Common Place Vol. 3

COMMON PLACE NUMBERS 7, 8 & 9 | 2015 & 2017

Volume 3 of Common Place continues the mix of poems and short prose pieces, some written as sets.

Number 7 combines a sonnet series based loosely on the Normandy invasion with a set of memoir pieces.

COMMON PLACE No. 7 JANUARY 2015

“Omaha Beach” and “Sort of a Memoir” (and Miscellany)

Prologue

The past rattles through my consciousness like so many trains running on errant schedules. They arrive unbidden, coupled together by association. I step in and am carried back. And often I take notes, observing how it was and how I felt, but from a new vantage point. Sometimes the journey I’m taking is to a past that was originally described to me by others, and then recalled or recreated from those descriptions. The past is shaped and reshaped in ways that can’t be described as true—something of which I’m episodically reminded by the glances and outright corrections that my versions of events draw from others. Yet the past is my subject—my past, true for me at any moment and yet subject to reconsideration as life shifts my view of it.

In the summer of 1960, I went with my family to Normandy to visit the scenes of the D-Day landing and its aftermath. My father played a role in planning the invasion: his job as a photo interpreter was to lay out for the invaders what they could expect to encounter, where trucks, tanks, and gun emplacements were hidden—a moving landscape, yet fixed enough to be charted. In his twice-daily letters to my mother from London, he writes only that “I’m working here,” then goes on to describe everything else. As a result, he comes across as a bon vivant, and no sense of his actual work surfaces, since it couldn’t. It was clear to me, being with him, that the places meant a great deal to him—Omaha Beach itself and the Normandy coast and towns. He rarely spoke about the war, but once told me that he was very good at what he did.

My father and grandfather saw and lived so much. “Omaha Beach” is drawn from my own life, but it speaks of them and their experiences. If I am my own best subject, as I write in “Sort of a Memoir,” the lives we live add up to what Zen suggests is a world that’s uniquely ours, but consists equally of everyone and everything known, set down and given back, in some sense, although it can never really be fully shared, can it? Writer that I am, I can’t help but try.

31 December 2014, Berkeley

Omaha Beach A bedroll out on the sidewalk, a drunk asleep, my father noted, building smashed, my mother jarred awake, the Atlantic between them. “Something has happened to George!

But he’s okay!” her story repeated— how she knew, how knowing was a curse: what if someday he were dead? She would know.

This was her fear, that her vaunted sixth sense would betray her. The dead make that last call, I know, like my late friend, gone at thirty.

Her story ended happily for us— our lives continued with the survivor’s— so naturally I liked the story.

Where would I be otherwise? Not here.

Blois I was twelve when we went to Normandy, saw Omaha Beach, Blois’ thrice-curved stairway, ate a seven-course meal, or so it seemed, with a family my grandfather knew, bourgeois.

The old lady, lost in her reverie, wasn’t lost on me. Even then I knew where memory can take you. It must be some remnant of my past, my own sixth sense, aware what burns in us, what flows—fire or river, call it what you will. He was manifestly there, Joe, the grandfather who waltzed through France twice, remembered fondly.

This was my twelve-year-old version; the truth is more complicated, or maybe not.

Credos In war, tomorrow is all that matters— the day after will take care of itself.

I can’t say this was my father’s credo.

Perhaps it was “live for the day,” but that lacks his optimism, always believing that he’d manage to survive, looked out for, although for what reason, who knew? The gods were not to be questioned. Just go with it.

In peace, today matters more, so begin by setting aside whatever can be— not dust from the road but motes in the eye that blind us to another’s unfolding.

Living in time, we prove as mutable as Heraclitus’ river: not the same.

Reveries Sometimes the wind blows the curtains outward and the reveries begin: how it was, how it was whether it proved false or true.

It all comes back, mocking those distinctions.

I have them too. Don’t think I can forget!

Did my grandfather? Love leaves its traces.

There is no black and white, to me, just was, just was with its smells, sounds, tactility— its fecundity fulfilled and thwarted.

Reveries leave us afloat, not yet sunk beneath the waves with no apparent sign of wreckage, no survivors, a true end or so it seems, yet always the debris washes up, bleached, takes on a new meaning.

Embrace The trajectories of the lives we lead embrace like lovers and then sometimes don’t, ripped from each other’s arms, perhaps, or else sacrificed to some higher truth and lost to another for a time. No matter how long or short it proves to be, point is we unfold along with life, cannot know.

Our folly is to pretend to ourselves we do, pretend we are exempt from this.

The glancing blows we suffer in consequence are from the outset almost guaranteed, yet we persist, driven on by longing.

Persevere! This is our human fate.

There’s no way to know except to embrace.

Practice “Won’t repeat them,” I was told, yet mistakes, like the rest, are never quite the same from one to the next. We blunder anew.

Pointless to think we won’t, although we do.

Life admits no duality. Mistakes cohabit with perfection. The pure lie down in the mud, snort and roll around like the animals they are, enlightened for blazing moments and then not at all.

When you ruled progress out, I read, “Just sit!”

“Just sit!” is all there is. Mind lands on walls, delusions persist: some call this practice.

As destiny shapes us haphazardly, don’t expect error not to follow suit.

Hints Signs abound. We wonder which pertain to us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We often affirm how lucky we are.

That luck begins with being here at all.

Sort of a Memoir

3 January 2014 Stendhal uses three different memoir-writing strategies: in media res, placing the reader at some middle point in the life from which the years that led up to it are recounted; starting from childhood, which Stendhal characteristically uses to show a certain authorial self-consistency; and the coming-of-age recapitulation that gets the hero from mere youth to the beginning of maturity. The first two can be found in his Memories of Egotism and Henri Brulard, and the third in the opening chapter of his great last novel, The Charterhouse of Parma.

Stendhal wrote Memories of Egotism 10 years after meeting the object of fixation it depicts. She dies in between, he eventually reveals, but his obsession with her persists. I can understand this. The book closes with an account of an assignation that he and a friend have with two English prostitutes. Bringing a repast of food and wine along, they make a party of it and the women are charmed—their English clients are not as thoughtful. Stendhal praises their chestnut hair, his spirits momentarily recovered. The impression he leaves us with is of a man who is haunted by his great love and yet clearly and observantly in the world. And despite his faithfully rendered day-to-day activities and distractions, we never doubt his single-minded devotion to her.

4 January 2014 The year after I got my BA, I worked at the oldest private library west of the Mississippi, as it styled itself. My colleagues were older women, like characters from a Tennessee Williams play, I thought at the time. The men among the coupon-clipping old-money patrons were often drunk after lunch, smelling of onions and alcohol. I couldn’t help but take these things in. Cautionary tales are useful when you’re young, showing you what to avoid. I remember thinking this later when, having lunch with colleague, I saw two old businessmen sitting near us, both veritable rhinoceroses in appearance owing to decades of eating the same fare we were consuming.

The most beneficial work I did between undergraduate and graduate school was as a term-paper ghostwriter. To make a decent hourly rate, I had to write every paper in six hours or less, so I developed a method and also honed my writing to the bone. In one case, I had to write five papers on different topics for the same class, so I varied my tone. Every paper got an A from whoever was grading them at Stanford. When, six weeks into the job, I was offered work at an architecture firm, I quit. It turned out I was the ghostwriting shop’s only writer, and they closed down after I left. The benefit for me was that I lost my awe of academia, or whatever you call it, and gained the ability to write quickly on any topic handed me. That’s served me well ever since.

My method was straightforward. I found a general source that gave me the basic plot. Volumes of the 1920s-era Encyclopedia Britannica, on which Wikipedia is supposedly based, were great for this. Then I would find two or three plausible current sources, quickly absorb their theses and grab some quotes and added references— sometimes found near them in the stacks, which is not something that could happen easily today. Then I would write. It helped that I’m a fast and accurate typist. I never polished the papers too thoroughly, which lent them authenticity.

The term-paper mill’s one sop to ethics was to make the students propose their own theses. This was a mistake— they were often completely wrong and I would have to argue in the negative, since I couldn’t change the thesis.

This I did with evident success: on-the-job rhetoric.

Later To want to live parallel lives is in keeping with our human sense of self. We embody different roles without much difficulty, navigating life’s predictable contexts in a manner that more or less meets each one’s expectations, so it seems reasonable to push this idea further. One problem we encounter is the inelastic nature of time. It’s true that time slows down in certain situations, but this is not the same as having more of it at your disposal.

We often push the idea further because we want our lives to be bigger or fuller than they seem. The opportunities to do so arise with what appears to be uncannily good timing. If they didn’t, they would be easier to resist. My own experience suggests that our ability to lead parallel lives is limited. What we really want is separate lives—a life here, a life there, with time and space between them. That would really be ideal, not to say convenient. Some reputedly arrange their lives in this manner, but I’ve never been able to pull it off.

If we’re honest about it, what we really want is a life that’s both fluid and frictionless. We want the usual boundaries to come down. It’s a child’s view of things, I think, in which “choosing sides” is all part of the game. To a child, the point of living is to play, alone or with others. We go to school, of course, and clean our rooms, but our hearts long to make up stories or get a scene going. And this persists.

Separately My daughter came over this evening after writing me a long note in answer to a question about the impact of travel that I’d posed the night before: How does it affect her? We talked a bit more about it. I said that place to me is a totality—conveyed in talk and writing, as well as experienced directly—of how specific things look and feel, and are cherished, neglected, or reshaped, and how people are (or were), as we experience (or experienced) them there.

Over the course of my life, I’ve seen a great many places, uniquely themselves in a way that felt intrinsic, become “like the rest.” As business and tourism continue to search for still-distinctive places, I imagine they are as endangered now as the elephants that roam the African plain.

5 January 2014 While an element of bossiness floats through life, mandatory is a broad, resistible category for me, taking in other people’s ideas of how I should spend my time and even the consequences of my earlier, positive decisions to attend parties, openings, concerts, dinners, and other events. Travel also creates a sense of dread as the date of departure looms, not out of any fear of traveling, but from a countervailing desire to stay home. Knowing that I will invariably resist, I try willing myself through it. I think this resistance, this sense of dread, relates to the desire to lead parallel lives: events seem appealing in prospect, and are of course the source of all that we draw on in retrospect, but we have to live through them, experience them, to gain it. Despite their allure, there are times when we’d prefer that someone else went and did the living for us. (I believe V.S. Pritchett made this same point about writers in general—their bifurcated lives.)

At the urging of a colleague, I once took the Meyers-Briggs personality test, learning that I’m an INFJ, the least numerous of its types. One trait was familiar: craves company and then flees it unexpectedly. That’s not resistance, I thought when I read it; it’s self-preservation.

As a child in Singapore, I used to move through the adult-filled garden of my parents’ parties. I was small for my age and my vantage point was low enough that the adults’ legs were like tree trunks, their upper torsos like spreading branches. Their attention meanwhile was at eye level.

(When I think of these parties, I think of the women in their long dresses, the men in their white suits and uniforms, and the Chinese lanterns aglow, strung across the garden. Once I talked an intoxicated RAF pilot into giving me his wings. To my dismay, he came sheepishly back the next day to reclaim them. I think my mother explained to me that he couldn’t fly without them.)

Nowadays at parties I try to float in and out, departing as quietly (and quickly) as possible. This is in no way a comment on the parties themselves, which are perfectly fine.

Separately Each person’s nature is distinct from every other’s, yet we generalize constantly about how people fall into categories and how the categories differ. These generalizations are both true and false. Since we chalk a lot of behavior up to them, believing in their truth must be part of our social-navigating apparatus, a heuristic that keeps us from stopping every five minutes to figure out what just happened.

To me (and also to Borges, I read recently), distinctiveness is all, especially in the closer relationships. The beloved one has these specific qualities of self, and every time I catch a glimpse of her, I’m reminded of every other time these qualities were evident. The thread of her distinctiveness is visible whenever it appears. I see it and remember, “You aren’t like anyone else.” The best gift of self that we can give each other is our distinctiveness.

Later I read—V.S. Pritchett via Russell Banks—that death is a mark of seriousness in literature. It is the “great matter” according to the Buddhists. I believe they’re talking about our coming to grips with mortality, a dance that began for me when I first realized that I would die. I was 14—pretty far along, that is, before the “terror of our situation,” as Gurdjieff put it, became real for me. How one contends with death—that is, with the unavoidable fact of it—varies with one’s age. At my age, the imagined perils of getting older are more dreaded than death itself, which can start to look like a relief. (Borges notes this, saying that the old get impatient for it. Recently, I stood and watched an aged neighbor hobbling—there’s no other word for it—to her front door, a task that for her has become Herculean, like climbing the Alps. I wanted to rush over, but sensed that this would be unwelcome, that each one has her Alps to climb, that climbing them is the point.)

Uchimaya Kishio, a 20th-century commentator on the Soto Zen of Eihei Dōgen (1200-1253 ad) explained what mind means in Zen. Our world, Uchimaya wrote, lives and dies with us. Mind is everything that ever existed for us, accumulated across our lifetime. No one else can experience it as we did, so reading it written out is like encountering the residue of the spray on a sea-facing window in some cottage we happen to visit. You can get a sense of the pounding waves or the way the sea smells at a certain distance, but how it was, beyond these images, and what it meant to someone else, is limited by the medium, the intent, and the impenetrable boundary between the other’s world and yours. A memoir, like poetry, tries to bridge this distance.

Is love not also a mark of seriousness? Love involves play, but play takes in death as well, long before we understand that death applies to us. From the start, love is a serious game: our life depends on it. It exposes us to the perils of misunderstanding and the limits of our ability to shape events to suit our desires. It plunges us into unhappiness, almost from the outset.

Still later It’s characteristic of me to play the same music again and again. Right now, it’s Angela Hewitt’s version of Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier, especially the second half of notebook one. Before that, my favorite was Keith Jarrett’s recording of some of Handel’s harpsichord suites. My life is organized in a habitual way, so that even my variants from habit soon become habitual.

Friends occasionally express amazement at the way I cram culture into short trips, but this too is a habit. I pack my days with activity because otherwise I’d get depressed. When this happens, I become lethargic—when I’m really depressed, I hardly stir, which is difficult to pull off when traveling, as everyone wants you to circulate and of course you have to get up and go out to eat.

My life was organized for me very early on. Whenever a structure is provided, I fall right in with it. Where it isn’t, I have to create one—a slow, trial-and-error process. Weaving, which I do on most Saturday mornings, is an example of success in this arena. I have to extend it, I tell myself, thinking of everything that isn’t getting done, isn’t habitual, and needs to be—an old, old story.

One characteristic of contemporary life is that its disruptions erode my habits. Bookstores where I used to go have vanished. Music arrives in ways I can’t fully fathom (and most of it isn’t the music I want). I have to decide and decide again which parts of “the new” really pertain—and learn and relearn how to navigate the subtle ways the everyday is altered over time.

Return François, duc de la Rochefoucauld is another great French commentator on intimate life between men and women.

His own experience of women was one disaster after another, but then he finally met one smart enough to make a friend of him, not a lover—or not purely one.

If lovemaking is a kind of conversation (between two souls, Borges asserts, quoting another poet), why does it always blow up? Is there a way to sustain it? These are the questions that arise. It should be simpler, but both parties have to see it that way first.

The one psychic I know told me that relationships between men and women have children as their trajectory when fecundity is in the picture. Children are where it wants to go, whatever the conscious feelings of the participants may be. I think there’s some truth to this, based on my own experience. Getting older is therefore potentially liberating, freeing relationships to take other directions. (When I look back at them, I wish they’d been friendships solely, and I don’t. What I really wish is for friendships to emerge that preserve their intimacy in new forms. Later in life, possibly, something like this can be regained, but I don’t know yet. What I do know is that love can emerge within friendship, and sometimes does. The reverse surely takes time and commitment—you each have to become someone else to the other, yet still close. Then a true friendship may finally emerge. Whether it’s materially different than it might have been had you never become lovers is a question that can’t be resolved. It’s one of love’s questions, however.)

Separately When I read Claudio Naranjo’s Enneagram Structures, I saw that my enneagram number is seven. I thought I was a five or a nine, but he showed me that I’m a seven through and through. The flaws of this character type—my character type—are to want to live anywhere but in the present (and, especially, to live in the future), to be dependent on personal charm to dodge the bullets of interpersonal relationships, and (a related trait) to avoid anything remotely painful.

(I told a friend recently that Naranjo and A.H. Almaas have written the most useful books on the enneagram— complementary books that reflect their respective involvement with Oscar Ichazo, with whom Naranjo studied at Arica, Chile when Ichazo expounded on the enneagram. The book of the Jesuit Don Riso is good if you know your type, but less helpful if you don’t. The several books of Helen Palmer are useless although people have said that her workshops were good.)

6 January 2014 Some time ago, I dreamt I was walking in the middle of a curving, residential London street, the kind that’s lined with shade trees and row houses. There was no traffic. Looking down, I saw a thin gold ribbon embedded in the pavement. I picked it up. In dark-blue letters against the gold, it read, “You are an editor.” I didn’t argue. It also made me realize that I’m a writer of a specific type. I write well, and this ability has served me my whole career, but I don’t think I’m capable of writing anything longer than a chapter, and most of what I write is much shorter. When I look at what I’ve written, I see a miniaturist, a belletrist. This means that I have to treat many topics as fragments, if I can treat them at all, while others are perfectly suited to their small frame.

The diary form of this “Sort of a Memoir” exemplifies how I drag content onto the page. It reflects my lifelong tendency to plunge in without much if any prior design beyond an intuition of what might emerge. (Fiction is much harder, perhaps because I don’t really believe in it. The fiction I enjoy clearly emerges from life experience, projected on to the subject, as with Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower. The book is about Novalis, but with a sensibility honed by her own life—a sensibility with which Novalis resonated. She depicts the poet as a human being whose Bildungsroman falters on the rocks of fate, time, circumstance—all that conspires to keep the things life seems to promise him from happening. For Fitzgerald, the big event—the lucky break—was to live on to write, to live out and fulfill her destiny. It’s no small thing, shared with Lampedusa, although he died without knowing it, and Stendhal, writing on despite every indication of a failed life. Borges’ modesty, his superstitious wariness of hubris, reflects his knowledge that luck is luck, but that in the end, we have to write, “just write”—and keep on writing, because, as with fishing, something good may eventually strike. It’s the only way.)

(In the photo above, taken by my daughter, I’m reading for the first time and with astonishment the poems of Wallace Stevens, in the house of Simone and John Opalak, 30 minutes by car from Bayonne, France—the house where I started “The Barn Partitas,” the sonnets I collected in Common Place 6. The poem that particularly caught my eye was “Peter Quince at the Clavier.” On that same trip, at Daunt’s in London, I believe, I bought a copy of Sylvia Plath’s original edit of Ariel, with its remarkable opening poem, the first line of which made me wonder at the depth of her suicidal depression, the terrible grip of ego and narcissistic grief and rage, which I’ve also experienced in a greatly reduced form, sufficient to understand it and eventually get through it, see it for what it is—for which thanks especially to A.H. Almaas, whose book The Point of Existence, while coy about his patented path to enlightenment, is very clear about the territory of ego and narcissistic grief, how it appears to be the real and telling thing, but is not.)

While I occasionally have ideas for stories, I can’t see where a story should go next. And where it usually goes is a blind alley, which is frustrating. I feel that my story has been hijacked, that its protagonists wouldn’t go there, and yet clearly I took them in that direction. It takes more work, in other words, than I’ve been prepared to give, so hats off to the real writers of fiction!

Separately What are my actual topics? They probably begin and end with me. As Christopher Isherwood put it, “I am a Camera,” but the camera is holographic. My topics are meaningful to me, resonant. This doesn’t mean that other topics don’t figure, but how to work them in? When I think of another’s distinctiveness, I could cite the most specific details. In fiction, this might be useful, but in other kinds of writing, even poetry, it feels gratuitous and indiscreet. Some of my photo-collages get into this territory. Art and fiction blur identity or subsume it to make a different point: not her but this. A fictional narrative could be useful, but my version of reality has been challenged often enough to make me wonder, with Hayden White, if every narrative isn’t fictive? Certainly every narrative is subjective. (As White notes, none of them are “true.”)

Also separately In 2005, a Sephardic friend in Tokyo suggested that my father’s family was Sephardic. I don’t know if it’s true, but certain things argue for it. My surname derives from a city, which is how the Sephardim named themselves. (An artist friend in San Francisco also noted this, but I didn’t know the history of Jewish migrations in Europe well enough to take her remark to heart.) Parma had a large Sephardic community, granted the freedom of the city but then attacked invidiously, enviously, by others. History suggests that my family, who were bookbinders, part of the burgeoning printer trade that swept north and south in Europe, left Parma in the 1560s, traveling first to Germany and then splitting up, some going to Denmark and Norway, and others to Finland. The family bible records that “they were bookbinders, arriving in Odense in 1620.” Everyone after them is named. My sister and I always thought this was strange. I read an essay by Peter Drucker, written toward the end of his life, on the history of printing, a 200-year trajectory. My family headed north because the jobs were there—the technology was taking hold, far from major printing centers like Parma. They came as experts. When they got there, I imagine they said, “Hello, we’re Italian. You’re Lutheran? What a coincidence. We are, too.” When I look at my family in Norway, some look entirely Nordic, but others look like the portraits of Modigliani—faces that could be from Italy or Andalusia, elongated by Nordic intermarriage.

My daughter lived for almost three years in the Alpujarra, the region of mountain towns and valleys that extends south from the Sierra Nevada Mountains behind Granada. When I visited her there, I had an impulse to settle. I love Madrid, a more likely destination, but something about the place felt like home. If true, this must be a genetic memory. Is that possible?

12 January 2014 A friend posted a short essay asserting that a memoir isn’t really an autobiography. Her real point was that you shouldn’t expect accuracy from a memoir. Nabokov also made this point, revising Speak, Memory after his sisters complained about certain “facts.” (“We were in Nice, too!” they objected.) Reviewers complain that memoirs are “unreliable,” that other evidence contradicts them, but life happens in real time. No one sees things the same way.

19 January 2014 One morning I visited a close friend of longstanding who’s being treated for a serious illness. It took a toll on him, from which he’s gradually recovering. Observing that his life has become more bounded, he said he wanted to find things to do that fit this new reality. (Almost a year later, I’m happy to report that he’s back on the circuit. Habits of a lifetime are hard to break.) Weaving, which I’ve done for several years, is an example of what he meant. I understood—many of the things I do are essentially domestic arts. (My character is phlegmatic, although leavened with sanguinity. This—the temperaments—is yet another means of characterizing our species, the third I’ve mentioned here. I wrote a sonnet about mine in “The Barn Partitas,” mocking my tendency to wait passively and contemplate life more than live it. This is true and not true, of course—a phlegmatic temperament tolerates contemplation more readily than other types, producing insights that are mixed with a healthy dose of blankness.

Yet there’s something crocodile-like about my type, springing into action when inspiration finally strikes.)

Later I read an article in the Financial Times about long-lived Japanese men and women, and the doctors who tend to them. The goal is a good quality of life, said one. They cited a term that roughly translates to “live life to the fullest and then die fast.” One person’s full is not another’s, I thought. When I sum mine up at the end of the year, there’s an illusion of activity, but it reflects my way of being here and there, trying to maintain it. It’s a comical process, especially in company. Owing to its repetitiveness, the everyday is supposed to have less resonance for us than unusual events, yet I crave the everyday. Perhaps its resonance for me is a deeper one.

Postscript The original version of “Sort of a Memoir,” written a year ago, ended on the note of ambiguity above. In editing it, I’ve added some parenthetic thoughts that arose as I went through it. Soon I’ll be 68—reaching the end of my 68th year, as someone else reckons age, and beginning the final year of this transitional decade, the sixties, which is arguably the vestibule of true old age. In Conversations, edited by Osvaldo Ferrari (Seagull, 2014), Borges says that what separates us from other living things is our foreknowledge of death. I’m not sure I agree. Late in 2001, I saw a menagerie shared by several fish restaurants on an island in Hong Kong Bay. It was immediately clear that all captive life there, even the shrimp, were aware of their doom. What’s terrible about capital punishment is the terror that attaches to it. Death within life has its terrors, but it’s different, I think, part of life’s warp and weft, the last part that we reach at the other end, inevitable and in some sense welcome, especially in the case of a long life well lived.

When you’re my age, you’re more aware that your existence is no longer assured. The Zen idea of “getting breakfast on the table” becomes more useful as a prod to go on living, to contribute. “Who else would do it?” the old monk asked Dōgen when he, a young student at a Chinese monastery, asked if the man wasn’t too old to be gathering firewood on a hot day. This is what I do, the old man said—these are my roles in life, my purposes, how I pay for my upbringing. This discipline took hold in me early on, yet I still accuse myself of laziness. It seems best to write a memoir along the way, I think, even if the plot has further twists and turns. One can add to it episodically, if there’s more to get down, but meanwhile there’s a marker: “Made it to here.”

Miscellany Looking again for a poem written long ago, apparently lost, I found typed-out extracts from a 20-year old diary. It’s always a question what to take from them, but I agree with Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s observation that a diary’s immediacy gives it a faithfulness to unfolding events that’s missing in post-facto accounts. We live among others who may observe, comment, write down what they saw and thought, even about us, and perhaps recount some of it. Diarists do this, and I’m one of them. I’ve tried to protect the innocent.

Rudolf Steiner: “Fully mature human beings give themselves their own worth. It is not pleasure they seek, handed to them by nature or by their creator as a gift of grace; nor is it some abstract duty they fulfill, recognized by them after they have stripped away all striving for pleasure. They act as they want, that is, in accordance with their moral intuitions; and they experience the attainment of what they want as their true enjoyment in life. They determine the value of life by the relation of what they have attained to what they have striven to achieve.” (Early 1991) I think the thing I want most of all is to be energetic and enthusiastic about what I’m doing. What do I really want?

Success without effort, an income without work, freedom to do “nothing,” I say in all honesty, recognizing their total impossibility. But maybe this is also a period of “becoming,” a transition from one way of being and thinking to another. And this new way is not yet formed, thought through, or understood. In my dream existence, I write 3.5 hours a day like Virginia Woolf, and learn and master new arts. In my real existence, I squander time. I seem to “unlearn” and have no real calling or motivation. (6, 7 and 13 September 1993) Margaret Duras: “Between men and women, imagination is at its strongest.” (February 1993) My neighbor described a planned exhibit on William Wurster. What one wants to know about him, I thought, is his context and history—like Joe Esherick’s sister who died of pneumonia because she’d never turn the heat on: the details and ephemera that rise and fall around architects and their buildings. Since I saw Venice a second time, I only think of buildings in a contxtual sense, and the lives of architects interest me purely as lives. So I imagine that an exhibit on Wurster could up the ante on the importance he gave to the Bay Region—what it meant to him. I remember visiting the art museum in Gothenburg in late 1977 and being struck by that city’s cultural selfsufficiency in the late 19th century—a self-centeredness that allowed it briefly to flower. (This is the same epoch that Ingmar Bergman depicts in the Stockholm of Fanny and Alexander.) We had it here, as well, even when I first arrived, but then we lost it.

For all these reasons, I want to know what Gardner Dailey thought about as he plunged toward the bay, and to see on the wall a series of photographs that show how Esherick’s three daughters resemble him and each other, despite their several mothers. Like the adherents of a cargo cult, I imagine that these rituals of remembering may reverse entropy, revive the corpse, and bring a newly rebirthed Venus floating to our shores. As I write this, I see what I meant when I noted earlier in my diary that I’d like to write an essay on the impossibility or extreme difficulty of regionalism. Perhaps a region’s moments in the sun are just flukes, momentary delusions, or acts of discovery or rediscovery—by outsiders, inevitably—that bring the region suddenly into focus, only to decline back to lethargy or indifference. Of my generation, Stanley Saitowitz alone fulfills this role of outsider, addressing the region from the standpoint of discovery, in the same way that Esherick and Chuck Bassett did before him. (25 July 1993)

I dreamt last night that I was talking with an architectural historian I know, waking up just as I was saying to her that the 1940s and 1950s looked forward to the future, but this optimism was destroyed in the 1960s. From then on we’ve looked backward. This last decade especially—the 1980s—was a “bracket” to the century. On waking, it seemed like a truism, but in my dream I said it with great feeling—great enough at any rate to wake myself up. (8 August 1993) In a conversation over coffee, I was told that I was selfish and that my diary was replete with references to money— evidently my central preoccupation. She asked repeatedly if I was offended by these criticisms, and interjected that I was also generous, but that what wrecked things was the need to schedule every encounter. “I could never just see you!” Of course, I could only agree with this. Then I mentioned the text of a postcard I sent her while she was away, in care of her old aunt: “Maybe we would have gotten along better if I’d been a woman.” She half-screamed and said, “You wrote that? I hope no one can read your writing!” (8 August 1993) I thought last night of a novel, set Woolf style in a single day, called “The Marriage.” It follows the protagonist through his day as lived and through a series of flashbacks that illuminate his current situation and his own part in it—a satirical novel in which I’m the object of satire, in fact. The novel would chronicle my many contributions to my current semi-unhappy state of ambivalence and to some extent of sorrow. (16 August 1993) I’m the sort of man who cries at The Nutcracker, moved at the sight of the young women, and who falls in love in the midst of a conversation, undone by a helpless empathy. I read about angels and would like to believe in them, perhaps do believe in them, since at heart my beliefs are almost animistic. // “Tales of the Middle Classes”: a possible title for a book. // An idea: to write micro-essays, one a day or at any rate one at a time, in succession. // Going back through old diaries, I realize that the entries are like letters to myself, to be read later in order to “see what I mean” with the benefit of distance. (21 December 1993) Designing a life, dealing with the limitations of time and space—time “now” and time “out there,” with its finiteness and its impact on me and on those I love: Duncan Grant’s “cultivation of independence.” Needed but difficult to attain: a disciplined life that makes time for writing, relationships, children, place making, travel. I torture myself perpetually about not writing. I found a note that my oldest son left on my desk, expressing the hope that I would finally write the brilliant thing he believed me capable of writing. (March 1994) In Venice: The woman stares out of the painting at the viewer. She holds her baby to her breast, and though a piece of cloth lends modesty to her upper torso, her belly is exposed, with a roll of fat that speaks to a recent birth. The Virgin sits at her desk and reads. The angel’s red sandals are wrapped around his feet, his robe elaborately folded, almost defying gravity. (2 May 1994)

COMMON PLACE No. 7

Except as noted, text and images © 2015 by John J. Parman http://complace.j2parman.com

Number 8 has number 7’s mix, but draws on recently written sonnets. The prose is the initial version.

COMMON PLACE | No. 8 | JULY 2015

TABLE MUSIC as poetry and prose

TABLE MUSIC

Witness

Crossing

All else that can’t be said is written: backs of envelopes in old steamer trunks for the executors to mine, smitten by the prospect of affairs, those drunks ambling along sidewalks in anecdotes: the muse puts up with this—with how it is when writers sit down to write. How she smotes some handy object, the muse, with this biz floating past and not safely bottled up.

Everything that can’t be said is uncorked, filling glasses, even the loving cup.

They toast the many times a straight road forked.

The muse looks glumly on. Plot’s familiar, she thinks. Forks are closer than they first appear.

Some set out to prove the thing, a spent youth hanging in the balance they made themselves.

Some cross the channel to ply their troth or revive the things placed too soon on shelves deemed out of reach, out of touch. Their lives left them stranded. From islands they look out and marvel how far away. Be they wives or husbands, they neither ignore nor flout the bell frustration rings, the handy boat “Desire” that tempts them to pull anchor and set their compass toward another.

The winds are dodgy and their charts unsure, yet, undaunted, they trust what the gods give, assume it won’t be short and abortive.

Away

Close

The easel in view, the artist off to a place in truth less distant.

Side by side, they cooked.

Deep in his heart he felt those tendrils, their barbs.

Hinge

Anew

The sight of the yarn brought it back to mind— the crinkled, lucent surface of black hair rising from those oyster lips. Oh, to find such beauty, a beauty hidden down there between her thighs! He saw her narrowed eyes and Borromini smile, strands obscuring breasts as she leaned over. The moans and cries he heard again, their traces echoing along the mind’s hallways, knocking the dust off ancestral paintings. The wide armchair with its repressed maiden, tied down, her lust— straining in its taut embrace—was still there.

The red-stained sheets were rolled up. Once soaked, stiff white cotton marked where she’d been stroked.

In life’s midst, in the dark wood or near it, they encounter their damaged selves, mirrored.

They make a pact. Too soon they forget it.

Repair ensues but then they’re caught, scissored by whatever in haste they ignored: the encyclopedic contradictions; lists of those hurt, angered, their feelings gored; the press of living doubled lives that shun all that surrounds them, or try to shun them.

Yet they have their reasons. Like the spring moths that break out into a brief world, these men and women, trailed by their luminous cloths, fly headlong into flames—a blazing torch consumed save the handful they only scorch.

Shift

Vence

I saw a film in which facsimiles of love abounded. I don’t think our love is fake. Frustrating, yes, perhaps a tease, yet real in spite of all of the above.

On another occasion, on a deck, she sat reading and I felt what one feels.

Across the canal, mountains—what the heck, one thinks later, after the blood congeals: heart spinning on the street, the kind of grief that’s a facsimile of grief, both fake and real, like us on the deck, a belief in the lives we lead and the love we make.

A man and woman grapple with this now.

I’m done grappling. I don’t even know how.

Drawn-out, Côte d’Azur living, lungs burning, a gun begged for, nearly fetched—a pistol.

An honorable age, filled with learning, but can it really be said, "I am full"?

Handsome still, his mind the draw with women, as perhaps it mostly is—bulls excepted if some semblance of rutting's wanted. Then "I am full" applies, but he, respected, took them conversationally, his mind clearing the orgasmic row that women plant and harvest on their own, as men find if they take the time to notice. Amen, they think, this game can be played out until the lungs burn and life at length must be stilled.

Reckoning

Offer

It should be easy, they think, but it’s not.

Easy to plunge, but hard to swim, laden as they are by families. They say hot invites the plunge, but it slips the blade in, invariably. Why is this? The good we humans do, the intent to do well, falls apart. They always think it could be different, if they could sidestep the hell of suffering: she suffers, he suffers— this repeated and destructive pattern a track to nowhere, track without buffers, set on sand, not those sturdy ties. Slattern and of no fixed abode: this is the dead weight the laden share: no home, no common fate.

Oddly, the choices seem arbitrary, a product of chance. One factor is time: the order of things, their chronology.

Is life so reduced or is it sublime?

Because if the latter, does the value not transcend the weighing of each event?

Is the value not in life itself? You and the world, as you say. Why were we sent if not to savor all of it, good and bad?

Do these categories apply to love, for example, with its happy and sad, a sea in which we founder, heads above the waves sometimes only barely, our hearts afloat or weighted down, whole or in parts?

AFTER WAKING: In the dream, an older man goaded him: “Are you good?” No, he answered, but the man wanted a more robust response. “Not really bad,” he ventured. Waking, he thought that love—physical love—was an addiction, so any sudden rupture of it was like crashing. He replayed such crash, seeing how she weighed him against a new lover, reducing what was between them to a litmus test. Later, walking back from the pier, he told her that he’d loved her honestly. It was true: he really had loved her, for all the good it did him or her. He saw too how everything he did thereafter was meant to forestall the recurrence of this addiction. Perhaps the point of marriage then is to domesticate the drug of physical love so that the married couple can get on with their lives. It’s not enough, at some points, this methadone-like substitute, but it has staying power, like any evolutionary fixture.

Returning from Europe he found her letter. “Stepping back from an unknown future,” she wrote. He agreed with this, and yet he believed that if lived out, life would reveal the logic of their pairing, just as it had eventually revealed to him how easily one can mistake one lover for an expected other. It made sense that their wires crossed given their coincident hunger at that moment to be reaffirmed. The other’s arrival later also made sense.

Then there was his nature to consider. Given the choice, he preferred to sleep alone. He related to women most easily on a conversational plane, needing time otherwise to settle in and catch their rhythm. Breaks in the flow of arousal made room for exchanges that were as memorable to him as the rest, snippets of which also drew his attention. Each woman is distinct, he thought, which conversation and lovemaking both bring out. At times, they come down to the same thing.

BOURGEOIS LIFE: He was older now, and felt more solidly bourgeois, despite the latitude the West Coast bestows—a default tolerance that papers over the prejudices and tics. Wealth is relative. Many were wealthier, but he’d done okay and they’d done splendidly, husband and wife, managing to accumulate productive assets and leverage what they knew. They ranged far at times in search of something else, but what they found there was never discussed nor held against the other. At every juncture, they opted to stay together. Once, talking with a woman they’d retained to help them sort things out, they gave entirely different answers to the question, “What do you want from the marriage?” The woman told him at another point that his wife was dishonest, but to him her answers were completely true and her sense of their marriage was more accurate than his own.

He married to have children—a desire matched by his wife’s fecundity. Was there real desire? Perhaps marriage only required a desire for itself. Within bourgeois existence, it accumulates not only progeny, settings, and assets, but also familiarity, mutual knowledge, and acceptance of the essentially alien other. Of the different ways that men and women cohabit, marriage struck him as the best. That they were intended to cohabit was never self-evident, given that they often seemed like two entirely separate species.

A psychic told him that what the universe gives us isn’t ours to choose or reject. And the Englishman who sometimes surfaced as a mentor noted that everyone does their best with the situation as they see it. These are West Coast truisms, the stoical fatalism that that allows bourgeois life in late capitalism to continue.

A blurred self in a man’s body, he concluded, after the psychic described a voyage across multiple lives. It was like a play of many acts in which the couple regularly exchanges roles and genders. His own borders were certainly fluid. The femininity of the one brings out the masculinity of the other, he noted, and those with fluid borders may crave this, even as it walls other things off. Better the woods and meadows of the self, with occasional visitors, but this had proved difficult. We spend our lives trying to arrange things to suit our peculiar natures, he thought. We do so within the confines of received life, of course, working the seams of its now-solid, now-porous boundaries.

The evening his lover tested him and found him wanting, she became as opaque as the rock face of a canyon wall—a clairvoyant moment that echoed another, when he could see his family dead, present or absent in their graves.

Women open to a word or a gesture, and then they don’t. This is one of their specific powers.

Sometimes he put on the tie she gave him, its fabric expressive of her. He never really fell out of love, he knew, but time freed him from the hunger and the sadness—everything that compelled him to take another up or that left him bereft and distraught. The look back was strewn with delusion and madness—paths and blind alleys that wove in between the great roads of work and family—those twin highways that keep life going despite every hazard.

A PRE-MODERN ADRIFT: He approached life like an amateur, trying to construct a working theory of everything he sensed, making notes in daybooks like an 18th-century naturalist. “A child of the Enlightenment,” he told himself, but he felt as he said it that he didn’t know enough to be sure it was true. The titans of the current economic order were like condottiere, he thought, focused on the main chance and disdainful of any resistance to their will. “They bid the future to come to them,” one said, but Machiavelli had made much the same point, adding salient details on how to execute one’s plan, and when and why to extinguish those who stood in the way.

Humanism is an old man’s game, the redemptive last act. He admired the ones who soldiered on, intent on passing along what they’d acquired to their progeny in a bid for genetic immortality. Here and there, it worked. In the Duoro Valley he saw remnants of the aristocracy’s long game: the manor with its husbanded hectares of soil, constantly renewed by generations that depended on it for their identity and fell back on it for their livelihood.

In the pantheon of the Greeks and Romans, there were the major gods, the local gods, and the fates.

Instinctively, he placed himself within this system that addressed life as he understood it. He prayed to a protective parent in moments of peril, and to the local gods for luck. Like the gods, he knew that the fates ran the show, spinning their Monte Carlo generator of randomness. Like the gods, he shared—illogically and delusively—that sense of exemption that made it possible to set to work despite knowing he would die, knowing that with each passing day he drew closer to death, which he accepted on one level as pure extinction, although he’d sometimes sensed the dead and even been visited by them. As the Buddha said, it didn’t matter. Life is about life—“one world at a time,” as Thoreau said. He agreed and kept working. Like the old monk asked Dogen, “Who else but me?”

MODERN OR CONTEMPORARY: He learned only belatedly that there’s a difference between the terms. In a technical sense, it was wrong to conflate them, yet clearly it was as a modern that he passed through unfolding contemporary life. It always shocked him that people tried to undo what the moderns succeeded in doing. Yet he also saw himself as postmodern, wary of canon and grand narrative. Politically, he was more interested in the operative than the ideological. Politicians were liars and incompetents, with a few exceptions, mesmerized and corrupted by money. Very little worked well, at a time when events constantly exposed this, reinforcing the point.

If the grand narratives are dead, as Lyotard wrote, or, as Vico observed, every era’s narratives are encoded with a context that time strips away, then either narrative’s grandeur is ephemeral or our vision of it is fatally impaired.

In every Portuguese town, he observed, every church had a baroque altar or side chapel, layers upon layers meant to resist time’s steady erosion of significance. And here and there, secular palaces stood as bulwarks against anarchy, while cloisters made a place for silence, refusing to put a roof over emptiness.

THE LAW OF LEAST RESISTANCE: Time also eroded resonance and made no-go zones of the places he loved.

He kept a supply of resonant landmarks at hand to ease the pain of so much colonization, but they failed to compensate. It wasn’t that he wanted to fix the world arbitrarily, but that he disliked what it had become: variations on a tiny number of themes. The effort of travel needed to be compensated by ample difference, and too often there was none. It wasn’t just that a place had changed, but that it become like every other place that had changed in the same way. Contemporary life arrived like acid reflux on the heels of an ostensibly sublime meal. It was hard to imagine, some of it, but depravity is often a failure of the imagination, a failure engorged by repetition. We are struck by the engorgement—human appetite in the thrall of monomania. And these monomaniacs were on the ascendant, he thought, their banners flying: My contemporaries.

He was a child of moderns, growing up in a modern house filled with modern art and modern furniture. Only the TV, an ungainly brown metal box, felt out of place, an intruder, interrupting every conversation the way the radio did in the car when the talking started or the lyrics asserted themselves. Amplification was the Great Satan.

In the ideal modern apartment as Le Corbusier drew it, the worker read his paper in peace. In Tokyo, he stood in a replica of this very space, trying to imagine being the worker, a householder with a family. The apartment was smaller than he expected, although a view might have made it seem more spacious. In a lecture he’d attended, an architect said of the sketch that, “Le Corbusier designed spaces for men as if they were gods.” Household gods.

The I Ching refers to “the law of least resistance” and also points to water analogously as a perennial solution to our human dilemmas. “Flow on,” it suggests. In another lecture, an expert in river deltas described the folly of trying to alter the flow of rivers like the Mississippi and watersheds like the Veneto. That Venice’s lagoon is becoming a bay he attributed to alterations made to its watershed in the 13th century. The law of least resistance is partly about inexorable force—how it looks for a way through, propelled along by whatever propels it. We cling to our illusions of free agency as our lives take us from one meal or bed to another, dictated by fortune and our nature. It’s a miracle we get anything done, but the doing is largely to keep the game going—provide ourselves with the food, the bed, and the company. A good life is when the doing has its own pleasures—pleasures that outweigh the pain of being.

WHERE THE HEART IS: We underestimate how tied we are to a place. It took time for him to realize this. Once, in a period of estrangement, he moved to an apartment and immediately felt alienated from all that mattered. After this, he gave up imagining he could ever leave the place he loved. It was like a beloved one, its different aspects forming a greater whole. And each and every aspect was seen constantly in a new light that revealed something not seen or grasped before. He understood its contingency—a gift that the gods might snatch away—but that was the sort of contingency life presents, acknowledged yet put out of mind.

Two blocks uphill, an earthquake fault was overdue for its next big shift. Downhill, the view was ripe for obstruction. Time ravages it all, he thought, and nothing is immune. And while he gave up imagining, he found himself picturing places purpose-built for one lover or another—a world all their own, detached from the rest of their respective lives. Several times he bought tickets to this parallel paradise, but they were never good for travel.

THE POSSIBILITIES AND LIMITS OF WRITING: Hayek wrote that describing accurately is a valid move within the social sciences. Writing was like this to him, a process of “writing out” or “writing down” in order to capture and make sense, some kind of sense, of snippets of experience. His life appeared to him as an unbroken narrative, which—he learned quite late in life—is the opposite of what some others experience. This explained how the accrual of time, so important to him as a sign of love and commitment, meant nothing to these others.

His sense of narrative gave the women who came into it a claim on him that he could never set aside. The frisson might wane, but his pleasure in their company remained. And sometimes, despite themselves, there was laughter and reconnection. To him, this was part of their particular story, unfolding over time. Flying back from Europe, he thought he should write them out, to the best of his ability—approximate, but true to his impressions.

Once, banished from a doomed but intensely close relationship, he wrote a short book that tried to capture it.

From time to time, he reread it as a kind of diary, written in an effort to forestall the immense pain that followed. It didn’t work and he was plunged into narcissistic grief, a terrible but necessary period, but in retrospect he was glad he wrote it, because it set down the experience of their relationship with considerable accuracy. His diary entries and correspondence from this period, on the other hand, were almost unbearable to read.

There’s very little we can do when life really goes south. We act heedlessly, like true idiots, until we finally recover ourselves and accept things as they are. Whatever we write about what we’re experiencing in these periods is deplorable from end to end. It would be best to go far away, he thought, abandoning all personal writing for the duration, but of course we never do.

A BUZZ IN THE HEAD: Toward the end of a nap, he heard a buzzing in his head and saw numbers turning rapidly, the way they do when something has gone wrong. If I can slow them down, perhaps it will stop, he thought.

If not, I’m probably having a stroke. Later, awake, it was clear that he hadn’t, but the possibility of one was there, part of this new territory. (Gombrowicz, writing about the mind/body problem, said that they’re inseparable, being integral. And yet the mind seemed to float apart from the body, impervious.) We land in it, as Nabokov wrote memorably: this flimsy bridge between two blanks. We share it with the living and with the markers of the dead— their graves and their detritus. Some of it speaks to us, resonant, and makes us grateful for one person or another’s presence. Geologic time dwarfs us all, and cosmic time subsumes it all. Whatever was flung out originally to expand and evolve collapses into unimaginable density and then presumably is flung out again.

As he grew older, he began to see his parents as contemporaries. They sometimes appeared in his dreams in active roles, still family members but no longer parents. In these dreams, there was always a failure to arrive, which he attributed to the fact that they were dead—a loss of agency, despite their presence. It was as if they were moving upstream against the flow of his narrative, resisting time in order to deliver a message. What was the message?

Everything he did for himself he did in the spirit of this interlude that the gods or chance afforded him and in the face of doubt that anything would resonate very far. The making itself resonated and doubt was pointless. That he was no genius was indisputable, but he had just enough talent to interest himself. The test, Schopenhauer wrote, is if one falls asleep when left to one’s own devices. He understood clearly who and what resonated, but was less clear about why. For him, resonance was an attribute of memory, summoned up in her or its presence.

ACKNOWLEDGING THE TRUTH OF HIMSELF: “Who am I really?” He posed the question in the safety of his bourgeois attire, but he knew there was no single answer, that he moved at varying paces from one state of being to another. Shape shifting took longer, but seemingly complex transitions were conjured up in an instant. The paces varied in the same way a river has eddies and main currents. Perhaps the question should be, “Who are you to me?” but, “Who am I to you?” felt like its truer meaning. He tried to answer honestly and to situate himself within the enormous landscape of the questioner’s feelings—not least to counter the unrecognizable places and depictions handed him. The traditional binary of female and male had already been supplanted by 51 variations, he’d heard. If he put his mind to it, he could probably exceed this number, but the impulse to choose one category absolutely never occurred to him. If life was sometimes hard for him when he was younger, he knew even then that he would emerge to find himself perfect, really, for whatever was needed.

“The world is full of people with narcissistic tendencies,” Knausgaard wrote. He agreed, being one. On a beach in Playa del Carmen he’d boned up on narcissism. When our hearts are sent rolling the street, the ego is yanked off like some glued-down, protective layer that love first softens up and then tears off heartlessly. The madness of these ruptures relates to the rebirth they signal, a disorienting freedom from an ego to which one clings by habit.

It wasn’t that his memory was any less comprehensive than Knausgaard’s, although he certainly lacked his energy, but its discursiveness was narrower. The past for him was a series of corridors behind doors, each corridor leading to other doors and rooms. Memory gave the past form and substance: the sound of the knife as the vegetables were chopped; or the sight of tears as the raft Medusa on which they drifted, spectators and participants, became unavoidably clear. The raft splits apart and each one washes up on a different shore, with a few exceptions. There were the suicide twins, paired in his mind although their means, reasons, and timing were different. Put them together in a room in the afterlife and it would take an eternity for them to understand what they had in common.

LONG AFTER WAKING: Christopher Alexander writes that we know the good by whether it has life or not. In the heat of loving, “good” has a specific meaning. That has its truth too, but like lovers’ correspondence and life’s narratives, its truth is contextual—stories we tell ourselves that may be completely different from the stories of those who shared these episodes with us. Later on in life, the events that gave rise to these truths sometimes resurface in our consciousness. If we are honest, we admit that in those unfolding moments, it was good.

Possession

Approximate

The illusive character of matter invites us to lay our hands on it.

Houses, cars, incomes, all of the chatter about money, which Freud called shit, just shit, but we see it as tangible, ours, and are loathe to give it up. And, like this, we prefer decades to a few hours once things have moved beyond the stage of kiss, possession being nine-tenths of the law west of the Pecos, but not every world runs that way. You came, clearly, and we saw, but what we gave each other was just curled up in five fingers: time’s glowing ball, round and true, tossed then gone, gone without a sound.

“Everything is movement,” I read. Poets “align constantly with the flight of time.”

Tzara knew firsthand how far from MoetChandon the lives of poets were. Sublime words became a noose in the hands of black shirts and icepick-wielding apparatchiks.

No wonder his wariness: off-the-rack bureaux sprang up like weedlots, full of ticks.

Some poets edged their way, a starving lot save the few rich wives and patronesses, save the doctors and insurance men, not writing revolution but of tresses shaken in summer’s waning light, a leg seen briefly, a doorway, “Don’t make me beg.”

Pocket

Stevens

Curiously, time’s glowing ball is close at hand.

Should the game resume?

A damp house in France, music from another world as he read each word.

Resistance

Fugue

“No no,” he hears her cry. “Like those street games, a feint to trick the mind, deceive the heart— the ball is here, the ball is there. It shames me to think I was taken in, so don’t start!”

Yes, no—both apply when there’s no ending.

The intermission: they stood with their crowd and wondered how they fell out, tickets sending them to different seats, one head in the cloud, the other looking sideways. Was she there?

His crowd as she imagined “Your people.”

Not the chorus of names, each with a where, she wraps around her like a coat—a steeple could hardly stand out more, but she denies it all: “So much less here than meets the eyes.”

At the institute up the hill, the talk revolved around the Great Fugue. Beethoven brooks no explanation, he thought. A walk might suit them, alone together, but then the repeated theme: No place to go. Turn it upside down like composers do, it still lookes like frustration. It tested his wit wondering how to carve out space and not kill bystanders. The maestro sought love in vain, he read—not an easy man, though brilliant.

Tey flip whole stanzas who are parched of rain and go unwed. They long to rut and pant.

Love is spontaneous, Tzara wrote, yet Horace bemoaned the temple fate he met.

Rocket

Objects

Desire is all speed once triggered, like a greyhound in love with rabbits.

Wood, built solidly, to be caressed or beaten hard as mood demands.

Provence

Vow

Then the streets were only her. Roused from sleep he made his way to the post, to use the word it wasn’t—a storefront with screens—and deep into the day by then, a day tipped toward strung out, disrupted by thoughts of her. Aix had its charms, its peculiar shops, women sitting vacantly inside selling pecks of baubles to the students. Corsican Mafia, his son said, laundering cash that better lines of work brought in: drugs, sex, discoteques, festivals, the wedding bash for the Russian tycoon. He longed for text.

Fate arranged a preview: Men who smolder when wives assert prompt them to be bolder.

Vesuvius erupts and men say prayers.

He chose to hang in, although she’d question what that meant, if anything. Naysayers abound and rumors cause indigestion.

Events unfold and it all looks for naught.

Despite this, he knew what he’d seen. Meetings happen when they happen. It can’t be taught, to know what to do. After the greetings we’re on our own. What was the plan? It’s lost somewhere in the cosmos. To him, a vow spoke to knowing, being sure, but the cost was harder to know then than it is now, when he waits to see where life will take them, every one on this stage, women and men.

Crypt

Death

Beneath the Machado museum’s floor of polished concrete, two decades laid down, a descent by stairs accessed through a door: the ancient foundations. Some Roman, gown in hand, fidgeting, telling others what and where—the arches rising, holding up a building that in time became, well, not secular but serving Christ—highers up like Him. The enormous walls, pressing in, the darkness at a turn of a switch: Death stood nearby, dressed in black, neat as a pin.

“We all play this waiting game. Out of breath?”

He made a show of sympathy. His teeth glistened. “Exiting will be such a relief.”

Sometimes he chooses evening clothes, black tie, and other times he circles lazily like a shark or, feigning sleep, he waits by rivers. Sometimes a match is handily produced to light the gas in the tire or a last ounce of will induced to pull the trigger, slash the flesh, tug the wire.

Sometimes he sidles in, pleasantries full as the glass of morphine he has ready, his eyes alive with excitement, parties in the offing: funerals and wakes. “Steady on, old man,” he says. “You made your sorties.

Now it’s time to wrap it up. Beckoning, those who tote it up, make the reckoning.”

Hammock

Narcissus

The blue sea ahead and the shading roof, next door, the psychologists with their theme of intellectual beach life, aloof from holidaymakers, from every scheme to tourist it up. Within this milieu he collected stories—the girl survived a massacre, the woman a got-you mother found drowned, relived but not revived.

And his own: a man torn in two, but who?

Who was torn? Ego, a book suggested, so a false tear, though painful through and through.

Insights like this were slowly digested, yet he grasped at once he was alone with the sea, flesh and blood and brain and bone.

He asks her if she would take him back. No, she answers, she’s offended. And perhaps this offense is of long-standing. To go in search of love, to create these mishaps— such acts offend a self-adoring heart.

Within a well-honed temple that heart sits.

Others will come, others will play their part.

Her children with her, he no longer fits in this world she’s constructed. An exile in his own home: that suits her. Love is dead.

She won’t go a step let alone a mile, his sacrifice what the marital bed demands. Mothers rise from it as virgins— an old story retold in new versions.

November

August

How cruel circumstance, like when ghosts leak in and drown light with heaviness.

A month of Leos.

When the pride admits a goat, incidents ensue.

February

Honor

So many lucky and unlucky days to mark beginnings that would coincide on some astral plane if one had the ways and means to see them touch and not collide in contradiction if not active hate of finding themselves conjoined, together in the same anteroom, gazing at fate as it goes its separate ways, and never makes anything but a separate sense except to one who has February in mind, a month with no real recompense save arrivals happen then, usually, if one can generalize from them, sample who one knew. In this case, they seem ample.

She was the first. Breakfast occasioned them.

Every meal left disorder in its wake, and love strewed their world with childish mayhem.

They learned on the job, that constant mistake that rubs dull the sheen of love, but strangely love has more depth. And so a few topics allow them to converse wide-rangedly.

Two rooms spare them from each other’s tics long enough to remember who they are.

For such as them, distance is a blessing.

To meet always having come from afar, they’ve something still to say. No need dressing lives in platitudes. Friendships are like this.

Odd to think they got there, though, hit or miss.

Thistles

Mid-May

Horses. Then, bone dry despite the creek, black seedpods, a dead sea of stalks.

Etched name, heart’s chamber shared sometimes, but now the key’s hidden or mislaid.

AFTERWORD: The title, “Table Music,” is borrowed from Telemann. When I read it, I thought how so many things that arise in life recur later in our thoughts. We pick them up and consider them again and again without ever reaching a final conclusion. The people and places that inhabit memory unfold with us, sometimes within life and sometimes purely in mind—as with the dead who are present nonetheless, part of our being. History is a metanarrative of many strands, Hayden White argued, and each strand puts forward an individual point of view. Think of “Table Music,” then, as a contribution to this genre in poetry and prose. (2 August 2015, Berkeley)

Number 9 drew poems and short prose from the site where I posted them (j2parman.tumblr.com).

Common Place No. 9 | Spring 2017 Selected Poems & Short Prose, 2016

I caught a glimpse of him in his workman’s apron, the hallway filled with boxes.

She’d come back with her children.

“Couldn’t you be happier to see me?”

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

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

I may have said I wanted to be loved.

When I heard the word, I wondered.

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

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

My friend Eva Hagberg ruled out resolutions, arguing that they are goals. Nothing can be resolved in this fluid world, she wrote (in so many words). But to me resolutions are more sense of the house than state of the world.

Just now, I threw the hexagram 63, “After Completion,” which counsels wisely that at points where equilibrium exists, one must take arms against misfortune.

“Misfortune” in my case may have to do with taking too seriously Morgan Forster’s injunction to “work as if immortal.” Yes, do so, but prepare for mortality. In particular, prepare for infirmity, for slowing down, for making room for others, for taking up work long neglected. The hexagram speaks of water over fire, which implies the need to keep adding water and wood to keep things simmering. Other things might be added, too, of course.

So, prepare—this is one resolution for 2016.

A few days ago, I dreamt I was in France, perhaps. I go for a drive, getting lost. At one point, I see a valley of startling beauty. Then I come upon an apartment that I go into, come out of, go to lock the door but it won’t. It becomes the trunk of a car. A woman tells me not to bother locking it. Then I start to drive back. In reality, I know what I saw—the actual, unfolding circumstances complete with an awaited sign that pointed somewhere, but how I get there is unclear. Beauty appears when it does and you wonder how you’ll find your way.

It’s a truism that you have to get bitten again to ease the memory of the last time out. In my experience, though, it doesn’t work.

I’m between texts, unless I count re-reading Pound’s Cathay. After a conversation yesterday, I thought that I should have read aloud several pertinent poems. Perhaps in a year I’ll have that chance again, God willing. Or maybe she’ll find them beforehand, but this seems doubtful.

How women move is a reason to wait.

They are in every case distinct, but you are you.

To wait is to remember this— not to move on, but recollect.

I put her apron on, pretend to be a woman.

If I wait long enough, I’ll come as one.

I’m devoted as a mare, the I Ching says, but my mind is like a dressing room in the Kabuki Theater.

I dreamt a kind of purifying dream.

More often, I’m failing to catch a flight— my suitcase half empty, my clothes in disarray.

Always the same city, yet it makes no sense.

My parents appear, although they’re dead.

Being dead, they never reach their destination.

I vowed to stay here to the very end— waiting games the last of it— like slabs first then we decay.

Will you attend? The odds aren’t good.

I’m not the only person who posts photos of self, but it always seems odd in retrospect. This past weekend was slightly aimless. More accurately, others set its outlines. I don’t mind this, but it usually happens when I’m traveling. In that context, it’s part of the larger challenges of navigating slightly pressed time and unfamiliar space.

At home, it inserts a smaller version of this into everyday life—small enough that I don’t really focus on it, yet large enough that it throws me off. In light of this, I’d say that my photos were self-locating: I’m here and then later I’m here. Unanswered is the question, “Who exactly is here?” The black-and-white photos especially contend with a self-view that is anchored in an unfolding present. Experience tells me that I’m considerably slowed down now, but my mind floats above this. An older friend uses a photo that was taken when he was 58. I guess that in his head, he still is. When I meet with him, I adjust to his present. Recently I saw the still-beautiful wife of another friend, some 20 years after our last encounter. I felt my mind adjusting. Perhaps looking at photos of myself does this, too.

Consciousness’s netherworld, aware of its impending end: postcards Death might send from an enclosing future.

“Getting older” is a transition that raises questions of identity on several levels. As always, we move through it with our contextual selves in train, sometimes a sage, sometimes anxious. The road toward death shortens and the workarounds that enable us to function become more crucial—being rather than having and a kind of optimism about time and worth. Identity is also sexual and, Frederick Seidel-style, we open up and out in a selfacknowledgement that owns our ambiguity with greater frankness. My poems lately are on this latter theme.

They often want you to love them on their own exclusive terms.

Love is more a question than an answer. The exception is unquestioned love, which when it exists is mainly between parents and children, possibly between siblings, and rarely between friends.

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

This is my version.

Yours, his, those of others may differ, but I was there filming it in my head.

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

This is my version.

The curtains billowed when the wind came up.

I’m fairly sure that happened.

Fecundity and death shape or warp our lives, although we go through stretches when they matter less or we’re oblivious to them. Fecundity is both life’s initial push and its pull thereafter. Death is the shadow of extinction, which dogs us fairly early and grows more pronounced with age or if prompted by deaths around us. This is obvious, and yet they’re the main things. I find now that at night I want to write and make art, so everything to be read is piling up. At a certain point, I toss it out, but with a sense of loss or guilt, which suggests time as a third “main thing.”

You ran off yelling. It confused me when it happened, but eventually I called your name, a pointless gesture. (A snippet of reality.) I’m bewildered when things slip out of sync. My mind runs behind some others. It’s like I have to screen the film to grasp what happened. But certain interactions are prolonged by this same phenomenon. This is the sort of human I am.

Coming home, the bus driver calls out for me to be careful disembarking. I think later of writing something on the theme of metamorphosis. It’s been done, but can it ever really be done?

The urge to live transparently is always there. The line between self-revelation and solipsism is inexact, but we are our subject, project, the body in question, placed here to deal with it.

Two women friends wrote in succession yesterday that they were bisexual. They’re with men, but bisexual still.

Something like this is surfacing in my poems.

Ted Hughes waited nearly to the end.

We’d been corresponding about the Sea Ranch, which I’ve never visited. The hedonism of one of its architects came up, “but no one talks about that.” In the course of the discussion, I thought of other venues. A poem by Cavafy, set in a café, suggests that desire can infuse a setting so it takes on a different character. Poets leave more evidence of this in their wake than architects do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In some seasons I can’t go in.

Will death establish that I’m really gone?

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

Not far away as I measure lives.

He’s no great beauty as men go, while she orbits her particular sun.

Following her along a road she traces an ellipse.

And this is not to speak of her fecundity.

Someday I’ll outlive this, but propagation dies hard.

Thus, Francis cleaves to sheep and bees, to crops, to a future creviced in between, the vessel of each transient’s story.

I had what I call a traveling dream just before waking. One driver of the plot is difficulty getting to the airport. I read this one as a commentary on my next stage of life. When I reached the barn, I asked the I Ching for advice and it confirmed my reading. My daughter came by and we talked next stages, a topic that follows us through life. I said to her that how you get from stage to stage often looks odd or untoward as you live through it, but makes more sense when you look back, realizing the good that arose from it. We carry our regrets and sorrows, things we’d take back or do differently if we could, but we only have ourselves and this time.

Your letters go unread, but their phrases recur. Sometimes at night the moon angles and I want to tell you.

Lately, I remember how it was, the conversations in between.

If they could happen in their own world, separate from every other, then the sign would have pointed there.

The rain stopped. It’s supposed to let up. I reread two poems I wrote recently. I cut the first one down a lot; the second is more like talking. I made a collage, thinking about what to use, what not to use. I could take the attitude that it’s all material, but Elizabeth Bishop complained to Robert Lowell about his doing that. Somewhere I wrote about de Kooning painting as his mind gave out, wondering if this gave his work greater directness. Robert Walser, said to be mad, worked out a method to get past the blocks to self-expression. Certain photos people post online strike me as dealing with this issue—the boundary between inside the self and outside the self.

The oddity of love, with its slow dances, its rides, its in-betweens and moments of transition from that bodily state to some other. We are these corporal beings who, if capable of breeding, may produce issue owing to our passion, folly, going along, giving in.

I’ve always seen time as an accrual of acts and experiences. When I write things like this, I see them as part of a narrative, a kind of written life. Weaving and the collages I do seem similar.

The lover I imagine is a chimera.

Australia I go back to the Art Gallery of New South Wales to see the white art of Australia, which lags Norway by about 20 years, based on what I saw, but retains the provincial peculiarity I’ve seen elsewhere—in Göteborg, for example.

Mixed in with this are some stunners, like Sidney Nolan’s mid-‘40s Ned Kelly series. Then I give in to tourism and take a taxi to see Utzon’s Opera House—surprisingly good, the way Gehry’s Bilbão was, although I expected otherwise.

In Melbourne, having dinner at Supernormal, a Japanese fusion place across from the hotel—jammed. I went to half of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) earlier. The indigenous art was thin, but an exhibit on the Australian artist John Olsen (b. 1928) made up for it—really stunning, mostly landscape-derived work. In a film, he explained that he looks at the structure of things: heads, bodies, topography. Melbourne is quite different from Sydney. I’m staying in the heart of it, surrounded by restaurants and shops that line the back streets. The scale is good—not especially tall, but dense in a good way.

I napped after my afternoon in Melbourne’s wine country. While there, I encountered a man who’d just moved back from Slovenia. He’s half Slovenian, he said, and planning to desert a woman there because moving her to Australia “would be hard.” This is our human condition, I thought. After he left, I told my friend that he had the look of a film actor, which was true.

At home, it’s evening. Out here over the Pacific, time is a question of progress from one point to another. I wrote a poem thinking of a laconic correspondent whose prose poems, if that’s the right term for them, I admire.

Sometimes I think that if I were a woman and younger, I would be like her as I intuit her nature. Or perhaps what I mean is that there’s an inner part of me that’s like her, like my sense of her. But my poem was directed at what we share as two humans, parents and observers—a simpler connection.

The poem I wrote about the MoVida bar is similarly observational—not a love poem, but a poem about love. I still write love poems, but they come from a different place: memory’s play with the unfolding present, mostly, and those flashes of desire that are also our human nature.

Women touch their hair as they get ready to be loved.

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

Later they will narrow.

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

Scads of feet above, I told my daughter, an island continent behind me. I wrote a poem about love as witnessed, this human thing with its progeny, like yours and mine. We have them earlier or later. They arise from coupling, going under— the thrust of making.

Our lives thread in and out around these human acts and their issue, offspring that we love without condition, hopeful that they’ll know it and live fearlessly as we have tried, often failing, stumbling over ourselves, a shambles that we take in our stride, the best we are on many mornings, only ourselves to bring along, along, as we have always done, yet somehow we loved, were loved, made it to here, deep in the country or in flight over the wide sea.

We ran like savages, my friend and I. Alice was appalled by our nakedness, feathers, play its own category; not games, but with intent to arouse, a look that said you got to me, I’m wet oh God get in me, or let me get on top of you, do that next thing.

Somewhere I read that men know how women are.

Their genes crossed that line early on.

We hid out mostly and then hiding lost its fashion. Identity is this shifting thing. Perhaps we really want our own kind to play with us, brazen, but we’re so scarce.

My friend compared here to there. I thought about you, sitting near.

I am the same in every place (we assert). Behind my faltering eyes consciousness (out walking). You were there. I sat talking.

I was there. We spoke. I am the same, only minutely older.

Your father, too. All of us sparked to life, genetic matter unfolding ‘til we reach that switch.

We’re the same; we’re not. I have the projective apparatus of my sex.

That apparatus is what it is. Time passes. Even the wiring frays, although desire has a long shelf life. Someone or ones have noted how inconvenient it is, how the gaze drifts, how the mind hungers after it, how rarely if ever it goes as planned.

We are our outward, inward selves. Life’s multiplicative force asserts itself.

At this point, I’m immune. Inwardly though I want it, too: each beauty bearing.

Writers who are dead aren’t walking. It seems unfair to hinder them.

Paths are strewn with things they wrote. The earth will end up charred and dead.

The sun, the universe, everything walks back in a collapsing mode, takes to its bed just long enough to start again.

Rain and cold: late fall as opposed to late spring. Nine days in Australia were a reprieve from the winter I annually dislike, although this is when nature sleeps and recovers. It’s a theme of Robert Graves’s White Goddess: the agrarian Corn King reigns through the sowing and reaping, and is then ritually murdered. Winter arrives with its sharpened knife.

I dreamt that I was staying in someone else’s ramshackle house with children who I was vaguely in charge of, although they appeared to run things fine without my help. At one point I was back in a stripped-down version of my parents’ midcentury modern house, looking out at the adjoining woods—a kind of paradise of pristine trees, the pond within them now a lake.

Fidel Castro stayed in Harlem in 1960. It was clear this was the right move. Later that year, we had dinner in Basel with my father’s company’s rep in Cuba, who recounted his hair-raising departure from Havana. Exiles followed— one taught Spanish in my New Jersey high school.

These are the waning weeks of Obama and the waxing weeks of Trump. Clinton partisans now sound like Sanders partisans. The pre-election noise has if anything grown louder, even as it’s punctuated by ugliness from those emboldened by Trump’s win to take his dog whistles as meant for them. The evil around Trump is the reductive, simplistic thinking promoted by hucksters and ideologues. The possibilities he raises relate to breaking with the postwar consensus, of which Clinton was an exemplar, and reshaping the political landscape around new realities.

We need a progressive alternative to come forward, leaders prepared to take this project on without Clinton’s inherited baggage. It’s not enough to oppose Trump; he has to be transcended. We need to step through the wall he breached and define a different future than the nostalgic and ahistorical one the Tea Party thinks it can impose on us.

Most Sundays, I write a letter to a friend in Maine. We started corresponding some years ago, reintroduced by a mutual friend. All this took place online. I read in an obituary of a London literary agent that he felt collections of letters were dead as a genre, but I’ve never stopped writing them. This may reflect a habit begun in childhood, when letters were the medium. My parents famously produced a Christmas letter that went out literally around the world. I produce an equivalent wrap-up every year in their honor. Correspondence is particular. A diary like this is written both as notes to self, a record, and to an audience that’s intuited rather than known. I’ve re-posted writings of another—prose poems, I would call them, but that’s a loose boundary—that have this quality. I admire their openness and evocative language—both good things.

My daughter urged me to collect the diary entries, as I did with my poems. It’s an interesting idea to gather what’s been written over the year and see what’s there—harvesting material that, as I write it, seems ephemeral or ripe for deletion. I tend to keep everything because it may be valuable later, not least because it was written in the moment.

Reading it, like looking at photos, brings things back to mind when I have some distance from them. This raises possibilities itself.

My attitude toward my poems changes each time I read them.

I sometimes think that I’ve been wronged. There’s an attic full of these complaints.

Was thinking that this election, which Clinton won in terms of actual votes, is a testimony to the bias against cities we’ve inherited from our country’s founders. It’s time to lift that curse.

It seems I’m now the object of those riffs we tell ourselves to stanch the pain of no one else with whom to riff. Pain’s too strong a word. It’s like an ache, a missing arm.

If I could split myself in half or maybe in thirds or fourths, then you’d each have have a piece of me to fuck and talk with, grow old with or outgrow, take to things I sort of like but often don’t.

If I had split myself, those lives I tried to lead might have worked better than they did. Draw your own conclusions, how mad it is to think we can split ourselves, but then the knowledge gained is only gained by this congress, this intercession, this joining against odds and rules.

I should be thinking of sauve qui peut, of everyone who felt deserted or moved on to her intended, but I’m thinking of you in your two-way mirror, how a part of my psyche is there with you in the frame, wondering if there’s a woman in here somewhere and why nature put this head on me, the old mind-body fallacy.

If it were me, it would be a projection, how that protuberance grows into another and why we’re rooted in our several ways in the strata that becoming gives us, these rolling, huffing, illusive conclusions that cue up and are cued up by the study we make of our moving parts, held still for the camera, our breath caught, not to give ourselves away. If it were me, radiated and all, strata half-blasted to oblivion—if it were me, I’d hide behind the scrim that ambiguity lends me.

You need none, but perhaps later nature will give you a taste of it, coarse and aggressive, taking what you desire like a man in the old sense, the sense of butch on femme.

If it were me, I’d scrape thorns across my breasts in penance—desire’s pain, mirror of pleasure.

As a topic, the way men see women is maybe out of fashion, as if they should have no opinion in print or shouted from the safety of a building site.

But catcalls aren’t the subject here. Desire is desire, how I see you is how I see you, stated or not.

As I write this, I picture you and my mind unpacks the hints your clothing gives. How like a film, your face, turned toward me, its own clue.

That human sense of want, the splay or curl, the shock of the part, the plunge, the gift when it’s a gift, possession as it happens.

The room is strewn and then each item is retrieved so that only the sense of you lingers. Bits and pieces of flesh cohere in service of this gathering in.

Yes, I thought, I dream of this. I woke thinking how acts condemn us. How we are what they say we are, even in dreams. And yet remorse follows us there. Everything is laden.

If I were free, if I were unafraid, we would cohere, we would part, burning our letters behind us or maybe not. I have no theory on this point, only practice with its dreadful weight.

In one of Stendhal’s manuscripts, he writes in the margin that readers will understand him in 150 years. In some sense art is a public act, self-expression. This isn’t catering to an audience, but desiring to be read, seen, or heard by a receptive other, as in love, for instance.

What resonates is hard to predict.

For three successive days, I’ve asked the I Ching for advice. I usually do this only three or four times a year, but each result I got this time seemed to be part of a longer answer. It also prompted me to sharpen the question in light of it. They fit together I saw today.

My queries of the I Ching yielded hexagrams 22, “Grace,” 63, “After Completion,” and 15, “Modesty,” becoming 52, “Keeping Still, Mountain.” The opening query solicited advice about my becoming 70, but the response focused on my current position, far enough from the real action that my work is ornamental rather than substantive. The second query followed up on the first, noting a conversation with someone loosely in my field who’s stepping away from it for personal reasons. The response pointed to what I’ve accomplished and how in many ways it’s at a close, so the real attention needs to be on what follows. (A theme of the I Ching is to let the situation unfold.) It also said to limit myself to small things. So what are they, I asked? It pointed to “Modesty,” which states that the Mountain (an image with which I identify in the sense of “grounded”) is the youngest son of the Creative, and then shifted to “Keeping Still, Mountain,” which states that “the way to expansion is through contraction.” So “small things” is both staying clear of ego and paring down in order to focus on the things that really matter. Hexagram 52 adds that the Mountain’s stillness is a deliberate pausing before it moves again.

I was 21 in 1968, a baleful year, the start of what the Italians called “the years of lead.” It’s starting to feel now like it did back then. One difference is that students had a big role then, radicalized by an unjust war they were called on to fight. The gap between students and workers was less precipitous. Today’s disaffected see a dead end and politicians who are clueless.

Dōgen wrote that moments of enlightenment emerge from a “mind” that’s a half-fiction of interpretation, yet there’s something more to “self” than randomness (contingency). If it’s all made up, we do a good job of keeping the plot going.

Two questions: First, is the mix, Carnival and Lent, necessary to live as a human being? Swedenborg argued that very few people are good, although many believe otherwise. “We are led by what we love,” he wrote. Even grief is often self-love distracted by loss. Second, is brilliance or surprise to be sought in poems, or is it false to do so?

Techné, Rusty Morrison said, has to be balanced by poesis. She also advocated for pushing for a perfected line.

“End of the road,” Laurie said.

It had that look. Although he drove three days before expiring, negotiating the road’s twists, the state of the place spoke to the negligence with which the departing treat material life. Properly speaking, it’s a sham that mortality brings to light: how we, the quick, shade off into this forest of stunted pines.

They taunt us, these firesticks, half alive, spawn of past catastrophes. 'A wood stove,’ my oldest son projected, but pine is a mass of sparks. 'We’ll clear it away,’ he offered at another point, an all-purpose summary of the scene, its wrecked boats, trailers, cars, and yurts.

Yet there’s a spirit here that draws you to it.

More than a sketch, the house begs to be carried out, more than a shell, but not yet shelter.

1 January: atoning and planning; a death 15 January: the Reverend King’s birthday 22, 24, and 25 January: loved ones’ birthdays, the middle one gone 4 February: appeared 7 February: birthday of dead-by-her-own-hand Jane 13 February: a day of coincidence 14 February: a saint’s day 3 April: day my mother died; an artist’s birthday 7 May: remembered 8 May: a loved one’s birthday 10 May: birthday of one grandfather 15 May: a sign, and then?

17 May: Norway’s national day 18 May: remembered 6 June: D-Day 12 June: remembered 14 June: birthday of the other grandfather 4 July: Independence Day 14 Juillet: Bastille Day 1 August: a loved one’s birthday 10 August: one parent’s birthday 14 August: their anniversary, in between 19 August: another parent’s birthday 30 August: anniversary 2 September: a loved one’s birthday 6 September: a loved one’s birthday 10 September: a loved one’s birthday 13 September: a loved one’s birthday 28 October: a loved one’s birthday 9 November: remembered 7 December: Pearl Harbor Day birthday 23 December: a loved one’s birthday 24 December: Christmas Eve/shopping 25 December: Christmas/presents 31 December: New Year’s Eve Afterword The anthropologist and poet Vasilina Orlova wrote me questioning “Common Place” as an apt title for a journal, even a personal one, which hopes to find an audience. I explained its origins in a comment my sister made, pointing to the commonplace books of an earlier time. I noted Bay Area architect Joseph Esherick’s use of “ordinary” to describe his understated houses. There’s a whiff of Veblen here, I realize—his thesis that the leisure class’s apparent modesty was a feint. The title conveys how the work it collects emerged from the everyday. This issue was drawn entirely from my Tumblr site—j2parman.tumblr.com. Several others were written on the road or started there. Along with commissioned pieces and personal essays, it documents my foray into sonnets and my recent return to free verse. The main claim I can make for it is that it continues.

— Berkeley, late winter, 2017

Common Place | Š 2015–2020 by John J. Parman | complace.j2parman.com