Common Place Vol. 2

COMMON PLACE NUMBERS 4, 5 & 6 | 2o10, 2011, & 2014

Volume 2 spans a four-year period, the pace of my writing at the time—and shifts toward prose pieces and poetry.

Number 4 collected things I’d written elsewhere that I wanted to preserve and, in some cases, had my own ideas about how to edit. A longer version of the one on urban density appeared after the issue came out. Number 4 also marked my growing sense that memoir and polemic were two genres compatible with my abilities as a writer.

THE THRESHING FLOOR AT THE POLEMICAL MILL

COMMON PLACE No. 4 | July 2010

PREAMBLE: MEMOIR + POLEMIC

THE POLEMICIST AT 25

I got a big laugh and a lot of nodding heads when I said to some writing colleagues that I realized I often write in a polemical vein. To do so, I think, requires a certain measure of self-regard: you have to believe both that the topic that exercises you is worth discussing publicly and that your opinion will be of interest to others. This also motivates memoir-writing, it seems to me. A diary is not quite the same, although people publish them, too, and their spontaneity, if this is allowed to surface, can make them valuable (as Nassim Nicolas Taleb noted about the Berlin Diary of William Shirer). Memoirs may refer to diaries, or not, but they’re a different animal, closer to polemics both in displaying the self and in the arguments they make for and/or against one’s life. One could call a memoir an apologetic, but I think that calling it a kind of polemic suggests that polemics are a kind of memoir. The polemicist is present, whether the cause is “out there” or wrapped up in the life, the psyche, the bodily equipment.

It’s the polemicist who takes it all in and, having done so, argues for a way of seeing it or framing it. This “way” is always tentative, no matter how forcefully stated. There is no black-and-white in life, in actual fact.

— John Parman

FOUR KINDS OF FIRE

LIKE PROMETHEUS, EVE STOLE FIRE AND SUFFERED FOR IT

1.

The diarist Samuel Pepys describes London’s Great Fire, during which King James II, besmirched with soot, made sure he was seen helping to put it out. Large swathes of San Francisco burned down following the 1906 earthquake, although a few landmarks survived. In 1968, the tenements of Newark were set aflame by rioters and then left by the city as burnt-out shells, much as the corpses of the condemned were displayed at the gates of medieval towns.

Tokyo burned in the wake of the 1923 earthquake. Rebuilt, it was destroyed again by US bombs. German cities were whipped into firestorms. The Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte filed a story on the aftermath, when those left for dead were shot pointblank by the authorities. A man who survived the atom-bomb attacks on Japan died recently. Fleeing Hiroshima for Nagasaki, he was trying to describe the light the bomb made to a friend when the other A-bomb fell. “Like that,” he said.

Napalm rained down on hapless villagers in Vietnam. Lately in Gaza, phosphorus is the rain of choice. Each storm has its screaming child. That a generation separates them shows how little we are moved by these images to put a halt to the barbarous calculations that engender them. Smart bombs and drones now personalize the delivery; instead of the countryside, it’s an apartment in Belgrade or a schoolhouse in Pashtun. The replies, too, are personal, wrapped around the body.

2.

“Give tongue” is the phrase that my father’s book of World War II photographs used to caption one of an English battle ship engaging a German foe. “Fire!” belongs to the sphere of warfare, but has spread to terror and judicial murder. German firing squads used machine guns in France. As Goya depicts, French firing squads used muskets in Spain against loyalists fighting for the king.

Gary Gilmore chose a Utah firing squad rather than the noose. “Let’s do it,” he said. Spies and deserters, once hanged, were by World War I mostly shot. In China until recently, a .45 to the back of the head was the means of dispatch for literally thousands. Someone told me that it’s the quickest death, more humane than the poison drip that’s replaced it, even there. The drip puts some distance between us and the condemned, but his or her consciousness agonizingly persists.

Sometime in the 1990s, “Ready, fire, aim!” emerged as a business buzz-phrase. Marx’s “MCM,” as explained by Giovanni Arrighi in The Long Twentieth Century, describes how capitalism goes back and forth between a money

focus (M) and a commodity focus (C, like China now). “Ready, aim, fire” is a commodity formula; whereas “Ready, fire, aim” describes money’s endless innovation. Fire is the key word in both phrases, however. It connotes a commitment to action that, once taken, is hard if not impossible to undo. “Fire sale” is a potential outcome for both C and M, although (as Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out) the purveyors of M are not always willing to admit it.

3.

The oil crisis of the mid–1970s led me to stay in graduate school as job prospects for architects dropped off drastically. Arriving in the Bay Area in 1971, I was able to find work, but was also laid off twice—once because the client didn’t pay, and then (in my own opinion) because I was too slow. I would count the second layoff as a firing.

Firms staff up and use downturns as the occasion to pare. Tough times are when they’re forced to pare more than they’d like, making “hard choices,” as they like to say, among the deserving. It’s not anyone’s favorite process, but firing and being fired are the truest expressions of the nature of work in these United States, which is always a mash-up of trajectories, yours and theirs.

As with any relationship, expectations abound and delusion is endless: the territory of ego. We are exhorted to “work on it,” too, making ourselves “fireproof” by constantly upping our game. Yet the bigger picture of the workplace is fuzzy at best. You specialize and find there’s no more demand. You refuse to specialize and are penalized for failing to be team player. Similarly, you decline to move to where the work is—or you move and they decide the market isn’t worth it.

Being fired can be liberating. It invites us to wonder about them and us. Even if our being fired was lunatic, what do we do with that—seek out new lunatics? What if the whole field abounds with lunacy? As Rahm Emanuel put it, “A disaster is a terrible thing to waste.” And keep I.M. Pei in mind. “I retired from my firm in 1990,” he told Fumihiko Maki in 2008. “I decided then to devote the rest of my life—I didn’t know at that time it would last so long—to do projects of interest only to me. It’s very selfish.” Emerson called it self-reliance: Hitch your wagon to a star.

4.

In the mid-1970s, I read some 120 building-fire case studies. This left me with a lifetime habit of noting exits and an aversion to IKEA stores, which are designed like roach hotels. (Casinos also fall in this category, and they encourage smoking!) Another takeaway: the best thing you can do in a fire is get out as fast as possible. (So the best thing you can do beforehand is to simulate getting out quickly until it becomes second nature.) The principal victims of building fires are the old, the infirm, and the very young—anyone likely to become disoriented by smoke, or to be incapable of saving themselves in a hurry or at all.

Fire is an accompaniment to domestic life. Clothes dryers are a frequent source of fires in nursing homes, while still plugged-in irons, pots left burning on the stove, etc., also do their part. Candles on the Christmas trees of my father’s childhood burned some neighbor’s house down often enough to be a distinct memory for him. When my daughter lights candles in her room when she meditates, and then forgets to blow them out, my father’s stories come back to mind.

Sometimes I wish I’d never read those case studies. My father-in-law used to set up a barbeque in front of our front door—a hibachi, actually, that sat on the walk, the kids circling around it. He was usually having a drink at this point in the party sequence. When I was a kid, a neighbor squirted lighter fluid into his barbeque and it blew up the can.

Or so I heard. I must have a genius for storing away these episodes. In Barcelona, when my oldest son was two, every affordable hotel had the only stairs and the elevator joined to form a single “chimney,” with no second exit. I took the front room closest to the ground, figuring we’d escape with our lives if we had to jump.

When my father-in-law died, he was cremated and his remains were buried in a box about the size of a concrete block. He’d been an All-American football player in college, so it was odd to see him so diminished. I have a theory

that there’s a certain amount of residual consciousness once you’re dead. Fire, once again, puts an end to it. I think I’d prefer a .45 to the head.

NOTES Written for Arcade in response to a blanket request for contributions from its editor, Kelly Rodriguez, and published as the fourth issue of a volume on alchemy, June 2010. This version is slightly modified.

I wrote this, unusually, in one sitting, and just sent it off. I still don’t know what to think of it. The editor liked it— apparently, it was the first piece to come in. I feel that it responded to the alchemical theme, which to me is about transmutation. The firing squad, the .45 to the back of the head—they speak to the raw matter at the starting point of this process. Life often appears leaden, weighed down. Viewed through the lens of having, as Stephen Batchelor points out in Alone with Others, life is just slogging along toward a blank wall. We collect stuff, and then it all gets taken away. Alchemy gives some of what we accumulate a life of its own. Fire is part of that process.

As my illustration suggests, one could extend this essay. I’m thinking of phrases like “playing with fire.” Stolen from the gods, don’t forget. Eve also engaged in thievery. The Big Bang is still visible, still reverberating. The earth’s core is molten because of it. Fire is the alpha and omega, as Böhme knew.

SOURCES Among the sources of things mentioned in the piece are: Henry B. Wheatley, editor, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Volumes 4–6, G. Bell & Sons, 1962 Curzio Malaparte: Kaputt, NYRB Classics, 2005 The War’s Best Photographs, Odhams Press Limited, 1944 Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, new edition, Verso, 2010 Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Black Swan, second edition, Random House, 2010 Fumihiko Maki, interviewer, “I.M. Pei—Words for the Future,” A+U Special Edition, August 2008 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” Emerson: Essays & Lectures, Library of America, 1983 Other things, like the last words of Gary Gilmore, were drawn from a lifetime of reading the papers.

URBANITY, NOT JUST DENSITY

555 WASHINGON AND THE 200-FOOT “ZONING WALL” ALONG WASHINGTON ST. (STAN HAYES)

On April 15, 2010, the San Francisco Planning Commission will revisit the proposed 38-story 555 Washington Street Tower, designed by Heller Manus for AEGON, Lowe Enterprises, and Liberty Hill. At its 18 March meeting, the commission certified the tower’s EIR. (Because of a public notice problem, the rest of the agenda was held over, but my sense is that the tower already had the votes going in.)

At an earlier hearing, on 11 February, venerable community activist Sue Hestor asked the commissioners, “Does ‘new urbanism’ say that we have to fight suburban sprawl by putting 400-foot buildings everywhere in San Francisco?” Ms. Hestor had a point. For far too long, smart growth has meant “density über alles” on both sides of the Bay. The result is a dog’s breakfast, for the most part, much of which has little to do with walkable urbanism and nothing to do with urbanity. It’s time to get nuanced about density! As 555 Washington demonstrates, density’s context is not just the block itself—the immediate environs of the tower—but what is influenced and perhaps threatened by allowing its increased height.

The 555 Washington tower disregards current zoning for the block it shares with William Pereira’s 1972 Pyramid, still the tallest building in the city. Next to it, the new tower doesn’t look so big, of course, and it comes with a packet of ground-level amenities. For Heller Manus, best known for its political acumen, the design is OK: cribbed from the late-modern playbook, but OK. All of this has won it an endorsement from SPUR, an important advocacy group for urban planning and policy in San Francisco.

So far, so good—I can imagine the trail of logic that brought SPUR on board. It all seems fairly harmless, and if it violates the planning code in the process, well, the code’s out of date anyway. So why should the Planning Commission hesitate to move ahead with 555 Washington when it takes up again in mid-March? Here are three good reasons for them to slow the tower down and reconsider its larger context.

1. Put a halt to case-by-case rezoning Dropping a housing tower into the Pyramid block seems benign, but it continues a sorry tradition of case-by-case rezoning. Back in May 2009, San Francisco Chronicle critic John King—addressing the 555 Washington tower specifically—spoke up for “a re-imagined, focused plan for the financial and retail district.” He also noted the price the city pays for not having one: “As long as downtown is up for grabs, in effect, count on the process to grow more strident and cynical.” San Francisco’s Planning Department may be hobbled by the downturn, King observed, but isn’t the real opportunity of a downturn to plan intelligently for the future?

Given the state of the housing market, there’s no urgency at all to approve the tower. By delaying it, the commissioners can avoid repeating the travesty of exempting Heller Manus’s Folsom/Spear Towers, now the Infinity, from the Rincon Area Plan. (They were approved, and then the new area plan was announced—with a dotted line around the towers that suggested that its eastern boundary had been hastily redrawn.)

2. Add density to the core, not the edge The Pyramid block is on the northern edge of SF’s Financial District, considerably past California Street. To its north, the buildings are much lower, an eclectic mix whose tenants benefit from its current density. This is where you find two of the region’s best bookstores, City Lights and Stout’s, and many of its best dealers in the decorative arts. You want urbanity? It starts here, yet the area clearly thrives because of its proximity to the financial district.

Shanghai, facing the same dilemma, has opted to preserve similar areas like the Puxi district, recognizing—as Singapore did not—that they are irreplaceable. This is why SF’s planning code sought, a generation ago, to preserve them. Let’s give its framers some credit for foresight.

The question that 555 Washington raises is not whether it’s inappropriate for its site, but what happens next. As UC Berkeley‘s Peter Bosselmann, a professor of urban design, once pointed out to me, adding density at the edge puts pressure on the lower-density neighborhoods that adjoin it. He was talking about the Rincon area, but the comment is even more applicable to the north end of the central business district, where recent and proposed projects along Kearny Street are also testing the higher-density waters. A generation ago, KPF’s building at 600 California had to step down to blend in with lower buildings to the north. That’s the power of a planning code that’s actually enforced. If enough exceptions to the existing planning code like the 555 Washington Tower get approved, the current 200-foot “wall” along Washington Street is unlikely to hold.

3. Focus on urbanity, not just density The question to ask of density is: what does it really contribute to the city? This takes in everything—scale and mix, design quality, effect on microclimate, synergy with surrounding uses, transit access, etc. As we rezone, so shall we reap. Instead of giving 555 Washington a pass, the Planning Commission still has the opportunity to send a muchneeded message to the mayor and the developer community: No more case-by-case!

Now, in the lull before the resumption of business as usual, is the right time take a comprehensive look at how the central business district should grow, gaining rather than losing urbanity, and how much added density, if any, the districts north of it should absorb. These are the real and pressing issues, which the EIR did not address. The commissioners have one last chance to do so. They should take it.

NOTES This was written for the California edition, Architect’s Newspaper, 31 March 2010. The tower’s EIR was certified by the Planning Commission, and then decertified by the Board of Supervisors, killing the project. I didn’t really like the tower’s design, but the issue here was its impact on the larger area.

NY GETS FRESH NOUVEL WHILE SF GETS PELLI’S LEFTOVERS. HOW COME?

JEAN NOUVEL’S MOMA TOWER

I winced when I saw the Times’ headline, “Next to MoMA, Reaching for the Stars.” Jean Nouvel’s new 75-story tower alongside the Museum of Modern Art reached back to Lyonel Feininger for inspiration, finally realizing his vision of an expressionist tower. It’s hard to imagine a stronger contrast to Cesar Pelli’s safely office-like MoMA housing or Yoshio Taniguchi’s recent, buttoned-down expansion. “To its credit, the Modern pressed for a talented architect,” Times’ critic Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote, but he goes on to praise Hines, the tower’s “remarkably astute” developer. “Hines asked Nouvel to come up with two possible designs, and made the bolder choice.” That’s Hines in New York.

This fall, Hines also won the right to develop the Transbay Tower in downtown San Francisco. Pelli’s proposal for the transit hub component of the project is well done, but the tower is a version of his International Financial Center megatower in Hong Kong. As usual for Hines—they really are “remarkably astute”—Pelli was a smart choice. The Airport Express station that serves Hong Kong’s financial district anchors the twin-tower IFC complex. From the standpoint of credentials, that’s valuable experience. And a tower that’s up and running is easier to price, even with differences in construction, than one-offs like Richard Rogers and SOM’s competing proposals. Armed with that knowledge, Hines played its trump card, offering up to $350 million for the land—more than twice what the other two developers were prepared to pay. That’s Hines in San Francisco.

Hines is Hines—the same smart operators, east and west. Given what they’re proposing for New York, blame for San Francisco’s less-than-stellar tower falls somewhere else.

CESAR PELLI’S WINNING TRANSBAY TOWER PROPOSAL

Jokingly called Dean Macris’ last erection, the Transbay Tower benefited from the recently-departed planning czar’s determination to fulfill his longtime vision of a city skyline marked by three accentuated “hills”—two real and one manmade. This is the same vision that gave us One Rincon Hill, the first in a two-tower wonder by Chicago’s Solomon Cordwell Buenz. Compared to it, Pelli’s proposal is definite progress.

A lot of people have questioned the logic of Macris’ idée fixe, but that’s another article. The question here is how a competition that was advertised as being all about design proved to be all about money. Not that this is surprising, but—in light of promises made—it feels like bait and switch. And if I feel this way, imagine how SOM feels!

I wasn’t privy to the jury’s deliberations, but a few things stuck out along the way. In the initial interviews, Norman Foster failed to appear and his team was eliminated. While eliminating starchitect no-shows is a standard m.o. for competition juries, confirming Woody Allen’s maxim that “85 percent of life is showing up,” the jury’s reaction struck me as a surefire sign of provinciality. Another sign of that was the dearth of interesting architects in the mix.

Again, I didn’t make the rules, but at roughly the same time that the Transbay schemes were being unveiled, Thom Mayne won a competition at La Défense in Paris that clearly breaks new ground. This was another reason to wince, since a second major work by Mayne might finally have put San Francisco on the architectural map.

Of course, Calatrava made the cut, only to have a falling out with his developer. Perhaps he was chosen, like Icarus, to exemplify the dangers of the creative edge. That left SOM., whose tower—while drawing on a Chinese precedent—alone showed the originality that the competition promised. With its blend of structure and sustainability, it presented a credible future for tall buildings in the earthquake-prone West Coast. Plus, it was

new, and that seemed to be what was wanted. (Unlike SOM’s, Richard Rogers’ peculiar tower was a throwback to his high-tech, frame-and-infill days, but vastly toned down, with no real gain in use value, especially as office space.) SOM’s tower fit the bill, if the object had been to build a tower in San Francisco that broke the mold. In retrospect, no such luck.

The Transbay Tower reminds me of the new east span of the Bay Bridge, a chance squandered to do something on a par with the Golden Gate Bridge. San Francisco rises to its own occasions with about the same frequency as its earthquakes—maybe less frequently. In that sense, there’s no real mystery about the latest outcome. Still, it makes me wince.

NOTES This also ran in the California edition of Architect’s Newspaper, 30 January 2008. Nouvel’s MoMA tower was subsequently cut down a bit. Neither tower is really underway, but the transit terminal and park that accompanies Pelli’s is moving ahead. This piece was also a fast burn, as I found the much-hyped Transbay Tower’s outcome deplorable, despite its utter predictability. AN is great about running criticism. This version amends a few edits in the original that distorted my meaning.

MANHATTAN SKYSCRAPER BY LYONEL FEININGER (MoMA)

PLACE AND SCALE

AN ABBEY ROAD OF THE MIND IN AIX-EN-PROVENCE

Over the Christmas holiday in late 2008, I read two book-length interviews with Ivan Illich by David Cayley1, a Canadian broadcast journalist. In passing, Illich mentioned Leopold Kohr, an Austrian political theorist best known for the phrase, “Small is beautiful.” In a talk that Illich gave at Yale University in October 19942, he noted that Kohr advocated for proportionality rather than smallness. As Illich developed Kohr’s main themes, I saw his relevance to how we think and talk about urban density.

Kohr argued that everything that exists has natural limits, and that cities arose and thrived thanks to a widely shared “common sense” about the limits of their pieces and parts, and the ways in which they properly related to each other. Proportionality for Kohr meant “the appropriateness of the relationship.” Another key word for him was certain, as in “a certain way.”

Kohr would say that bicycling is ideally appropriate for one living a certain place. This statement reveals that “certain,” as used here, is as distant from “certainty” as “appropriate” is from “efficient.” “Certain” challenges one to think about the specific meaning that fits, while “appropriate” guides one to knowledge of the Good. Taking “appropriate” and a “certain place” together allows Kohr to see the human social condition as that ever unique and boundary-making limit within which each community can engage in discussion about what ought to be allowed and what ought to be excluded.

In other words, we cannot meaningfully discuss density except in relation to a certain place. One question that density poses is, “What relationships are appropriate to that place?” It’s not a question that is meant to be posed or discussed in abstract. “Who is the community?” is also a relevant question: in relation to a certain place, “community” is no abstraction, either. In his talk, Illich noted that, with the Enlightenment, we began to lose our grasp of proportionality in this sense.

The price of modernity “Plato would have known what Kohr was talking about” Illich said. “In his treatise on statecraft he remarks that the bad politician confuses measurement with proportionality. Such a person would not recognize what is appropriate to a particular ethos, a word that originally implied a dwelling place, later something like ‘popular character.’” Also lost is paideia, “the attuning of the common sense to the ways of a certain community, and tonos, which one can understand as ‘the just measure,’ ‘reasonableness,’ or ‘proportion.’ A hundred years before the French Revolution, proportion as a guiding idea, as the condition for finding one’s basic stance, began to be lost.”

This disappearance has hardly been recognized in cultural history. The correspondence between up and down, right and left, macro and micro, was acknowledged intellectually, sense perception confirming it, until the end of the 17th century.

Proportion was also a lodestar for the experience of one’s body, of the other, and of gendered relations. Space was simply understood as a familiar cosmos. Cosmos meant that order of relationships in which things are originally placed. For this relatedness—this tension or inclination of things, one to another, their tonos—we no longer have a word. Tonos was silenced in the course of Enlightenment progress as a victim of the desire to quantify justice. Therefore, we face a delicate task: to retrieve something like a lost ear, an abandoned sensibility.

Illich also pointed to temperament, which went from being “the combination of qualities in a certain proportion, determining the characteristic nature of something,” as medieval philosophy defined it. “To temper was to bring something to its proper or suitable condition, to modify or moderate something favorably, to achieve a just measure.” At the beginning of the 18th century, it “came to mean to tune a note or instrument in music to fixed intonation,” Illich said. The universal and general thus replaced the local and specific. “Proportionality being lost, neither harmony nor disharmony retains any roots in an ethos. The Good, Kohr’s ‘certain appropriateness,’ becomes trite, if not a historical relic.” The result is a shift from “the Good” to “values.”

An ethics of value—with its misplaced concreteness—allowed one to speak of human problems. If people had problems, it no longer made sense to speak of human choice. People could demand solutions. To find them, values could be shifted and prioritized, manipulated and maximized. Not only the language but the very modes of thinking found in mathematics could norm the realm of human relationships. Algorithms “purified” value by filtering out appropriateness.

Modernity, that child of the enlightenment, comes with a price. How we think and talk about density today is symptomatic of what it has cost us. This is what I take from Kohr and Illich. While there are proponents of higherdensity urban development who speak eloquently about urbanity and manage to achieve it, density in practice can be a diktat of abstract values that leads more often than not to a redeveloped cityscape that is placeless, generic, and disharmonious.

Reframing density Cities like San Francisco and Berkeley exemplify our current dilemma around density. On one side are the advocates for what might be called “regional, long-term values3.” On the other side is the local community, appalled by redevelopment proposals that disregard current zoning and posit a fabric that is radically altered from what exists. All this occurs within a drawn-out and politicized entitlements process, fought as a zero-sum game.

Reading Illich on Kohr, I wondered if what’s actually broken is the way we think of density in an urban context.

How can we reframe it? Three changes seem crucial: First, we need recognize that density’s effects are always specific. Another question to ask of density is, “What will it actually contribute to this place—this site, block, neighborhood, district—in terms of livability, urbanity, and sustainability?” It’s also important to ask “Who will benefit from any changes to the existing fabric that alters its density?” Especially so when the changes proposed will undo existing agreements on the character of that fabric.

Second, we need to revive the rule of law in urban redevelopment. In San Francisco and Berkeley, its loss has led to a politicized, case-by-case entitlements process. Glacial and expensive, it makes every project a protracted struggle, while undermining the existing planning framework that, at least in theory, codifies good practices and precedents.

Third, we need to restore a “common sense” about proportionality and appropriateness, so that density regains its innate connection to actual settings and to those who live and work in them. There is a supposition that ordinary people cannot be trusted to make decisions about density, yet the results of a process dominated by experts don’t inspire much trusted in their greater wisdom.

By rooting density in the specifics of a place, the larger principles that make a higher density desirable can be considered in application. Is this the place to shift the density higher, and if so, then how and how much? What will this imply for adjoining areas? Do we need new rules—or old rules reaffirmed—to maintain these areas as they are or ensure that their future redevelopment is appropriate?

Restoring common sense These are obvious questions, but they are not being posed. Density is considered a value for its own sake—socially useful. The actual results are often a disaster. Ordinary people are up in arms, because they realize that the governments of their own cities have turned against them. That’s steadily breeding a reaction, even in progressive San Francisco and Berkeley, where people accept that higher density is necessary. It’s not just “Not in my backyard!” The reaction is really “common sense,” a desire to preserve the quality of the city against incursions that undermine it. With justification, there’s little confidence that what’s being proposed won’t result in a net loss of urbanity for a neighborhood or a district.

We all know of places that, by adding new density thoughtfully, have gained hugely in urbanity. These are the benchmarks to which Smart Growth advocates point, but they’re the exception. Every time mediocrity gets a pass in the name of higher density, the case for it gets weaker in the public’s mind. Every time some out-of-scale project emerges from entitlements, bloated by the need to recoup what politicians have managed to extract from it, the public sees higher density as yet another form of corruption.

The divide will get worse, not better, until density is reframed. Cities will get worse, too, until urbanity is seen as the necessary outcome of redevelopment. Behind urbanity are the place–specifics of proportionality and appropriateness, as Kohr and Illich noted. Without that sense of tonos, we are not as smart about growth as we need to be.

NOTES 1. David Cayley, Ivan Illich in Conversation, Anansi, 1992, and The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich, Anansi, 2005.

2. Ivan Illich, The Wisdom of Leopold Kohr, 14th Annual E.F. Schumacher Lecture, Yale University, October 1994, E.F. Schumacher Society, 1996.

3. This was neatly illustrated in an article on 4 July 2010 by Jonathan Weber in the New York Times, quoting Smart Growth advocate Peter Calthorpe, who spoke approvingly of such proposed mega-projects as the environmentallyvulnerable Saltworks in Redwood City, seeing that partial-wetlands redevelopment as responsible in the longer run, as against the shortsightedness of its local critics.

Still unpublished, this was written for a Smart Growth advocacy group in Manhattan that put out a call for papers during the late December 2009 break. This is the sixth draft, considerably cut down.

EXCERPTS: A MEMOIR IN TIME

A GATHERING IN NEW YORK CITY, 1949 (KARL BISSINGER)

1.

I sometimes think that if reincarnation is real, the twin poles of our moving across time are absolute masculinity and absolute femininity. Each step in one direction or the other gives us a different mix, but our subsequent associations—who we fall in love with, for example—color what comes forward. Biology is never precisely destiny, as long as our human imaginations are intact. Our nature is innate, but it is also situational—malleable in response to people and events. It’s one of our compasses, but the courses we set vary immensely over the expanse of our lives. I sometimes weary of being a man, but I know well that being a woman is a good deal harder, actually. They must weary of being women, too.

Growing up, I constantly had to come to grips with my own nature and decide, if that’s the right word, what to bring forward and, having done so, how to stay on good terms with the rest. I think that’s an important point, how easily we imagine that the rest can be ignored or repressed. The constant unearthing of proof of the folly of doing so is one of the great themes of our times, a cautionary tale that too often is also someone’s nightmare. Making the world safer for human nature is a worthy project. We would all benefit. It’s still tipped in the other direction, but that simply doesn’t work.

The politics and the landscape of sexuality began to change when I was in high school. I worked for two gay florists who lived together above their store in the next town. In the company of my Iowa cousins, I visited Fire Island, where a friend from their town was the island doctor during the summer. This was before AIDS. Gay men took to the beach in the same way that women did on the French Riviera, I observed, barely clothed, their bodies buffed. In men, it felt like childhood. I remember the impulse to remove my clothes, at that young age, and the frisson of running around naked with other boys.

Sexual license in general increased dramatically while I was an undergraduate. What was seen as the hypocrisy of our elders was thrown off. Youth, propelled both by the war and by drugs, hit the streets. In white America—not black America—this was mostly nonviolent. Black America set out to burn the house down. They had less to lose, and good reasons to disbelieve in nonviolence, especially after King was assassinated in 1968. Whites—those whites that turned out—were tired of the line of reasoning that led to a pointless war to which they might be sacrificed. We were close enough to our fathers’ war to know that this one didn’t add up. As children of war survivors, we took staying alive as a birthright.

My generation, which came of age in the 1960s, is often pilloried by succeeding ones for our hubris and narcissism.

I remember a writer for a national magazine, Life, perhaps, telling us that we risked being remembered only for smoking dope and making love. Not so bad, my cohorts replied. It seems an odd charge given what we knew even then about our parents’ generation. Didn’t he read the New Yorker?

One difference was that sexual license “came out.” That process always overshoots, but its origins go back to World War II, when everyone turned a blind eye to everything. Our parents tried to button it down, but they also knew what that could mean—the Nazis being the prize example. Coming out is a theme of the second half of 20thcentury America. It took myriad forms, but the instinct was the same.

2.

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

People look back at the midcentury as a high water mark of design. In Europe in 1960, my parents bought some fine pieces of Scandinavian modern furniture for their modern house. Modernity came easily to them, because they’d experienced the modern world directly. They saw the claims of our small town as momentary, however much they might get caught up, day to day, in the mechanics of the plot.

SONNET: IN HELL Work is tantalizingly close to done.

You eat your sandwich at your desk, munching.

Evenings and weekends always promise fun.

And your book suggests some weekday lunching, But then those plans fall through. It starts to rain.

On the train, one woman bores another.

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

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

Life has an eternity left to run.

It’s raining out, but they predicted sun.

NOTES A Memoir in Time is an attempt to write autobiographically and place what I experienced personally in a cultural, political, and social context. (Don’t all memoirs do this?) I started writing sonnets after reading Invitation to the Dance by Mary Oliver—a book on poetic structure. To be honest, I couldn’t figure it out from this book, although I learned a lot of other things, and I ended up looking at a sonnet by Shakespeare and applying his structure and rhyming pattern. I’d never written poems to this kind of constraint before, and it’s proven interesting. I also discovered that I have a knack for rhyming.

COMMON PLACE All articles © 2010 by John Parman Website: http://complace.j2parman.com

Number 5 features an essay that I began in 2001, but abandoned. Writing it anew revealed my discursiveness, and to keep going with the main arguments, such as they are, I made codas of other topics as they arose.

ANGELICA BELL AND HER AUNT, VIRGINIA WOOLF

COMMON PLACE No. 5 | October 2011

VANESSA BELL AT CHARLESTON, PAINTED BY DUNCAN GRANT

PREAMBLE: MARRIAGE, FAMILY, AND FRIENDSHIP This essay revives and completes another, "Love & Marriage," that I started in 2001. It consists of eight theses and five codas. I use the word thesis because the essay draws on my lived experience of the hu- man condition and its conundrums. Theses are not laws or rules; life is not a set of algorithms, but it has discernible patterns. There's no map, just a way in and a way out, neither very well marked.

My polemical goals are several. I want to lift the improbable weight that tradition has placed on marriage by demanding that it fulfill every human need. There may be such marriages, truly self-contained, but they seem unlikely. I believe that we need a new tradition of marriage and, along with it, a new tradition of family. I also want to raise the stature of friendship, acknowledging the potential and even the likelihood that it will overlap marriage and family. Friendships are voluntary and self-renewing. How they relate to the familial contexts of the friends, if there are such contexts, cannot be prescribed or proscribed in advance. Any new traditions of marriage and family need to account for this, which suggests in turn that a new tradition of friendship may be needed, too.

This essay was written in parts, each of which was posted on my blog, Quotes & Thoughts. This is an edited and condensed version of those posts. It was written in Berkeley, September–October 2011. – John Parman

A SUMMER CAMPING SCENE, PAINTED BY VANESSA BELL

THESIS 1: MARRIAGE CONTINUES FAMILY My first thesis is that marriage, as the continuation of childhood, is as wrapped up in family as it is in the desire for love that gives rise to it.

We are born into a family and it forms the context of our lives through our upbringing. We make friends and eventually we split off from our family in order to form another. But that act, if we pursue it, is also part of the family dynamic, which posits its continuation and views marriage, particularly from the standpoint of the parents, as a vehicle of generation. Marriage could be thought of as a genetic conspiracy between grandparents and their grandchildren. In time, everyone joins up. The year's feast days bring the family together “under one roof.�

Cousins meet and form a larger cohort. The elders may age and die, but the family lives on.

Marriage recreates the intimate tension of the family at its heart. We enter the family by passing through our mother's birth canal and then attaching ourselves to her breasts. Long before this, we take hold amid passion and make our presence felt. Once born, we relate to our mother physically. That physical intimacy, the realm of childhood, is forcibly put aside until our hormones stir and our bodies change. At that point, we may seek lovers.

Not always consciously, we may want children.

There's a hardwired aspect to this, and not everyone shares the wiring. So, instead, I could say that at a certain point, we want another (or others) with whom to share an intimate tension. Family may be both the cause and consequence of this. We do so despite the inconveniences, unhappiness, and even the dangers that come with it.

For my purposes here, I'm going to set the untoward aside. Marriage in one form or another is a common feature of life, so it exhibits the full range of human behavior. There are sociopaths and psychopaths out there. A lot of family life is toxic in one way or another. This is not about that toxicity. Its sense of family is more benign than not.

Yet the inconveniences and unhappiness are real. And there are dangers, even among the benign. You can be messed with without anyone laying a hand on you, often with the best of intentions. Misunderstandings abound.

We bring our natures with us, on arrival. Parents do their best to deal with us, and then friends, lovers, and partners take their turns.

Yet we invite this, throwing our ill-suited natures into unlikely combinations that nonetheless attract us. This too is like a family, which despite the bond of blood is a genetic menagerie. Perhaps instinctively, we want to mix it up. (Personally, I give destiny some credence.)

What family has going for it is staying power. Not for nothing do cults seek to break its hold. Cults and gangs are family substitutes, but poor ones that suffice only when the real family doesn't cut it. And of course a lot of families don't; those that do manage to transcend our species’ self-centeredness often enough to be altruistic. This altruism is limited, as Swedenborg noted. (He condemned families for tending to restrict their kindnesses to themselves.) It's limited, but it's a start. You have to learn altruism somewhere. Altruism is an evolutionary tactic for the family and our species. Xenophobia and tribalism persist, but the cosmos we inhabit suffers from them.

Intimate tensions at the community level have a way of exploding. The family is where we first learn to negotiate difference. (Not everyone learns, of course.)

THESIS 2: MARRIAGE IS ALWAYS IN TRANSITION My second thesis is that marriage passes through what Zen Buddhism calls gates or barriers. One of these is the transition from personal to familial love.

Behind this thesis is the Buddhist notion of practice. In Zen parlance, gates and barriers are not markers of progress, but of the depth of exploration of the same phenomenon, so to speak. Love, marriage, and friendship are practices, too. Family is one of their contexts.

When I first arrived at this thesis, I was thinking of the birth of my oldest son, a remarkable event that even now I can remember vividly. Birth reminds us that we’re a species. It puts us in the timeframe of evolution, faster moving than geological time, for example, but also subject to time's river-like shaping. My son stared at us and we stared at him, meeting for the first time in one of life's sacramental moments. In this respect, acts of lovemaking are like the collisions of galaxies, each bringing a unique but overlapping genetic ancestry, conjoined at the heart.

Marriage exists in everyday time and evolutionary time. The family is both a socio-economic unit and an evolutionary unfolding, dynastic and genetic. Against this background, the marriage partners work through their individual and shared desires, dilemmas, and frustrations. They acquiesce and they rebel. They age. Life unfolds and the marriage experiences stresses and strains.

Many of these are age-old. Sometimes they break us, break the marriage, and break the family, but the family can also be a refuge. Families are typically more accepting, between the generations and among siblings, than the partners in a marriage may be in the midst of its turmoil. The family in this sense provides both a reason to keep the marriage going and a model for how to do so. What families exhibit—familial love—is more likely to forgive, more likely to be unconditional and accepting, and more likely to see ruptures as an aberration.

This reflects a consciousness of evolutionary time that becomes clearer as we get older. We begin to understand that our own life has threads, a "heaping up of small acts," as both the Tao Te Ching and the I Ching put it. This continual modest effort may get us further than repeated acts of "reinvention." Time is a background dimension in life, but families can bring it into higher relief.

One of the purposes of marriage is to bring us out of ourselves. This is something that work, for example, only partly accomplishes. Behind this is our individual ripening, the slow shedding of ego for being. The "great matter," as the Zen Buddhists call it, seems to relate to this. (I'm not an adept, so all I know is what I've read.)

Familial love exemplifies being as much as having. In their dynastic aspects, families appear rooted in having, but when you scratch the surface, being is what persists. What families possess is more often the means to new ends.

THESIS 3: MARRIAGE NEEDS FREEDOM My third thesis is that the acceptance of marriage's dynastic purpose is aided rather than subverted by the freedom its parties allow themselves.

I've used the word familial to describe what married love becomes when personal love is transmuted or transcended by the family's pull. To the extent that families will consciously or unconsciously seek their perpetuation, familial love is tied up in what tradition knows as dynastic purpose. And while this seems like the stuff of aristocracies of one kind or another, all families nonetheless engage in it to the extent that they look to their future as a family, concerning themselves with their children's and their grandchildren’s lives, wishing for and often working for their success.

Accepting the dynastic purpose of marriage is a logical development of familial love. The family provides a context for the marriage, and the marriage partners start to see themselves as an intrinsic part of it. Ultimately, they end up as elders. If they've earned it, they're respected and sought out as guides by the younger generation. There are often property and other assets to be considered. Some families are like businesses: the elders look for successors, if they can find them, to carry it on.

Let me be clear that what I'm describing is one pattern out of many. Not every married couple even thinks of itself as a family. Not every married person wants to "get past" an initial desire for a purely personal relationship with another. Indeed, this transition can be difficult and even a disaster. Yet from the other side it can look more like a breaking through than a breaking down.

Accepting the dynastic purpose of marriage makes the family more valuable to the partners. Whatever tensions exist between them, they have more incentive to resolve them. This can be taken in several ways.

Tradition argues for hierarchy: family first, often with one or the other partner "in command." Despite the lip service paid to modernity, this model persists. In its modern form, the family may be invoked to stifle dissent. To me, this is not a modern marriage. It's the traditional model trying to cope with modernity. A modern marriage accepts that its partners are individuals, with their own lives. It acknowledges the love—personal and familial—that each brings to the marriage, but recognizes that love can take many different forms. When a modern marriage accepts the dynastic purpose of marriage, it commits itself to perpetuating the family. How it does so is not and cannot be wholly predetermined. Tradition is often of little use when a couple faces a crisis that tradition suggests should end the marriage.

It's like the difference between the Decalogue, with its moral absolutes, and the Buddhist precepts, which focus on state of mind and not causing harm. There are times in a marriage when for practical reasons the partners are almost totally dependent on each other. If the marriage vow has its reasons, they are these. Our responsibilities to offspring are similar, but we recognize that there's a point when we have to let go.

A modern marriage is open ended about the means but less so about the ends. As the I Ching says, it seeks "an end that endures." These ends can’t be foreseen in any detail, but they reflect a hope for the family that is like that of the gardener who considers not just the next season, but the future of the garden itself. There's an element of cultivation to it. That this hope may be pointless in the grander scheme of things, life's ephemeral nature, means little to families of cultivators. There's an element of stewardship to them, a sense of connection to an enterprise that predates them, often by a considerable amount, and on this basis alone posits their future. I can trace part of my family by individual names back to 1620, and its previous history can be inferred to its arrival in Parma early in the previous century. Within my family history, my "dynasty," are the individuals involved, the personal histories.

Modern marriage accepts that individuals matter and looks for ways to enable them to live as fully as they can. The individual freedom that this implies carries risks, but modern marriage accepts that they're worth taking.

The stretching out of life means that modern marriage has more incentive to do this than traditional marriage did.

The freedom to live fully becomes more important as one grows older. The truism that "youth is wasted on the young" seems true in that there's a ripening in human life. That ripeness pervades individual experience. Its actual potential is to enrich the marriage, but this is not always immediately apparent.

Tradition, Friedrich Hayek noted, is received wisdom or evolutionary lore. The way society is set up, its norms and laws, is not designed, he said, but handed down. Traditions evolve as part of unfolding life. As Thoreau pointed out, traditions have their limits. There are times when we have to disregard them. Slavery is tradition, too, and today, no one defends it.

A new tradition of family may need to be accompanied by new traditions of marriage and friendship. The dynastic purpose of marriage isn't applicable to every type of family that considers itself to be one, but I would guess that cultivators can be found in all of them.

THESIS 4: MARRIAGE NEEDS A NEW TRADITION My fourth thesis is that marriage needs a new tradition that reflects its familial and dynastic aspects, its potentially long-lived nature, and its periods of vulnerability and dependence.

Marriages evolve and the couple gets older. In the childbearing years, the presence of dependent children makes the couple more dependent on each other. This dependence resurfaces if one or the other partner becomes seriously ill. Any new tradition should acknowledge this. I would revise the marriage vow to say, “Marriage is a commitment to treat as family the issue and estate of the partners, however acquired, and to treat one's partner as family, whatever else may happen.” There are instances—I've seen them in my own extended family—of longdivorced couples reuniting around an illness, because the sick person is a parent of the children and often has no one else.

The mutual obligations of the partners in a marriage evolve over time. As two individuals, what they owe each other versus what they owe themselves changes. A new tradition of marriage accepts and works with this. It doesn't say what to do, but acknowledges that something may need to be done.

The nature and timing of marriage's evolution is up in the air. One partner may object. The new tradition of marriage says fine, but don't point to tradition to back you up. You knew going in that this might happen when you reach a point when mutual dependence is no longer an issue. Instead of seeing of it as an affront, see it as a time of growth.

Marriage, as an "honorable estate," has legal meanings and involves the couple in a legal process to undo its status and redefine its obligations. Among my hopes in proposing a new tradition of marriage is to prompt discussion of this legal context. Just as the old tradition seems out of sync with the realities of modern life, the legal framework of marriage feels rooted in another era.

If there's a pattern to the evolution of marriage, it coincides with the evolution of self, the slow or precipitous shedding of narcissism and possessiveness in favor of being, with its greater willingness to accept others as they are and allow life to unfold. Being as I understand it isn't passivity or fatalism. You still plan and daily life still has its discipline and élan. What's different is that you recognize life's contingent and ephemeral nature, valuing others for who they are, but not as yours. This takes an act of will. Sometimes this shift can feel like your skin is being pulled off, yet it is the necessary step. Being is the only way to live with life as it really is.

A new tradition of marriage accepts life on its own terms. It accepts the partner as an individual, part of something larger, a family, to which we both belong. That identity is indelible, but this says nothing about this other belonging to us. "Until death," as the old tradition has it, is about a path we each take up. How we walk it is up to each of us. A new tradition of marriage accepts the partner as an individual whose life unfolds independently from ours.

As this implies, a new tradition of marriage needs to be open and capacious. The old tradition left this unstated, leaving it to each couple to negotiate the openness and deal with their marriage's evolution. The new tradition is more forthright about its possible trajectories, willing to see it as a union of individuals who necessarily grow and change. It acknowledges what arises from the union, the sense or reality of family, and anticipates its importance.

THESIS 5: MARRIAGE’S FREEDOM REVIVES FRIENDSHIPS My fifth thesis is that friendship reasserts itself as a fundamental human relationship, on a par with marriage and potentially its complement.

The factors that lead us to marry are many and varied, so it is difficult to generalize. In my own experience, the attraction between the marriage partners obscures their differences. They then spend considerable time dealing with this. Someone in my family once told me that the first four years of marriage or its domestic prelude, sharing a household and a daily existence, are spent sorting this out.

My sense is that beneath that sorting out are deeper differences that can't be fully sorted. For the marriage to continue there has to be an accommodation. Beyond this is whatever the marriage partners cannot or will not provide each other. Part of the ripening of a marriage is often the desire for a fuller life. Individuality asserts itself, and with it comes the impulse to transcend the marriage or, in effect, to enlarge it.

Part of the initial sorting out early in a marriage is the sorting out of friends. Their claims and their relative compatibility with both partners are examined. Some friends survive this vetting and others don’t. Friendships made in later life may revive the past or arise anew, but they again reflect truly individual preferences.

Friendship grows in importance because it is part of the territory the individual is exploring and extending, the territory of the self. The friends one makes there may be exclusive to it or they may come to relate to the marriage, too. This cannot be predicted in advance. What is possible to say is that the marriage can be enriched by friendship and vice versa. For this to happen, the territory of individuality has to be respected.

The other partner may envy or regret a friendship, because it speaks to differences between the married couple. One cannot be what one is not. Yet friendship makes a different point: we are who we are. This applies to the marriage, too.

Friendship is not a familial tie, although it may become one. The friend of one or the other partner may become the friend of the couple and the family, or may simply be the particular friend of one of the partners, potentially accepted and respected as such, but not part of the larger circle. Each couple, each family, and each friendship has to work this out for itself.

What makes friendship a core human relationship is its tie to our individuality. Friendships arise because selffulfillment is part of our makeup. As we get older, this aspect of our humanity comes forward and friends often figure. At this stage in life, a friendship can be profound. Among friendship, marriage, and family, the love and closeness we feel differs in each case, but friendship, lacking dynastic ambitions, is the least encumbered. Friends may end up sharing certain things, like a correspondence, and may even live together, but there's still a difference.

The heart of friendship, to me, is the willingness of the friends to take each other straight up.

THESIS 6: OUR INDIVIDUALITY IS FUNDAMENTAL My sixth thesis is that each one is her or his own person, not the property of any other. Vows cannot transcend this basic fact.

Individuality is fundamental, which is why to be works better in the long run than to have. We don't actually possess even ourselves, these ephemeral would-be vessels of our possible souls, but we can be more assuredly than we can have. That's the Buddha's take, but this is also the territory of François, duc de La Rochefoucauld, what the French call amour-propre. Love between two individuals dances around their singularity, which is to say their self-love and self-regard.

Individuals are not unchanging monoliths. As their lives unfold, their interests, desires, tastes, pursuits, and natures evolve. So does their use of time. It's not just their appearances that change; they are literally not the same from point to point. Yet viewed within, there’s a kind of thread of identity that makes each one feel she or he has a self, is the same individual all along. We are and we are not, which is to say that we are best understood as having an inherent uncertainty, like particles of light. Try to possess this other and there's nothing there beyond the moment. This can be maddening, especially to those who see life in a binary black and white. To extend the analogy to Newtonian and quantum physics, the old tradition of marriage is rooted in the former, simplifying existence by holding to an ordered universe in which a binary view of things is of a piece. This mode of life works up to a point. It ceases to work is when it runs up against the realities described above—when it becomes obvious that its narrow descriptive power and limited repertoire of responses are unequal to our actual human condition.

The old tradition of marriage declaims its absolutes and the partners deal with the nuances of their specific situations.

A new tradition of marriage acknowledges the quantum nature of life. It sees life's basic relationships taking place between individuals. While they have responsibilities to each other and to their issue, if any, they are still individuals. A new tradition brings the nuances of life to the forefront, acknowledging that the real history of women and men, their intimate history, is vastly richer than the absolutes of the old tradition posit.

Most of all, a new tradition makes modest claims, not sweeping ones. It recognizes that many of the problems we face in life are wicked, as Horst Rittel called them: they can be resolved, but the solutions are ad hoc and provisional. One could say that the solutions to wicked problems are bound by time and context. A new tradition accepts this. It seeks a better understanding of how life works. It's more interested in narratives, in individual histories, than in absolutes.

All of this points to the need to set aside whatever properly belongs to the past. The grudges that we hold, the slights and betrayals that we count against others, are our baggage, artifacts of memory. They can become objects of identity, but this puts the brakes on our own unfolding. We owe it ourselves, our individuality, to acknowledge this and set these burdens down. We owe to the present an ability to be present within it, to be open to what unfolds and able to respond with immediacy. To live otherwise is to be prejudiced, and experience suggests that prejudices are seldom warranted.

THESIS 7: FRIENDSHIP ANCHORS OUR RELATIONSHIPS My seventh thesis is that friendship is the core of all successful human relationships.

I could argue that affection is the core of all successful relationships. Yet I want to bring friendship to the fore, especially as other parts of this essay have emphasized marriage and family.

La Rochefoucauld exemplifies how with love and affection friendship can overcome the obstacles that plague close relationships. Late in life, unhappy and disillusioned, he met a woman, Madame de la Fayette, who truly

befriended him and placed this friendship ahead of other considerations. Said to be successful with women, he was by then disfigured and outmaneuvered, his ambitions thwarted. But the mind is the true engine of our feelings, to which the tongue and pen give expression. Left with only this essence, he found a friend who truly loved him for it.

Consider again Vanessa Bell. Married to Clive Bell, she grew to resent his familiarity with other women.

Falling in love with Roger Fry, she tried out what could have been a second marriage and household, but gave it up, returning to the households she and Clive Bell originally shared. Their marriage kept going. Meanwhile, she fell in love with Duncan Grant. Her physical relationship with him, which Grant found singular enough to record, produced a daughter, Angelica Bell. Once she was pregnant, or soon after, Grant told her that this aspect of things had to stop. Despite the unhappiness this caused her, their relationship continued. They lived together and painted together. Their closeness seems only to have grown stronger.

Angelica Bell wrote a memoir that describes her ambivalent relationships with her parents. Gradually she came to understand that Grant was her biological father, although Clive Bell had always stood in. Ten years after writing her memoir, she wrote a new foreword acknowledging that her retrospective quarrels with them were expunged, that she saw them in a different light. And even in the first edition, she pointed to her daughters as compensation enough for the unhappiness she suffered.

I recount these episodes in one extended family to note how, as the I Ching says, affection underlies all close human relationships. Marriage, family, and friendship are all either grounded in affection or risk becoming a sea of unhappiness. In asserting this, I recognize that I'm projecting my own nature, which is more affectionate than not.

In an interview in the Paris Review, the poet Frederick Seidel said that you reach a point in life where you're unwilling not to be yourself. You write what you write and if people don't like it, that's their problem. I agree with this, but feel it has to be tempered when one is together with others. I've observed that some people take pleasure in constant strife. "This is sex for them," I sometimes think. I'm not speaking here of the flashes of anger that are inherent to close human interaction, but of a chronic penchant for behavior that quells affection.

As we get older, the loosening of the mortal coil allows us a greater openness to others, a clearer sense of who they are beneath their foibles and grievances. It's as if we can feel their hearts beating, sense the humanity that connects us. We no longer think of them as ours, as part of our circle or orbit, revolving around us. As this happens, friendships take on a different hue. We're grateful just to be with a friend when it happens. How it was, how it might be—memories and speculations may well up, but they no longer gnaw at us. We're finally on better terms with our past and more willing to let life surprise us with its possibilities. It's at this point that friendship takes center stage.

Friendships take many forms. I'm not arguing that one form or another will enable closeness to blossom, but that closeness is independent of the form a friendship takes. And while affection is necessary to a friendship, its closeness really depends on mutual acceptance. This is the lesson of La Rochefoucauld and his friend Madame de la Fayette, and of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.

THESIS 8: TRUE FRIENDSHIP REQUIRES MUTUAL ACCEPTANCE My eighth thesis is that friendship is mutually accepting or it's not a true friendship.

The Soto Zen essayist Kocho Uchimaya makes the point that there are limits to how well we can know another. His spiritual ancestor Eihei Dogen makes another salient point about our mutability: that we are better understood as a spectrum of behaviors, unpredictable and beyond our conscious control, however much we will it to be otherwise.

Enlightenment is a transient awareness, Dogen asserts, that can't be privileged over other states of being. This is why he placed so much emphasis on "Just sit!" To sit is to find the ground again, by whatever means.

"The ground" is a useful metaphor, pointing to the moment when we let go of whatever carried us away and place ourselves again in the unfolding life that in reality, we've been indivisibly part of all along. Place is not quite right, since everything is in flux, but it will do. Usually, we are somewhere when we find our ground again. It becomes our vantage point, the shore from which we venture on, sometimes together and sometimes on our own.

Although we cannot know the ground or the path of others, these metaphorical words are helpful to describe what we share with them, which is to be present in a world that, although we see it and respond to it individually, unfolds for all of us.

True friendship is rare, in my experience. Like light, it's one thing at one moment, something else at another.

The quantum nature of life governs it, so we have to accept that it isn't wholly bound by time or space. A true friend is often in our thoughts, but our encounters reflect our individuality. We accept each other's individuality because we value it in ourselves. We leave it to the other to shape her or his life. We accept each other's nature, however much we may want to change aspects of it.

This in itself is bucking the tide. We live in an era when perfectibility is on a lot of lips. There's a lot of complaining, too, since life doesn't really work that way. Self-cultivation shouldn't aim at perfection, but at sustaining and enlivening one's existence. True friends accept that this is one point of their friendship. There's an inherent element of playfulness to it.

We humans are a mix of animal spirits and various higher callings. What Dogen saw, his insistence that it all shades together, is what true friends accept of each other; they do their level best to live at the higher end, but they know it doesn't always happen. They may have to go off and lick their wounds in consequence, but they know the other suffers, too. Find the ground again: this is what true friends ask of each other. That's what their mutual acceptance means.

CODA 1: WORK Work is life's other great thread—with school, the great inculcator of discipline. It’s also the enabler of family, providing the wherewithal to achieve a measure of independence, to marry, and to support a household. A topic in itself, work deserves mention if only to note the social costs of economic stagnation and exploitation. One achievement of the postwar era was to quell for a time in selected countries the terrors of unemployment and put family life on sounder footing for the working and middle classes. As that achievement has been undermined here and elsewhere, family life has suffered.

The employers of my father's initial career were altruistic, reflecting the sacrifices the next generation had made on their behalf. The immediate postwar era, 1945 to 1960, was a period of rebuilding that drove economic growth and made work inherently and self-evidently valuable. In the 1960s, this fell apart. At the same time, the shadow side of the postwar era—its apparent emptiness—triggered a reaction in the next generation, which its elders had foolishly committed to pointless "tactical" wars. Unburdened by its elders’ gratefulness for having survived the war and prospered, and taking prosperity for granted, the 1960s generation (and its older campfollowers) turned society inside out. Billed as a revolution, it was more of an interregnum that paralleled the real one—for civil rights—that started earlier and persisted longer. This larger struggle played out across life: love, work, and family.

Work lost its altruism in the 1960s. The social paradise narrowed and was criticized. Friedrich Hayek, who admired tradition, was wrongly paired with Ayn Rand to justify dog eat dog. High finance supplanted manufacturing in developed nations. Western families began their long accommodation. Yet even today, some enterprises are altruistic. Like a family, they understand that altruism is part of a social compact that creates a bond stronger than money alone. These organizations stand out today as the exceptions. Along with the economy, a lot of the would-be prime movers have been broken. Their destruction is attributed to strategic errors, market failures, and bad luck, but more often it looks like the people at the top took leave of their senses, walling off the play of opinion—the intimate tension— that is just as crucial to companies as it is to marriages and families.

DUNCAN GRANT, ANGELICA AND QUENTIN BELL

CODA 2: TIME Everyday time is ordinary time. It has dimension, but its boundaries are both contained and amorphous. It has its plans and deadlines. It's also where work happens, where we practice. We don't always or often practice with any larger sense of time in mind. When we're young, others do this for us, urging us forward in the name of where we might end up. This is closer to evolutionary time, which plays out in cycles. Hence being's chain, a linked series of events that repeat a sequence in roughly the same way. We’re born into both types of time. The everyday gives us glimpses of evolution's cycle.

"Just sit” is Dogen's famous summary of Zen. You place yourself within all of time's dimensions: ordinary time that you can measure and count; and evolutionary, geological, and cosmological time, which move steadily beyond our lived experience. We see and slowly grasp these latter dimensions of time by their traces and artifacts, but intuitively we experience them as a cycle or chain, a learned sequence, a set of theories, a mystery. Our persistent belief in a parallel world of spirits, of reincarnation or the hereafter, reflects the oddity of being set adrift in a world in which time works deceptively and relentlessly. "Just sit" acknowledges that as life unfolds, we unfold with it. We’re part of life, not separate from it. Marriage, family, and friendship alike are part of life, too, unfolding with it.

Living in time as we do, we are haunted by our ephemeral nature. "Work as if immortal” was a maxim of E.M. Forster that Christopher Isherwood embraced. I interpret it to mean, "Suspend time as a factor in order to taste something of its expansiveness and let it fill your sails." The immediacy of ordinary time can leave us blinkered if we're not careful. This is as applicable to the way we live as to the way we work. Forster and Isherwood could equally have said, “Live as if immortal,” although this flies in the face of what George Gurdjieff called “the terror of existence,” the inevitability of death, which he, the Stoics, and Steve Jobs, among others, pointed to as the ultimate prod of our taking charge of our lives. Isherwood’s maxim is not a call to squander life, but rather to look beyond everyday constraints in contemplating everything that engages us. That includes marriage, family, and friendships.

Without a proper sense of time, we can get on life’s treadmill and lose ourselves entirely in the everyday. The way men with consuming careers act in retirement, racing to pick up lost threads, attempting to continue as they were, or simply falling apart as they finally realize their predicament, points to the dangers. We don't teach people how to live with time or how to live with death.

Death is "out there" unless we understand along the way that time will eventually drown us. "I had a good ride," many men say as they slip under. That part at least is granted them. But drown is not quite right. "Just sit" invites us to contemplate how we fit in. It also invites us to wonder at the sheer expanse of life, to take every aspect of it seriously. More than just sitting, Zen practice is living consciously in ordinary time. It’s a vow to be aware of how everything connects and that we're just passing through, time travelers all. Compassion and responsibility start there.

CODA 3: FAMILY Family is detaching itself from marriage or extending beyond it. It's worth noting this. It means that marriage in the context of this essay should be understood as any pairing that, formally or informally, acknowledges and seeks recognition as such, from each other and from others. I want to distinguish this from what Roger Fry described as a "little marriage"—his brief, intense relationship with Vanessa Bell, an innately domestic person, although iconoclastic. We might call this an affair, but Fry aptly captured the fact that it was more. And he suffered more because of it, being attached not only to her but also to domesticity itself. It pulled him psychologically into the orbit of her family, where in a sense he remained, but further from its emotional center than he desired. This brings us to the borders of friendship, a separate topic, but I mention it to say that the boundaries of marriage are broad— not only formal–informal, but brief–long, too.

Another trend, still being fought by the forces of reaction, is the pairing of men, of women, and of older women with younger men. Paralleling this is the decision of single women to have children, often with a gay donor who participates in raising them, sometimes with his partner. Such families are more and more common now. They are families and a new tradition of family needs to include them.

Social transformation happens at the edges. Vanessa Bell did what she wanted thanks to a legacy and a devoted, tolerant husband. She exemplifies the motive power of family, which she held together despite its unorthodox arrangements. She also exemplifies the fluid boundary between love, marriage, and friendship. Artists and writers stake out this territory, as do the poor and dispossessed. Sometimes they resemble each other, but the latter, as they rise, often crave a conventional life.

A new tradition of family would expand its boundaries and enable the members of the expanded family to identify themselves as such. It would recognize that this expanded family, too, has ties that are indelible. The old tradition of family maps to other concerns, like inheritance, in its aristocratic and bourgeois manifestations. This became rights and responsibilities in the era of the no-fault divorce. A new tradition would apply them across this larger collectivity, the expanded family.

Because this discussion overlaps the legal apparatus that's grown up around the family, I run the risk of seeming idealistic and unrealistic. When I look at my own limited experience with family situations that challenged convention, I would say that what was crucial to a good outcome was the shared desire for it. This led the individuals involved to set aside their theoretical prerogatives and consider the outcome. And because of this— because of the familial love that each person felt toward the one most at risk—that one now has an expanded family to draw on and identifies with all of it. There were formal agreements behind this, but they never really figured.

Would it have been any different if there hadn’t been? I'm not sure, but I don't think so.

Not every married couple has offspring, yet dependencies arise. For example, a partner gets seriously ill or lapses into senescence. These situations will tax the resources of most individuals. A new tradition of family would both recognize the idea of collective responsibility and tie it to a social safety net that comes into play with certain triggering events. For an advanced country, we are shockingly stupid in the way we provide supports, rarely doing

so or providing enough when they're actually needed. This is perverse. Alone of the developed nations, we're still adding population and our ratio of young to old isn't disastrously out of whack. We need to maintain this, not make it harder.

A new tradition of family should cut the family loose from every organization that's ever tried to exploit it for political or religious reasons (which are often the same thing). It needs to reassert the underlying realities of human life and gear public support accordingly, sharing responsibility across a larger community of which the family is part. The key phrase here is "sharing responsibility"—not taking on full responsibility, but acknowledging that our individual resources are not always enough. That's when families fall apart, with huge social costs.

CODA 4: PATHS The word path suggests moving through time and the different territories we inhabit. It suggests the threads or strands of our individual lives, which seem separate but are often linked in certain ways— overlapping people and places that can cause our individual paths to converge or diverge. We are born into territories, like that of our family, but we take up our paths individually. Paths may be or may appear unavoidable, but there still seems to be an element of volition to them. In their positive sense, paths are voluntarily taken up. They may involve vows of marriage, of friendship, or of "voluntary suffering" (in Gurdjieff's phrase).

Like a path through unexplored terrain, the paths we take up in life may not take us where we expect. It is tempting to label "false," a "dead end," a path which leaves us "nowhere," but life proves the contrary often enough that I resist this terminology. Paths aren't linear. They're more like streams that sometimes disappear, only to resurface later in a different form. Other paths are like rivers, always in view even if their nature changes.

All of them are part of our life's terrain.

Paths can intersect as life unfolds. This process seems accidental, but it may not be. When I look back at my own life, how it unfolded makes sense in retrospective. This may be what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls the "narrative fallacy," our human trait to reconstruct our life so it adds up. And yet, pace Taleb, this narrative reflects what we see. There's an aspect of destiny visible to me when I look back at my own life. Sometimes I think of destiny as being like cycle of plays in which the parts are divvied up among the same company. The actors seem familiar, but the roles they play differ. Perhaps karma relates to this and the part we're assigned reflects and answers the previous play (or plays), even as we play it out in real time, a different story. Except in the very broadest sense, destiny lacks predictive power. “Broadest sense” means whatever we’re prepared to stake our lives on. Very few things qualify.

Paths may or may not be predestined, but we find them and take them up with some sense of being properly on them, recognizing or intuiting their rightness. This is an inexact science, to say the least. Life doesn't come with an instruction book. We read the signs as best we can. We do our best to be on a path we've taken up, although our best may fall woefully short of what a path demands of us.

When a path involves a vow, that vow is to persevere. This is equally true in marriage and in friendship. To persevere means to continue on the path regardless, not to insist on its features or the other’s constant presence on it. The paths of marriage and friendship are individual paths. We sometimes find ourselves on it together is how I look at it.

CODA 5: MODUS VIVENDI Over lunch in May, a friend told me that, despite years of separation and a current relationship of long standing, he and his wife were still married. This is reminiscent of Vanessa and Clive Bell, discussed previously, who stayed married while they went their mostly separate ways. Formally, there's marriage and there's divorce. More recently, there are also domestic partnerships, a halfway house toward marriage. Meant to extend some of marriage's rights to those excluded from it, the category could disappear if marriage grows more inclusive. Its existence sets up the possibility that a married person, living separately with a different partner, might embrace it in order to afford the new relationship more rights and standing.

I mention this because marriage and divorce are usually seen as a binary pairing, a black-and-white rendition of a landscape that we know full well is resplendently colorful, textured, messy, and in flux. When you look back in history, especially across cultures, you see a lot of variation. Looking across a table sometimes, you see former partners breaking bread. I realize that time is a factor here, but when you consider both the tumult and the reconciliation, life can prove bigger than the partners imagined. Certain ties still bind them.

We speak of no-fault divorce, but it may also be useful to speak of no-fault marriage and friendship. This is to recognize that much of what affects a marriage reflects our human dilemmas. Moreover, if a marriage is a partnership of two individuals, then we have to accept everything this implies. In particular, we have to accept the essential good will of the other, even when the situation seems impossible. This is not an argument for any particular outcome, but for modus vivendi—the ability to take a larger view of things and use one's imagination.

Empathy, if one has it, makes a mockery of any insistence that there's only one course to follow. This is the basic fallacy of a black-and-white view of life. We are, each of us, a boiling pot of desires, fears, limitations, and smarts. We slowly acquire wisdom as we age, but slowly is the operative word. Our wisdom, though hard-won, can be gone in a flash. Volatile, subject to our natures, we make our way, and marriage and friendship alike have to deal with the carnage. There are times when we've had enough, but then we remember that we're like that ourselves.

Part of the idea of no-fault is to accept that along with the individuals involved, the nature of a marriage or a friendship (and their variants) changes over time. The form it takes matters infinitely less than the attitude of the individuals toward this. "An end that endures" is the I Ching's phrase for this "seeing the woods for the trees.”

Paths are about this, too.

AFTERWORD The earlier version of this essay was more of a manifesto. I came to doubt that this was the right way to approach it.

I tried writing another essay, "Buddha's Ladder," but set it aside as derivative of Stephen Batchelor's Alone with Others. He addresses what I've called the quantum nature of human life. As individuals who are also social creatures, saddled with biology and traditions, we live with some basic human dilemmas. They can make us feel like the glass into which our life flows is too small to contain it. It's not so much that the glass is half empty or half full, but that we see our potentiality flowing past us. A "hungry ghost,” is what the Buddhists call us in this state.

This essay, if I can really call it that, sets down my observations about three overlapping relationships— marriage, family, and friendship. I've noted that new traditions for each would serve us better by being closer to the reality of human existence. My sense of these new traditions is tentative. Each of us already contributes to their evolution by grappling with life's conundrums. The acceptance of another that each of these relationships entails begins with our acceptance of ourselves. For purposes of living in the world, we shape our behavior to fit in, but as we get older, we realize that life's river is as Heraclitus described it. This essay is about living with the implications of that.

DUNCAN GRANT AND VANESSA BELL

SOURCES On Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and their circle see Richard Shone’s Bloomsbury Portraits (Phaidon, 1996) and Angelica (Bell) Garnett’s Deceived with Kindness (Pimlico, 1995). On La Rochefoucauld, see his Maxims, translated by Leonard Tancock (Penguin, 1984). Nine years ago, I read and reread Stephen Batchelor’s Alone with Others (Grove Press, 1983), a book about being and having. A.H. Almaas’s The Point of Existence (Shambala, 2000) looks at narcissism. Both shed light on issues like possessiveness. On Horst Rittel, see Jean-Pierre Protzen and David J. Harris’s The Universe of Design (Routledge, 2010). Robert Grudin’s Time and the Art of Living (Ticknor & Fields, 1982) is the best book I know of about time as a fundamental dimension of human life. George Gurdjieff was a mystic and probable Sufi, active in the first half of the 20th century. His Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson is hard going, but I like his notion of voluntary suffering. Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s relevant books are Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan (Random House, 2008 and 2010). Two books on Eihei Dogen have influenced this essay. Kosho Uchiyama’s Refining Your Life (Weatherhill, 1983) is on Dogen’s Instructions for the Cook. He notes Dogen’s assertion that, done correctly, being the cook for a monastery is a shortcut to enlightenment. Steve Jobs would probably have agreed. Hee-Jin Kim’s Dogen on meditation and thinking (State University of New York Press, 2007) presents Dogen as a philosopher of radical nonduality. The interview with Frederick Seidel is in issue 190 of the Paris Review, fall 2009. My quotes from the I Ching, from memory, are from the Cary Baynes translation of the Richard Wilhelm translation (Princeton, 1972). Everyone knows about the river of Heraclitus, but the source is fragment 41 of Fragments, translated by Brooks Haxton (Penguin, 2001). Accounts provided by my sister, Alice Parman, of the wartime correspondence of my grandfather, Joseph J. Shoemaker, and her travels with him in France in 1963, were one reason I began this essay in 2001. The illustrations are from the web. Their use is noncommercial.

DETAIL OF THE BELL–GRANT LIVING ROOM AT CHARLESTON

COMMON PLACE Essay © 2011 by John Parman Website: http://complace.j2parman.com

The sixth issue of Common Place was the first to be give over entirely to poems. I started the main section in France, as the introduction notes. Perhaps anticipating that I would drop the sonnet form, I included a second section that drew on earlier poems written more loosely. I still occasionally write sonnets. I like to rhyme and, as Frederick Seidel noted, the form itself grabs hold of your intentions and reshapes them.

COMMON PLACE No. 6 DECEMBER 2014

“The Barn Partitas” and “In Memory”

PROLOGUE

In September 2013, I visited a village 30 minutes by car from Bayonne in southwest France. One day, declining an excursion to the coast, I stayed behind and began writing sonnets that I called, from the start, “The Barn Partitas,” both in homage to Bach’s clavier partitas, a favorite, and to acknowledge the shed in Berkeley, the “barn,” where I usually write.

A poet friend of my daughter dismissed the sonnet form, saying that he and a colleague used to compete to see who could compose them faster. There’s that—anyone can write them, and I’ve written many that went nowhere. But the sonnet is a way to contain what’s on your mind, give it a specific form, and a sonnet series is way to gather these small harvests as something like a feast. The unstructured poems I’ve written are longer and, in unedited form, messier. Reading through them this weekend, I found one—“In Memory”—that felt in the spirit of “The Barn Partitas,” so I’ve included excerpts from it.

Proust noted that life provides the raw material of literature, and Croce added that poetry reflects the poet, not simply her material. Memory, as Nabokov observed, suffers from the fact that the camera is dodgy and the filmmaker often distracted. According to Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche believed that the world is text, so everything we write about it is an interpretation. This aligns with Hayden White’s assertion that history, since it’s conveyed in narrative, is inherently or inevitably interpretive. And I would say, with Heraclitus, that not only is the river new each time we step in it, but we who step in it are also new. I write from experience, but ultimately, I write from the experience of being human, addressing others who are human, too.

Along with correspondence, poetry is a medium that lends itself to personal discourse. Unlike correspondence, poetry involves what Nikos Kazantzakis noted as an almost alchemical process by which the personal is transmuted into art. Whether this is art others can judge.

— Berkeley, 30 November 2014

THE BARN PARTITAS Much that could not be written: the look back, often in company—small wonder, then, her wariness. He scanned the long horizon: roads sinuous and tree-lined, shrines, chapels, terraces, rooms with views, cars and ferries— all the possible venues that figure when someone else is the journey’s purpose.

Can one explain the road as lived? Reason has no answer. When questioned about it, the I Ching gave him “Splitting Apart,” apt and to him optimistic: things must break so something new can gather force, appear.

“Things must”: how fate permeates the road!

And each one sees it as it is for her.

I. THE ROAD Memory "And what would that look like?" she might have asked.

The question looks ahead, if doubtfully, but his mind tends toward retrospect: what's formed has taken place, associative scenes stretching back to time’s bending point, where he regained consciousness of self and others.

The scenes arrive like Swedenborg’s heaven: not a great distance when they first appear from where he is or was. The observer in these scenes is also present, a filmmaker’s eye, but more holistic in what he takes in on the journey through: green walls behind the mosquito netting; white cotton with its narrow line of wet.

Wildflowers "Abandon no one": his maxim, not that it was believed. Love and friendship mix badly between the sexes; they want one or the other. He learned this slowly, noting along the way that, unfolding, time opens life up, makes it possible to find the river again in that space.

And while she may only put her toes in, there’s a glint of warmth in her eyes and voice.

All because time has turned the ground over and those wildflowers that betrayal scorched emerge and flower in a new season.

The gate is always there, the hedgerow sometimes a wall, else more of a curtain.

Any Predict he would take up another?

It seems perverse. An umbrella rolled up is like a baby without a mother, he thinks. Or is it the other way? Pup or pop, dad or daddy: which is which? Bride on bride, groom on groom, the issue deferred, he imagines, arranged, left on the side until after the wedding, matters blurred.

Who asks whom first? Groom on bride, bride on groom, all permutations are permissible, lawful in two senses. Crossing the room, she walks the way women walk: visible.

How many crossings, then, before the slam, despite amour, despite the wham and bam?

Canyon Less an old story than a new one: one tries to learn from experience, but then experience is new. It’s never done telling how it is, will be, once again.

And so the room is new, and the terrace, also, the brightness here, the darkness there— their stories come around like a Ferris wheel, like houses on a cliff, truth or dare.

In short, we may as well call any place OK for our purposes, and not wait for the tide to run out. There’s so much space between A, B, a canyon of this date and that, the emptiness I noted, such quiet, if quiet matters, matters much.

II. ENCOUNTERS Hints Perhaps it’s true, these charges leveled.

I could see it. My history precedes me: a life smooth to the touch and yet beveled, even knife-like, and sharpened to a T. Yes, it may be true. I feel like smoking or playing slow music in a dark room.

There may be a blue lamp, someone soaking, barely vertical, diktat from the womb.

You know how the chorus goes, the long moan, the short gasp. Yes, definitely like this.

I’m sure I’m guilty as charged on the phone.

(But one could also say, “An odd life, miss.”)

Imagination plays a role, a touch of ambiguity, small hints and such.

Heft The word from eight (the hexagram): union.

Life has its hubs or maybe its nodes. One finds one’s place, tries to avoid confusion.

The whole is organic after all, fun while it lasted, you could say, a tear welling up, but then it orbits around— the brass ring you missed might just reappear, only golden this time, and what’s lost is found.

The whole is dramatic after all; full of everything that leavens existence— black bees abuzz or the massive white bull that carried Europa north. “Resistance is futile,” she thought, tightening her hold; imagining its heft had made her bold.

Chemistry Melancholic, I read: analytic and literal. Mix sanguine in and then you get what Hegel called dialectic.

(It can seem bipolar, now and again.)

Literal, yes, that rang a bell: a clue why metaphors sink like lead in quicksand.

The glass, famously half empty: that’s due to some negative universe, a band most often playing in a minor key?

Mix sanguine in and things look much brighter.

It takes hold so quickly. The chemistry is such that everything soon seems lighter.

When that glass fills up, claret or amber, the bow, taken up, regains its camber.

Fork "Ask someone else," the woman said, turning back to whatever it was, blocked from my sight.

In the cafés of life, I'm still learning to distinguish a wrong move from a right.

We spoke of art as he drank his wine, art that sometimes lived in, the remove as slight as one remembered. Did he give a start?

Time's distance is no match for the flight of memory. Like how I can hear you as they must have, too, your door ajar. "Sounds like thunder," they might have said. If they knew, geology terms could have made the rounds— seismic, perhaps, or volcanic—but then memories fork, don't they, now and again?

III. NOTES TO SELF Winterreise Sometimes only boughs are visible, near as passersby on crowded city streets, close enough to touch, but we hold back, fear to touch the way we might if between the sheets.

A different season—the hedges form a square, a distant bell sounding, the sea fog-edged: Held in the mind, these thoughts ward off despair, even as the boughs bend close, winter full-fledged.

They say there are hot springs hereabouts, far or near, I know not. Heat intuited glimmers in consciousness like a faint star and yet proves faithful and deeply rooted.

Somewhere in this Milky Way, steam rises.

Make for that, a traveler surmises.

Doubled They each write out their provisos: how much emptiness exists between points A, B. He wonders why he now declines to touch.

She asks him what, if not this, love could be?

These are fair questions. Somewhere there’s a street that isn’t haunted by the past. Somewhere there’s a house, a garden, a bed, a sheet with no story. “In heaven, too—we share everything with a doubled eternal,” the Zen master told his listener. A spoon was the object doubled, not infernal, but ordinary as the waxing moon.

In the middle of her night, he awoke to find it was that moon, not her, that spoke.

Kronos A road, we call it, a path, but river, as Heraclitus suggested, feels right.

How slowly It moves, often, a sliver of life at a time, fluid yet so slight that it falls beneath our notice, gone from consciousness. What carries us along, we ask ourselves. Is this a boat we’re on?

Who steers it? The words of a sailor’s song mix with those of mermaids, sirens whose breasts are like the hills that skirt the river’s edge.

Garlanded, they push and pull, plot their tests of bravado for the boys on the ledge.

They’re up there, too, the girls, shedding a fin, then half-drowned—payment for their plunging in.

Shadow A shady figure, some would argue. Won’t get no denial from me. This is Jung’s territory, so why deny it? Don’t think I’m gonna. “I like it when she comes,” now there’s a phrase to warm a liar’s heart.

And God knows deception’s my middle name.

Yeah, keeping a straight face, playing the part— the shady life’s not easy, a long game if you can keep it going, and I did, waiting by the telephone, cooling heels out on the road, staying low and well hid, reading the racing forms and copping feels.

“It’s all too much! I am a slave!” No more.

The pledge: “Nobody’s fool, nobody’s whore.”

Somewhere Inside the room, inside the head: one could write stories of such stasis: nothing goes right or wrong; there’s neither must do nor should.

Around the desk, around the chair, life flows like a mysterious substance. Women come and go. The book lies upside-down, tent of paper and board, small markings like Zen, those koans, so hard to read, if they meant anything to anyone else: doubtful.

Cats also come and go. A jay lands, screams.

The mind wanders in its confining skull.

Somewhere, it thinks, a woman dreams or creams.

Wake! A cloud of sanguinity draws close.

A black bee, meandering, snorts a dose.

Riven The moon appears and disappears, first round then a vessel, pregnant, soon round again.

I watch and time passes. I miss the sound.

I miss the heat. Why do I not stir then?

The question was posed elsewhere: Would it shut?

But no, it hangs open, adrift in my doubts about setting out for the coast. Abrupt thoughts crease the stillness. I hear distant shouts, but the sound missed isn’t heard, nor is heat tangibly beneath my hand. These are felt like the moon’s passage, like the ever-sweet taste I crave: eyes rolled back, a deep hue smelt.

So, I measure how long a road, driven and driven in my head, feelings riven.

IV. NOTES TO OTHERS Cleft In the midst of months, a day divides the time as pre- and post-, like a gate that’s opened and closed, before and after. A slow climb up a road to a boxwood park; we spend an hour there, then climb again where hawks drift in the wind. Stones, a fence, clear air, the sea distant, iron blue. We take walks.

Cold in the morning, rising slow, your hair: one divides time up like salt, and after, cleft, the line’s inexact but fixed, bone dry, while you move. Between sadness there’s laughter.

Divided and divided, yes, and why?

Smote the sea and it opens, life confides; the corollary unsaid: time divides.

Listening Sometimes I see the film the music makes.

Would you be in it? There are no traces amid the scenery—poems aren’t outtakes— but I can picture it: our two faces (I’m looking up, your head is turned) close in, talking like we used to do. And outside is the changing view. On a map, a pin or pins, rather, would mark our high tide.

Variations like those I’m hearing now would do well in this film we made, suited to its mood’s wobbling course. I wonder how the happy ending they want is mooted?

“Define happy,” La Rochefoucauld might write, skeptic that he was, doubtful yet so right.

Materiality Odd how the body sings its final note.

We aren’t supposed to watch. A crime, they say.

We know the clip by heart, even by rote: the hood, the speech, defiance, one to pay the price of being in the wrong place, time, the wrong century, wrong era. “No dice!

You worship at another altar, slime!” and other epithets that aren’t so nice, as if nice matters when they cut your throat.

What is it you think in those last moments?

Odd how the body sings its final note despite the droning man and his torments.

English, they said, a recruit to the cause.

As for the cause itself, I see some flaws.

Caught Poison, he told her, but she demurred. Pain ensued, although not before bliss. That, too.

Dire, he repeated, but she demurred. Rain fell, metaphorically, but nothing’s true exactly, nothing’s as it’s depicted here.

So, the road in retrospect has its death, its depths of sadness, hearts ravaged, seared.

At points, human beings run out of breath, caught in those small rooms of contradiction, airless, cut off from the rest of life. All grinds massively to a halt, no friction left to spark love. It’s the end of the ball.

The door is always there, the saying has it, but the music can still be heard, can’t it?

Mend He wrote of borderlands transgressed, the bounds so readily passed through, despite knowing how unbending life can be. Making rounds, it came to seem, riding the range, sowing no wild oats, however much desired.

A ring, not a badge, a vow, not much use, a waiting, waiting game. She grew tired, he thought, or was it him, cutting them loose in hopes that life would bring them somewhere new?

He still rode the range, but slowly. Fences make good neighbors, he thought. “Rode it with you” in his head, despite distance, defenses.

Mending fences is not the worst pastime.

Builds character, they say. Must be sublime.

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

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

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

Blue Did she notice him, his eyes fixed on her, line dancing along the periphery, gestures toward a sky that reminded him of the lapping Caribbean Sea, blue with bars and shoals, the pelicans skimming?

He could picture her at home in that scene.

Would she come closer, answering his wish?

If the room emptied out, then just the two, alone in the semi-dark, the palm fronds swaying, imaginary though they were.

Or would he come for her, carried along by the rising and falling of the song?

Gravely she thanked him as he left; no kiss but only words, the kiss left unspoken.

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

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

Denouement A surprise to find paradise out back, Straight-laced on the outside, like a Russian dacha within. French influenced, no lack of creature comforts. “Nothing Prussian,” he might have said. His friend’s wife outlived both, his real wives ailing and absent. “In France,” she told me. “Heart attack.” So, first half a loaf and then none. And yet nothing seemed askance.

This may be the territory old age brings us to, when transience really takes hold.

The last scenes played out on this earthly stage need a few actors still standing, though old, French-style armchairs, shelves of books, leather-bound, blue walls, distant chatter the only sound.

VI. LOVE & DEATH May Whatever else he might have been, he thought, an opportunity wasn’t it. Still, he could see why the word came up. Squandered is how time can feel when expectations falter. The transformation shocks us. Love charts a path that rarely proves tenable, yet nothing’s lost, the I Ching added, soon after, but after what, exactly? Words like disaster came to mind. But was it?

There they were, as close as ever, despite the distance on some levels. The frisson drops away, the venues change. “It may just be this,” she told him a while back. Yes, it may. Our reality, he’d say.

Stories I want to write out love’s true story: talk accompanies love, does it not? Before and after is the rule, but sometimes we talk throughout, albeit in single words or more, short phrases or demands. Conversation comes in between, those moments of cooling after the long sprint, the respite of come, when our beings briefly reign, no fooling, as twin monarchs of all we survey: bed and linen, walls, a view. For some reason the mind is freed. Unwritten, what is said, yet remembered, some of it: the season, what you asked, how I felt; reality consisting then of us, we two, only.

I want to write out love’s true story: hearts melded into flesh, is that how it is?

The truth of love—many scenes, many parts!

Each folds back on the other—how it is.

He takes her trembling self in hand, rocket that she is. He’s like a match, and as dumb, column-straight, ignition in his pocket, then bent down at the gate, mind switched to numb.

How like a horse plowing, running blindly!

Love is a field to him; love is a course.

That another’s aflame, a rising sea behind those eyes, deep in the matted source— these facts pass like trees and houses, the road south, the beaten path, the curve of lips, her mouth.

I want to tell the truth about love. Death can come as a relief when it goes wrong.

Breathless, they say, but then there’s no more breath, no space, no room, no road: end of a song you sang in harmony and counterpoint, in reality and in illusion.

Love softens you up, puts you out of joint severely, a sure cure for delusion.

You stand on the balcony and look down.

Below are the dead, their quiet sleep, still as stones amid a field of green and brown.

They make no comment. Jumping holds no thrill, they seem to say, as if the dead could talk.

You could leap or wait. You could take a walk.

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

It's not quite the Noh play I imagined.

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

Three Morphine clears a path; it was requested, he learned at the wake. The bigger friar of the two—perhaps he was a father— set his remarks on women and offspring: how life’s quickening registered as joy.

(Invoking it seemed oddly apropos.)

Three generations of the female line were noted. The eldest, recently dead, witnessed this mutely. His theory (self-awareness persists a bit) foundered on a body from which all signs of life had departed.

“All used up” came to mind, admirable in its economy of means. No doubt that material life loses its spark.

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

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

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

Mass is over and we’re both still alive.

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

Notes Neck draws on Gabriele d’Annunzio (1863–1938)—a lot of work being that man.

Here was written for Donald Cremers in memory of Frank Sclafani.

The photos and photo-collages are mine except for the painting “Memory of Oceania” by Henri Matisse.

IN MEMORY He tore himself open like a star falling through heavens.

1.

Neither death nor madness could contain you.

We reason and we feel, and neither thing was enough for you.

Yet once, secure in your long dress, you laughed and tossed a shuttlecock over the net.

The clairvoyant said your journey now is separate.

Your path and his divided years ago, although the same roof enclosed you.

And still they carried you away, made you lie down among the old and sick, until you joined them.

Neither madness nor death wall you in.

Sometimes at night I hear you cry out for fame or release. Yet once, sheathed in your long dress, you stood and talked, a glass in hand, a cigarette between your fingers.

2.

The world outside reduces us to tears.

Its beauty startles us, catching us unawares.

We drift from childhood and lose our sense.

Beauty enflames us, but we are jaded.

The world outside is filled with paths.

I see my father’s tracks sometimes, like footsteps through the snow, my mother’s only rarely, her step cutting sideways over ice, then like a line drawn down across a wall, a thin line of daylight or the line the moon makes when it falls across your window.

3.

I knew you didn’t really love me.

What’s strange is how much I loved you.

Love is blind, they say, or possibly is blinded by itself, by the power of its hold.

What’s strange is how desire persists, even when you know what you know.

4.

My father sits now in the void.

He grew old without my noticing.

He expected just to fade away, with some reason—a tired, gentle sleep.

Not to drown like this in his own spit, his anxiety suppressed.

How did Christ die? Suffocation, one reader wrote, his lungs no longer able to expel.

We all knew that angels carried him away. Perhaps then his body sunk, and men were fooled.

My father died without expectations— not for him the cello or his favorite theme.

I still see him in his favorite chair, its arms of varnished wood— his drink, his book, his countenance, the house he built, the dogs he loved, the different worlds he occupied, now lost.

We live in parallel, and our fears are the same.

We live in parallel, and share a common hunger.

5.

The Taoist immortals, there were seven, could count on one finger the women they had had.

“There was just one,” they nodded. They agreed that she was perfect.

One day, in an old house by the river, the first immortal fell in love with shadow, the second with substance, the third with no-name, the fourth with mind-as-mirror, the fifth with no-desire. The sixth and seventh immortals sat together in one corner, near a window that overlooked some rapids. Some hours passed, and one by one, their colleagues fell away. The first disappeared forever.

The second crushed himself with stones. The third wandered mutely.

The fourth staggered blindly. The fifth returned and joined them in the corner.

Looking out, the sixth immortal gestured toward the river.

“How beautiful when excited.” The seventh nodded.

The fifth immortal shook is head. “How exquisite when possessed.”

The sixth nodded. The fifth immortal shook his head.

“This is just a river,” he said finally. They agreed that it was perfect.

COMMON PLACE No. 6 © 2014 by John Parman complace.j2parman.com

Common Place Volume 2 | Š 2010–2020 by John J. Parman | complace.j2parman.com