first surviving son. That knack for surviving stayed with him until the end.

It’s not exactly wisdom that age gives me, but a perspective and enough distance from my humiliations to see them as inescapably bound up in life itself. Yes, I was an idiot sometimes, self-deluded yet again, but in the service of such clues as I had about why I’m here at all, what I supposed to experience, and with whom. Of course, that’s a big presumption, the sort of thing a writer might elaborate from slim evidence, but the signs were compelling. Not much of it worked out in an on-paper sense except my remarkably enduring, seemingly foreordained marriage. If I were to sum up the takeaway, it’s that life isn’t capacious enough for what we desire from it, and that this basic fact is the root of most of what tears at us along the way. But the other takeaway is that the tearing is necessary, the only way we can free ourselves from an ego acquired in childhood that becomes body armor with a bionic presence. It’s like an invasive and persistent virus that tends us toward delusion and turns murderous when reality threatens.

What’s necessary is that we rid ourselves of it or diminish its hold. Heartache accompanies this process. When I went through it, it was like I had no skin and was living on two planes, delusion and reality. As La Rochefoucauld notes, “there are three cures, none of them infallible.” Life can only be depended on to throw the next curve ball.

This June, it will have been 10 years since I did 40 sessions of radiation treatment. I was diagnosed with cancer in 2006. I delayed treatment, working with a doctor I trusted, and when he said it was time, I was treated. At the end of it, the last few weeks, I would leave work feeling like I was 100 years old. Gradually, I recovered. My guts took the brunt of it, and I sometimes had to lie prone—not easily done in a workplace—to calm things down. But the treatment has held up, which was the intent. I offer great thanks to Dr. Patrick Swift, who designed it. In 1998 I lost weight after gaining too much of it. I had a physical with Dr. McGillis, a venerable GP. “You’re in good shape,” he said. “Of course, you’ll live on to get some weird disease or get hit by truck.” Hubris, he knew, is a thing. I lost the weight again earlier last year. I bounce between 130 and 140. My blood pressure varies more widely. I track all this and try to calibrate myself, to follow a Mediterranean diet as Dr. Avril Swan requested, and walk 30 minutes a day.

Older, your job becomes, for example, to keep from falling. When I was still working, I fell twice on sidewalks, caught on small cracks that sent me flying. The first time, it was a miracle I didn’t crack a tooth. I looked like hell.

Washing my face in the men’s room of the Hyatt Embarcadero, the guy next to me made the “I wouldn’t want to see the other fellow” joke and I explained he was made of concrete. Twice—that number is germane in life’s School of Hard Knocks—taught me to give more attention to what’s in front of me. I generally seek out handrails, although of course the pandemic makes them out to be repositories of coronaviruses (so choose your poison, as they say).

You’re obliged to do the regular maintenance, unlike my father, of whom my niece wrote, “He could really put away cake.” I remember orange juice—he was diabetic—and she remembers boxed wine. (I remember it, too. Once, flying back from Europe, I sat next to a German who made a good living repairing the printing presses used to label those boxes appropriately and selling the odd part off-market, without the manufacturer’s excessive markup. I’ve never bought boxed wine, but I can understand my father’s generation going for it: convenient and well-priced.)

And my father was in fact more attentive to his health than he ever was when younger except for quitting smoking.

But when my mother died and especially after he outlived his own father, he felt he was living on borrowed time.

Unlike my poor mother, who had a stroke and lingered, he died in a few days, making one last try at rallying. At his funeral, my sister played something he loved from Richard Strauss’s Die Fledermaus, inappropriate and perfect.

It was my father who told me to find a good doctor. Like his father, I shied away from them. In Tokyo, it became clear to me that I had high blood pressure and could no longer ignore it, so I went to see the aforementioned Dr. Swan, recommended by my daughter. This was after I tried to see another GP, last consulted eight years before. My wife, her middle sister, and her mother were all clients of his practice. When I tried to see him, he refused. My sister-in-law’s entreaties left him unmoved. Dr. Swan and I have real conversations. When yours is the body in question, I think it’s helpful that your mind comes along and actively participates. Dr. Swift was like this, too. I’d second my father’s advice. I decided to take it before it was forced on me, and I pass this piece of advice on, as well.

The saying that you’re only as old as you feel is accurate insofar as how we reckon age internally is at variance with any conventional chronology. Not that we’re unaware of time’s passage, but we remain contemporary in our own minds, even if within a diminished universe, and the signs we sense are versions of others. They may become chronic or permanent, hobbling us—we see instances of this around us, previews of coming attractions. We should despair, but we’re also used to a certain amount of this. On the train, young people offer us their seats, acts that are more specific in categorizing us as specimens to be preserved out of kindness, pity, or a sense of obligation. “It could be my dad,” they think, and indeed, they’re young enough to be a granddaughter, increasingly. We practice openness, because reactionary old people are unbecoming, slipping as they are into oblivion. So, contemporary is my daily practice, a child of moderns though I am. Even this shift I accept, along with all the other academic tics.

But my habits give me away. There’s so much I consciously avoid that crowds into contemporary life. Here I am, writing sets of short prose pieces while Schubert is played on period instruments and a pianoforte. Newspapers are delivered and I often think it would be more sensible only to read the literary reviews, given their longer horizons.

Most of culture I absorb by reading about it and glancing at the illustrations. Museums are hostels on the way to Compostela—a destination like Ithaka that’s desired but never reached. Experience in general operates this way.

Most of what’s memorable is transitory. Like us, we could add, despite our sense that no, we’re the enduring thing, the measure of all things and perpetual ground zero. Yes, it’s all transitory, just as the Buddha said. Memory is our fallible archive. In close relationships, these archives overlap and arguments break out among the curators.

Poets roam their hallways, looking for the right image. At night, dreams take over. Experience, being in now-time, is aware that the camera’s running, but the scenario is improvised. We sketch it out, but life differs from it. Then we crawl home to look at the rushes—or hand them around, looking for consensus on what just happened. Memory edits from experience, spinning it according to our personal chemistry. We are rarely reliable witnesses. Distance fogs the horizon, yet a window opening onto a bed is still visible, and another—an associative suite of such rooms.

There is something parallel to human life. I say this based on my experience of the uncanny. It leads me to two theories. The first is that while most of the dead move on to their next destination, some linger due to unresolved events. (Related to this is the observation that such dead don’t haunt us as we imagine, but pass through us in a way that convinces us they’ve done so to enlist us in a specific errand. When this happens, we’re briefly clairvoyant.)

The second is that the significant people in our lives are a cohort that moves through time. We recognize each other mostly through intuition, but there are also direct signs—I have seen one, and one may be all the signs there are. It’s not a game—it’s more like we each take different parts, exchanging places, roles, and attributes. When we encounter each other initially, we remember the other from the past—some remnant that comes with us. There’s nothing else to go on, and even a tangible sign isn’t much help, since you still have to live the life in front of you.

My theories suggest that our fear of death is misplaced and that immortality is here all along in some sense.

(My daughter, Elizabeth Snowden, took the photo above at the coastal dacha that her oldest brother is restoring.)

For a long time, I wrote “architect” on things like tax returns. I studied architecture, but I’m not licensed. I was in the field my entire career, but not as a practitioner. A cultural immersion comes along with studying that field, with its studio culture, long hours, and nightmare juries. The architects who became architects loved it. I’m probably more of a planner, although I appreciate a well-designed building. Architects make claims that their work rarely supports, since it needs clients and is subject to market pressures. Much hinges on whether the local patrons see design quality as table stakes for their ventures, and if good architects are hired to do them. Anyway, I now call myself an editor, having done this for the final 22 years of my career—a miraculous transition from marketing, a necessary but relentless activity that’s hard to sustain even in your forties. I left it at fifty. I even dreamt I was an editor—that is, I had a dream that made this clear in a highly symbolic, memorable way. It’s the family profession, along with publishing. Surprisingly, I ended up doing both for an architecture firm. It’s a lineage through my publisher great-grandfather and two generations of engineers, all descendants of bookbinders from Parma.

Tolstoy’s truism about families is exemplified by marriage. Waking in the early morning, I saw it as a cloud of space-time, but it could also be compared to something like the Globe Theater: the players come on and off, and the drama unfolds—now down to the intimacy of two people, and at other time expanding to take holiday feasts and other gatherings. The action shifts to hillsides or the coast—this may be a Tom Stoppard cycle, I realize, more apt for a family and the parallel lives of each and every character. Where do you start? With the early 1970s, probably.

No exit is necessarily final, but disappointment or a sense of betrayal is felt at points, and pride leads some to shun the stage altogether. Word of this arrives or events make their feelings manifest. The family drives the story, so other families have their own. Over lunch, some parts of one were filled in, an unusual dispensation.

This cloud of space-time that a marriage and a family represent, this saga to which I often come back, is stormy at times and even threatened with dissolution, but its nature is enduring. That stems from the bonds that hold both together despite everything. The marriage ceremony tries to list everything that might slam into it, but it’s far from exhaustive. The Catholic Church also asks the couple to vow that they will welcome children. Their arrival leavens the marriage, moving it past itself into broader territory with responsibilities that henceforth will always figure.

They’re put aside at points when desires take priority, but they arise again when push ultimately comes to shove.

The contradictions of these scenes are clear in retrospect, and I can feel only compassion for their protagonists.

Envisioning all of this as a cloud captures its apparent expansiveness, although parts of it narrowed to empty rooms, but a stage captures how the protagonists experienced it. There was no scenarist; all was improvised. We do our best, a friend once told me, given the situation in front of us, even if that situation is to some extent of our own making or an inadvertent collaboration, two people dealing with each other and everyone else affected. They figure, and when they constitute a family, they often carry the day. Unjustly in the eyes of others, and unwise of us to imagine it could be otherwise. The cloud’s expansiveness is in reality only what space-time permits, this being a lawful, Newtonian universe we inhabit in our human state. Although atomic, it’s still a clock. Gravity is constant.

There is no timeless, Thomas Gordon Smith argued, only classic. That felt right. At every level of society, what is preserved is what proves exemplary to those who behold it. Beauty in a familial line is so described, together with the wisdom that ideally accompanies it, love finding a deeper goodness, as Swedenborg noted. My friend TGS is a neo-classicist among the moderns, a believer among the atheists. On the subject of beauty, take him seriously. His first house, built on a shoestring, references the Romans, and remains a pillar of postmodernism, the hinge from which neo-classicism took wing and modernism found a belated second life until eclipsed by algorithms. Beauty is sort of out of bounds now—I’m reading Walter Pater in hopes of a revival. The beauty of women steals a march.

“Constitutional” was the word for a walk I take uphill and down. Dr. Swan recommended that I do it daily. I don’t, for various specious reasons—it’s too cold, it’s raining, etc. But today I went walking, tired of being cooped up in the house by the coronavirus. The route is uphill, then pretty flat as I walk north, then downhill into a park, then up the Tamalpais Steps, and still further up to Shasta Road, then downhill, arriving home about 30 minutes after I left. I encountered some others—several couples, individuals, and a mother with a baby in a pram. I stepped out onto the street except when one couple did this for me. I exchanged greetings with a few of them, while most seemed intent on ignoring any other. The sun shone, for the most part, and the bees were out sampling wisteria.

The walk is a cross-section of terrain—houses fitted into a hillside topography with ravines and streams, views to the bay and the coastal range north of the Gate, and stairs that link neighborhoods at different elevations. In place for more than a century, I imagine, some of the treads tilt slightly downward. I once walked down the Tamalpais Steps and found the descent, most of it without a handrail, unnerving. I only walk up those steps, leaning forward.

Bees are the surest sign of spring. They rouse themselves and descend on every blooming bush, tree, and vine.

As a child, I was wary of their sting, but I’ve learned they’re benign. When one flies into the barn, it goes directly to the skylight and I have to coax it down and out the open French doors facing the garden, lest it tire and fall victim to the spiders that are always lurking in the barn’s corners. This is a summer pastime, when the heat leads me to open the barn up to get a breeze, if breeze there be. Bees are to spiders (and dragonflies) as birds are to cats.

An earlier number of this journal tied the adjective “diverse” to “theses.” I was tempted to change it to “discursive,” but “diverse observations” is what this is—things noted that seem worth setting down—set down as they occur to me. That’s the common denominator of everything I’ve ever written here, with the exception of number 16, which gathered past work in a rough chronology. It was a selection, which is appropriate given that so much of it is true to the journal’s title, a chronicle of the everyday.

Owing to my phlegmatic nature, my everyday alternates between long periods of apparent stasis and bursts of activity. Within them, there’s a small version of this pattern, an ability or even a preference to slow things long enough to speed them up at certain points. Once, driving out to Stinson Beach, I made it to Olema from Fairfax without touching the brakes. When luck runs in our direction, an afternoon can be like this between us.

I read an account of a man who wrote two novels while commuting on a train. I’ve written poems on trains and at night. Longer things were usually written on Sundays, as I needed Saturdays to recover from the workweek. The advent of leisure has a different rhythm, but the poems mostly arrive at night. Someone commented recently that I produce a lot, but this is mainly because I work fairly consistently on things once they’re started. Each thing has its own rhythm, depending on the obstacles it presents. Looking back at past numbers, some “wrote themselves” and others sat untouched for six months while I thought about how to extend them. More accurately, I waited for that moment to arrive, even though everyone tells you not to do this. I wrote other things, of course. I don’t think that prose and poems have distinct seasons—times when one or the other comes more readily—but maybe they do.

In the account of the man on the train, he notes that commuting gave each increment of writing a deadline. But it’s more like Virginia Woolf’s 2.5 hours, according to Leonard Woolf, enforced by a train schedule. I don’t write to a schedule. I write, and at a certain point I stop. With reading, I tend to do a section at a time. I sometimes read back to front, especially biographies, and also from some point in a book forward, rather than from the beginning.

I find that forewords not infrequently exhaust my interest in reading books. I often skip them for this reason.

One theory why Sylvia Plath killed herself is that she wrote herself out, seeing Ariel as a masterwork that she would never surpass. This seems doubtful, as Plath seems to have seen death as a doorway that was always close by and half open, her children and unwritten work notwithstanding. Some writers feared dry periods, experiencing blocks and self-medicating. Others, like Malcolm Lowry, wrote in brief periods of lucidity between heroic benders.

I think these are separate conditions. Lowry was only sane when writing, I read, but sanity can be exhausting.

The pandemic makes every sore throat suspect. Hypochondria is a side effect. I remember when I was 10 or so, I thought I had lockjaw, based on reading about it in the Encyclopedia Americana. Appendicitis was another ailment I was convinced I had. My oldest son had it for real when he was 11; the symptoms were entirely different than what I imagined. Last night at dinner, my wife sneezed three times, making no effort to cover her mouth. I don’t think she has it, but if she does, I’m toast. That was my first thought, which is probably typical of the real order of things. It’s like that part in airline safety videos where they tell parents to put their own masks on and then assist their kids. I should be concerned about my sneezing wife, but those dreaded droplets are everywhere—a pandemic distraction.

In light of the pandemic and a discussion I had with others on the ARCADE editorial and design committee, I wrote the piece that follows. It speaks to that magazine’s next issue, on the topic “Phase Shift,” aka “Death. (The first 20 minutes were spent debating whether to keep “Death” in the picture, given current events on the ground.)

On Listening to a Pandemic “Enlightened vision is actualized in the mountains, grasses, trees, earth, stone, fences, and walls. Do not have any doubt about it.”—Dōgen Eihei (1200-1253) In late January, a friend left her mother in Taipei and returned to Shanghai as the coronavirus lockdown descended on that metropolis. To allay others’ fears, she started blogging. Her daily posts reflect the rolling nature of this catastrophe: it spreads virally, as we say, and to stop it, everything had to stop. As it did, people noticed—despite their misery—how quickly the air cleared up. Even the Himalayas were visible from the plains of India.

The pandemic gives us insight into what life could be like—pace Jeff Bezos and his stopwatch—if the holdover from Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford were finally expunged from work; and if the petroleum oligarchy that still runs things, despite the steady tapering of demand, were finally and definitively seen off. We sense we’re at a cusp, that we might find a new operating system beyond even-later, last-mogul-standing capitalism—an OS better suited to our planet.

The pandemic makes one big point: a crisis involving all of humanity demands a coordinated, cross-humanity response. Even as they close their borders, every nation-state knows that’s not enough. The constant undermining of cross-border organizations like the UN and the WHO has to stop and be reversed, rebuilding broad trust and a well-funded mandate to act appropriately on the other planetary emergency: climate change and environmental degradation.

We see vividly how our terrible habits make it happen. Like a five-pack-a-day smoker who manages to stop, we look in the mirror and see our yellowed faces and fingers return to health in surprisingly rapid fashion. The ways we work, consume, and travel are ripe for change, to name three obvious things that the pandemic has disrupted.

Behind them are all of the societal assumptions—about employment, for example, despite automation’s incursions.

We see this, but it takes humanity acting in concert to get to something better. Do we have to wait for it all to fall apart or have we just seen it do so? “Humanity acting in concert” can and probably should be a region taking steps that reflect its own situation and social construct. Like the pandemic, we’ll learn from each other while finding different ways forward. We can agree on the main goals. If we work toward them in unison, sharing our experiences and ceasing our bickering, it’s likely that regional progress will add up to planetary progress fairly quickly.

Since the oil crisis in the early 1970s, California has led on environmental and energy regulation. It’s big enough to set standards elsewhere, which is why the Trump Administration has muscled in. One opportunity the pandemic affords is for the states—coastal and inland—of the U.S. west to pursue a Green New Deal that sees in our “mountains and rivers without end,” as Dōgen put it a millennium ago, a direct, planetary reflection of our health as a species. It flips on its head our idea that nature bows to us. The pandemic says no. We need to listen and act.

(With thanks to Jocelyn Beausire of ARCADE for her edits. This first appeared on the ARCADE website.)

Trying and failing to catch a flight is a motif of my dreams. A recent one came back to me in fragments earlier.

Driving figured—something about getting out of a jam by aiming my car through a narrow opening. In real life, I have a sixth sense about its width. In another scene, I stopped to look at a huge old German radio that got bigger as I approached it. Someone had left it at the side of the road. It was sufficiently damaged that I decided against it, but also so big that where could I put it? I have an American knockoff of one (above), but I like the genuine articles, those old Grundig and Telefunken radios, now retrofitted with Bluetooth and hugely expensive. I found mine on the street, in perfect shape and working order. The dream transposed these thoughts. As I tried to gauge how long I had to make the flight, I knew that I couldn’t make it—possibly a metaphor for not catching the coronavirus.

I have one reliable correspondent outside my immediate family. We exchange letters every Sunday morning.

With most of the others, replies come sporadically if at all. Two always apologize for being slow, although I tell them consistently that it doesn’t matter. Writing a letter is more than halfway there, because the recipient is in mind as I write and both anticipation and memory are in play as I set out the letter’s thoughts. A letter takes a sideways look at other things written in the same rough timeframe, each in a way rehearsing the next until the context is exhausted or supplanted. This is true even if the influence is indirect or missing altogether. Context is a way to situate a letter by stressing the familiar or pointing out some telling difference: it’s like this here too or not.

A reply, if it ever arrives, closes one long moment of correspondence. If no reply is forthcoming, that moment remains open until hope is lost. The Palace of Memory has a Dead Letter Office where lost hopes are filed. Like the cold cases of aging detectives, hope lives on until the Palace shuts down. Nothing is lost, the I Ching asserts.

Once the friend of a friend said bitterly that her friend never acknowledged anything that she sent her. She had just self-published a small book of poems and reading them led me to write and send her a poem. Perhaps my poem was the reply she desired, but it shifted unwittingly from her friend to me. I project animus onto silence, but it may be that the other is at loss for a reply, or answers in thoughts but fails to get them down on paper (as we called it).

I don’t think I’ve ever fallen out of love once in it. This isn’t to say that I look for love’s revival, but rather that love forges a connection that, when it arises, makes it clear that love persists. This may be one-sided but seems not.

Against a wall is my friend’s masterpiece. I wrote her describing it there, still wrapped in clear plastic. The man who will hang it is off station, and I’m reluctant to try given its size and my own history of destroying walls, trying.

My friend wrote that, despite orders to remain in quarters, she and another friend were about to go sketching. At night, she posts things sketched or painted, much as I post diary entries and poems. Every day is an exploration.

Once in a while, there’s something to show for it. Entering a poetry competition, I chose two things, morsels of speculation about a real place and its relationship to other times and settings, ahead and behind this moment, this moment when I write this. A moment or two before, an incident came back to me. It sparked a poem.

To be silent is deceit. But wait, it gets worse.

Seduce the daughter, destroy the marriage, laugh in the face of “There are children.”

When they broke up, she got the Lexus.

Came upon her while shopping, great with child, the cycle resuming, the one seeds another, two bodies make a third.

To be screaming, but stay, offer breasts.

Time passes, washes away most stains.

The Great Demons have their defenders.

Mediocrities cite them. Terror abates.

At the piano, I recall, so not silent at all.

Intact, her and it, and no one laughed.

The second of my two poetry editors shushed me when I started to explain one of the two poems I entered in the competition, saying it would ruin her enjoyment of the poem. Each reader comes to her own conclusions, was the implication. It seems fair. My friend’s masterpiece has a title, “Masked Ball.” It reminded me of a Picasso painting that I always liked, which in turn reminded me of a story from my childhood. We bring these chains of meaning along with us, maybe they’re like DNA sequences looking for another like them with which to attach, blamelessly.

Attachments are involuntary. They arise from the native chemistries of the attached, natural and blameless. Those great tragedies should be rewritten, revolvers unloaded and put back in drawers, protagonists calmed down. This must be true whatever the scale, how crowded stadia attach as one, great with enmity and in a devouring mood. The raving, too, is blameless, a stepping beyond oneself the way an actor does, artifice being a part of nature.

Surely, I’m not serious? The papers throw this question at me. For if not nature, then intention. And what then?

A poem throws its thoughts against a wall. Or lays them out like sketches on the pavement, the artist standing back as people wander by, glancing down at them, if at all. Walking to a friend’s office in San Francisco, I passed the colorful output of a painter, each board hanging on a chain-link fence along Third Street south of Harrison. I always look. The painter is sometimes painting, sometimes standing back. He never busks. I look, hoping for the resonance that attaches a painting to me. Behind me and around me are paintings that did this. He’s not indifferent to his audience, I imagine, but there to paint, allowing resonance to happen if it happens. I’m here to write.

Such beauty and none had children. I’m sure this is a forbidden thought, how women pass it along, this mystery of undoing the ravages of possession. In museums you see how it fought free of beastly legacy, only to repeat the experience. “None had children” is like the Buddha’s Nirvana, stepping away from the cycle. Too close to material death, I thought, sugared up as desirable to a jaded, time-traveling veteran, one beauty too many. As a lover put it, “It ends with me.” Not a happy denouement, hers, but foreseen. No children for her, either.

Striations, I realized, are one model for my poems. Once on the edge of Austin, Texas, a conference room I was in looked out at one that must have spanned half a mile. I read that when an asteroid skipped across North America 10,000 or so years ago, it left a layer of ash. When writing a poem, one set of lines may unearth an ashen fragment.

It can seem unrelated to what precedes it, but it’s like I found a city or pieces of it beneath the one I was describing.

The heart of existentialism is human freedom, I read. This was Sarte’s big point, along with our responsibility.

It reminds me of Horst Rittel, who taught at my college when I studied there. Speaking of design, he said that there was no way to sidestep its endless implications. The “design thinking” cult of problem-solvers ignores this, but he and Sartre were right: the freedom designers claim is subject to the law of cause and effect. The Buddha saw it, too.

Composition is aesthetics kept up, appearance as art although also cuisine, as persimmons carry mixed messages in one pair of hands or another.

I compose constantly like a hotel manager might or a curator noticing a distant frame’s slight tilt.

Bounded space—we share it, although displaced.

Outside are versions of distance. How distant should we be? Another left off two years ago, the place defined like a mapmaker. How far now from that spot is unknown to me. Moon orbits around it, touches us, coming into view. Don’t know about her, but once I did, am reminded.

But you, closer in time and space, composed this small and boxlike universe, savory in look and soon devoured as we are. A smaller horde awaits demise, hoping for more than ashes.

Sumptuous is an aesthetic too, stripped down, laid out one last time. We were born for this.

Waiting in quarters, we give ourselves to time. Every nuance is projected on the cloud said to be around us.

Do character flaws outweigh accomplishments? It’s a perennial question. I read it again just now in reference to Heidegger. In Sarah Bakewell’s hands, he seems odious, but she’s not completely immune to the attractions of his philosophy. (This from her book, At the Existentialist Café.) It reminded me of Christopher Alexander, described by my friend Richard Ingersoll as “the Ayatollah of Berkeley.” Despite everything, Alexander’s core idea that we can discern good from bad, true from false, in our own dwellings and townscapes by asking if they have life or not, seems true—even radically so. His overblown polemic against modern architecture and city planning is valuable and will outlive his foibles and failures, because the heart of it frees us to question what we mostly see around us.

The photos he chose for his books show us what he saw that had life for him. They make his argument for him.

Whether Heidegger’s ideas outweigh his shortcomings and despicable actions, I can’t answer. It seems pertinent that Hannah Arendt continued the dialogue they broke off. Santiago Zabala argues (in Why Only Art Can Save Us) that Heidegger learned from his mistakes and that his writing after he woke up to them shows this.

Robert Grudin (in Design and Truth) compares Heidegger to Albert Speer, both flawed authors of flawed works.

In Horst Rittel’s telling, design has no inherent end point. It unfolds, and its wicked problems, as Rittel called them, are only ever resolved, not solved for good. What’s useful about Alexander’s main point is that it leaves us free to decide for ourselves what has life and what doesn’t. What we decide may change, and if we allow ourselves this possibility—the freedom to decide and to change our minds—then we should probably grant it to others, even if we also call them to account for their actions. (This is why acknowledgement and remorse are the start of mercy.)

We can say about life that nothing prepares us for it and yet everything prepares us for it. I tried to learn from it, always, but I found consistently that on the more important matters, I had to experience them twice before concluding that a given situation was unworkable. A lot of pain goes with this, because you’re acting from a belief that this time it will be different. Only it isn’t, even if the situation is uncannily like what you foresaw.

The uncanny has a definite place in my life. Morning and night, I thank it for its favors. It’s also force that goes against the grain, like the popular idea of Mercury in retrograde or the Buddhist one of a karmic residue or debt.

Based on my own experience, something is going on, but what exactly is unclear. Speculation of course is endless.

My second, namesake son made this watercolor. I asked him which way was up and he noted the green door of what is perhaps the apartment building across the street from my house where we lived when he was young—owned by his grandparents and now by their daughters, my wife and her two sisters. I love this watercolor, which is now in the room where I sleep, propped up against a window next to another he painted. Although black and mysterious, the building is also benign and cheerful. He inherited my buoyant nature, which manages to take life’s darkness in stride. Ten years or more ago, he surprised me by saying how much we are alike. When I was still in college, I made a book for my parents that tried to say what I took from them. I drew my father as a Viking—it was a riff on a figurine my parents had. I said that his indomitable spirit impressed me, but in fact he had a talent for at landing on his feet.

I realized later, as his numerous technical papers surfaced on the web, that he wrote and published constantly. His retirement ended his productivity, but he put his remaining energies into his granddaughter, as noted previously.

I arrived with my genetic package, dropped in media res. I made my way and found others, observing everything that I encountered. Setting it down in is a thread that runs through my life as I try to make sense of it. Observation is part of experience and the setting down is part of its afterlife, how reality is caught up in my life’s unfolding. The surprises it brings suggest that there’s never closure, that denouement is always premature, that really how would I know? A familiar voice may yet break its long silence. Stranger things have happened, believe me.

Common Place No. 22 |Š 2020 by John J. Parman |complace.j2parman.com