COMMON PLACE NO. 10 | SPRING 2018
AFTER RILKE (ESSAYS) | NEW POEMS & SKETCHES
PREFACE Much of what I write falls in that porous category, the personal essay. These essays began as memoir, but that proved stillborn. Reading Brian Dillon’s Essayism led me, via Robert Musil’s tribute to Rainer Maria Rilke (in Precision and Soul, a collection of his essays and addresses), to Ulrich Baer’s The Rilke Alphabet, which quotes a Rilke poem with the rhyming form, ABA CBC. (A poem included here, occasioned by a memorial for my friend Rob Gayle, uses this form.) Awake in the middle of the night, I thought of the form again as way to frame a series of brief essays. On a notepad, I wrote: A. Love, B. Death, A. Love; C. Place, B. Death, C. Place; A. Family, B. Self, A. Family, C. Work, B. Self, C. Work. Then I wrote the series’ title: After Rilke.
AFTER RILKE (ESSAYS)
Love An affliction and an addiction, love is also a kind of play we engage in early on and are always ready to take up again unless or although prudence and experience argue otherwise. Affliction is both illness and curse. Kicking an addiction (or being deprived of it) leads to a range of terrors. We learn this in stages. If I have consciously walled love off, it’s because I no longer believe in it. Love is an odd word that covers a huge territory. I haven’t walled love off, in reality, but I’ve foresworn acting on the desire for a woman to arouse and possess—to use the typical language, the shorthand, of a desire that is equally for the proximity or closeness love permits, with its unique exchanges, many if not all of which are as much between minds as bodies, or evidence yet again of the meaninglessness of that distinction. (Yet a dichotomy, and part of the terror.) “No longer believe in it” is imprecise. It’s like the difference between the quantum universe and Newton’s. There’s an element of destiny in love (that isn’t pursued purely as sport or habit) that’s uncanny in my personal experience. Like light as a particle, you think you can hold on to it. The world is as Newton described; like him, we sense that more is going on. This insight has no practical value. Goethe’s maxim, “Only love a woman you’re prepared to marry,” reflected his attempts to live otherwise. Hayek argued that tradition embodies evolutionary experience at a cultural level—widely shared “facts on the ground.” Facts can change, as Keynes noted, but the cataclysms are also part of the facts tradition incorporates. We tell ourselves we’re immune. Love can be revolutionary, two against the world. From that stance, tradition is there to be overthrown. Love’s approximation of being, at its peak moments, roots us in an unfolding here and now, but this is the flimsiest of constructs unless we take conscious steps to strengthen it. That means acknowledging the past and future that figure in any here and now. Anything less than this is artifice, however delightful. This brings us back to play, the scenes of childhood. Part of love’s motivation is to recapture a time when being came naturally and living here and now was all that was expected of us. Our upbringing hammers much of this out of us. That we should take life seriously is the message that accompanies the physical duress we experience testing our limits. We equate maturity with sobriety, but crave relief more or less constantly—a craving for a remembered paradise we believe we can recreate in an entirely different context. Maturity is a ripening. A clear head is helpful, and people achieve this in different ways. I see sobriety as a conscious decision to be free of a negative force, whatever it is, that exerts power. But maturity is also letting play ripen into something less destructive. Love isn’t precluded, but its negative aspects are acknowledged, brought into the picture. We look around us, not back.
Death “On borrowed time,” my father wrote me. At the time, I didn’t quite follow, but later I saw that he was referring to his own father, who died at 76. My father lived longer, dying at 79, about six weeks short of 80, so in his 80th year. I’m now in my 72nd year. My mother died in her 76th year, but her father lived into his 80s, dying in a car accident along with his wife. His father lived to be 97, I remember hearing, but I don’t know this for sure. A farmer, he continued to farm pretty much until the end. My father spent part of World War II in London, where he was bombed out—a lucky escape, waking up and going out for a beer, hearing the air-raid sirens, seeking shelter, coming back to find his building flattened. He was also inadvertently in the Battle of the Bulge. His survival is of course my survival. So, I too may be living on borrowed time, time handed me, a possible life. I’m not sure exactly how old I was when my personal mortality came to me in its full terror. I think 14, but can that be possible? A fear of death led me to stop flying at one point, but it was so impractical that I was soon back in the air. Mortality has two aspects: the transience of our material selves, no matter what; and the randomness of the larger world, no matter what. Much time is given, individually and collectively, to extending life and taming the world’s randomness. We even keep score, comparing peoples, cities, and nations. When I was diagnosed with cancer, my doctor told me that the longer I could forestall treatment, the better it was likely to be. Now it’s my eyes: if I can keep them stable, a genetic treatment may emerge in lieu of surgery. Earlier this week, I read that consciousness survives a stopped heart by five minutes. More accurately, the brain continues to function, although what that’s like within is unclear. (It has a bearing on efforts to revive people.) But the body is a package. You can work around deficits up to a point, but beyond that, you’re probably better off dead than living strapped to a machine. Suicide or its contemplation runs ambiguously through life. It has its varying traditions, some of which make martyrs, heroes, or stoics of the life-takers. I sometimes thought of it while waiting for trains or, in one instance, standing on a balcony. I was never serious about it. The only time I could see it was one weekend when I had an abscessed tooth and no pain killer. Once, visiting my family in Norway, I woke up in the night and realized that my late cousin had visited me and left a message for me to give to his father. There was no ghost, but no doubt, either. In the morning, I recounted this to its recipient, who told me I was the third person to do so. Later that day, I went to the communal graveyard where my cousin, his brother, and his son are buried. I saw clearly, clairvoyantly, that they were gone and he wasn’t. His daughter, then an adolescent, kept him tied to that place. Perhaps his wife did, also. The destiny that draws us to others reflects a time travel with intervals. This is my theory. The passage through may be loosely choreographed; it may even be a game. We’ll see. Love Poetry lends itself to writing around love. And death. Place By the time I was six, I’d circumnavigated the world by ship. Much of what I experienced no longer exists. The architect-designed house my parents built in suburban New Jersey in 1954, although a prime example of midcentury modernism, was torn down 45 years later. The only house of my childhood I can still visit is the one in which my late cousin also grew up. It still exists and I continue to visit it. My great-grandfather’s summer house, which I also knew as a kid, is nearby. I walked past it in May 2016, and my late cousin’s daughter lives on its grounds.
I arrived in Berkeley in March 1969, having driven out from St. Louis for spring break. One of our party, who was from San Francisco, stopped the car at the top of the Berkeley Campus. I can’t really say, “I knew I would live here,” but it feels true. I sometimes say that I knew immediately that my wife and I would marry when I first met her, but the reality is that I felt we knew each other. She first moved to the block we live on in 1968. After our first son was born, we moved to her building, which her parents owned. Later, they moved into it, leaving San Francisco. We bought our own house across the street in 1984. Square and shingled, it was built by Charmaine Kittredge in 1902. Her father was locally prominent—a street is named after him. She went on to marry Jack London. Ours is a Queen Anne-period pattern house made to look “shingle style,” as was popular at the time. It’s compact, but has a Victorian floor plan with a foyer and four small bedrooms upstairs. A previous owner added to the kitchen and built a large deck. There’s a 1902 shed in the back. From the room in which I sleep, I can see most of the Golden Gate, Angel Island, and the coast range that extends north to Mount Tamalpais. The view is part of the place, to me—an assertion that is actively rejected by advocates for higher density in “urban” cities like this. The location, four blocks uphill from what was once the main streetcar route through Berkeley, is “walkable”—close to shops, cafés, and one renowned restaurant, Chez Panisse. Living here has become “European” as the food and wine of the region have come up and up. This happened more or less from the time I arrived, creating a market for local agriculture and viniculture. But “Progress” (capital “P”) is constantly on the hunt to wreck this idyll. The region suffers from fragmentation, and each fragment imagines it can solve the region’s problems alone. The rise of the tech sector has created a kind of five-tiered economy, with the lower tiers steadily losing out. Young professionals of my acquaintance are leaving. This is said to be a catastrophe. And this is the Left Coast, a haven of old lefties and new ones. But the region’s politics are more complicated, often libertarian rather than progressive. (Tech-progressive, one could say.) The human mix feels like the future and is widely supported; the rest struggles to keep up. The regional economy is the size of the Netherlands (in a state economy bigger than France), but the pervading sense is a lack of public investment—austerity amid vast wealth—and a public sector that’s expensive and ineffective. Fragmentation ensures that reform is very difficult to enact. In 1989, I visited a friend who’d taken up a visiting academic position in Tokyo. He lived in one of the districts along the circle line that demarks the inner and outer wards of the city. In the 11 days I spent there, I came to love the texture of the neighborhood, which was dense but low. Someone told me the average height of the city was 1.3 stories. I imagine that Berkeley has a comparable statistic. When I heard it, I thought that adding density in Tokyo is mainly a matter of modest increases in height—something that was going on in the neighborhood around us. In fact, we lived in a three-story condominium building that consolidated the site of two or three single-family, probably single-story houses. The building fit well with its surroundings. Not every building on the narrow street needed to be redeveloped to add housing. The process, mainly instigated by owners in the immediate community, happened slowly. Slow is a good tempo at city scale, because the size of a city multiplies these small acts so they make a difference. Slow makes allowance for the character of a place in a way that fast often doesn’t. And fast in an urban context is typically glacial—a real slow that adds cost and discourages local initiative. Slow is made possible by a shared consensus about a place. The pattern houses that gave rise to much of Berkeley were densely sited and modest, affordable to young families. Most of them were built by small-scale entrepreneurs. Zoning reflected this consensus; now it doesn’t. A step was missed and building and owning property became politicized. This is a recipe for corruption.
Death From the sidelines, so to speak, I watched the mother of a friend pass from a vigorous old age to frailty to death. Her daughter reported this and, to some extent, I saw it in social media. Our occasional exchanges were mostly about weaving. I wove and she asked questions about it. Some years before, I interviewed a well-known critic twice in the space of about a year. He had declined significantly between the two conversations, apologizing the second time for a mind that worked slowly because his heart was failing. The first time, his Russian ancestry came to the fore. Or was it the Ukraine? According to a friend’s report, he died surrounded by his old colleagues, having excused himself to take a nap from which he failed to wake up. Twelve years ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. The man who made the diagnosis urged me to arrange for surgery that he proposed to perform. In time, I found another doctor and delayed treatment for four years. I also avoided surgery, which had no real advantages I could see over the radiation treatment I received. At my doctor’s urging, I made the rounds of other specialists. Falling in with a doctor that I liked and trusted damped down the incredible anxiety I felt at first. I went to two concerts with a friend immediately after the diagnosis and, at the second, realized that I had no memory of the first. This isn’t really about death, it’s about dismemberment. The territory of old age is perilous. I fell on the sidewalk twice in my early 60s and realized that not falling is part of it. You learn to be careful. But being careful only gets you so far. Part of the transition I’m making now involves learning how to be fitter than I am. I have episodically become fit, but the motivation wasn’t self-preservation. The observation, “He treats his body as separate and thus it is preserved,” found in Tao Te Ching, applies. But which body, exactly? According to Chuang Tzu, the Taoist sages joked about being bent over double by old age. As bodies age, this happens. It’s definitely a reason to be fit, as another doctor, then in his late 80s, pointed out. (He retired to do more skiing, he told me. I wonder if he’s still on the planet?) But back to my question. My own body has always been only semi-reliable, now tiny and thin, now taller but fat, now thin again, now heavier. It seems to hit a plateau, but then it changes again. The mind attached to it is masculine/feminine. The orientation is masculine, but the sensibility is feminine, if that makes any sense. I could imagine reincarnating as a woman. A psychic once told me that I reincarnated from a more masculine, charismatic figure with strong intuitive powers.
I remember a professor, so undone by the treatment he received for cancer that he died of a cold. He had a six-year-old son, the result of a late marriage to a younger woman. Once I saw him walk by, slumped with the burdens of illness and age, and then come skipping back in the company of his child, brought back to life momentarily. My mother, dying from complications of a stroke, paused in her dying, my sister told me, to listen to “The Book of Ruth.” My mother-inlaw willed herself through the holidays so her grandchildren could visit her. Once gone, she died. I learned in my thirties that I can tell from looking that a person is mortally ill. This talent came back to me when I met a friend last autumn and found him to be visibly dying. I’d learned from another friend who was in grave danger at certain points that it’s best to let the sick talk, to reveal what they want to reveal, discuss what they want to discuss. I sometimes think he was as much of a messenger as my late cousin, but messengers have their own lives and thoughts. Place When I was an undergraduate, a friend who had an aunt in St. Louis sometimes took me on drives in the country or to different landmarks in the city. One of them was the Bellefontaine Cemetery, with its mausoleums and Victorian-era sculptures. Where part of my family lives in Norway, the community lives around a Romanesque church and a cemetery that extends down the hillside, with a walkway that’s a shortcut to the rocks where we went to swim as kids. Where they put the dead says something about the communities of the living. My father’s parents are buried in Omaha; my parents in Eugene. My wife’s parents are buried in Kensington. I’m unsure where my mother’s parents are buried. But the dead of a part if my Norwegian family are buried together in a nearby place. I think this was a factor in my late cousin’s visit. In my transiently clairvoyant state, I saw there’s an attachment between the dead and their graves until they move on. There was a perceptible warmth to one, like a fire in a hearth; the others were cold, deserted. My cousins’ graves are marked by stones. The gravestone of the oldest, who died at 17 in 1963, is overrun with lichen and hard to read. Those of his brother and his brother’s son are tended by his brother’s widow, so their names are clearly visible. That we make places for the dead is interesting in itself. My wife’s mother gave her body to the medical school, which will cremate it along with others, mixing their ashes and scattering them in the Pacific in a ceremony to which the families are invited. Yet she has a grave marker next to her husband. We had a ceremony for her there, as we had for him. The constant search for mass graves, the identification and reburial of the dead—these actions speak to a desire to give each death a respect that’s often elusive in life itself. The impulse is often tribal. (I learned from a brother-in-law that the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s cemetery at Gallipoli is untended.) That the dead have markers at all, let alone mausoleums, reflects a long tradition of giving them repositories that, when the survivors could afford it, included testimonies to their value among the living. In the Greek Hall, as I think of it, at the Metropolitan Museum, there are a few that honor women as mothers and as the beauties they once were. This seems fitting. Beauty is fleeting. The photos of women in the paid obituaries of the New York Times often show them at something like their height. The men blend together, as in life, but the women are memorable. I think I’d like my ashes scattered in the back garden of my house. Next to the upstairs view, it’s the ground to which I feel the most connected. As for a marker, near my cousins’ graves in Norway, that gathering place of family spirits, might be good—a bit of me in both places.
Family I have a friend from college whose parents and grandparents were like characters in a novel by Tolstoy. It felt like the weight of that history fell on her, and that to work through it, she had to recreate those events and dramas as a brief and personally dangerous ordeal. The Sufi guru George Gurdjieff called this “voluntary suffering,” from which her baby daughter released her. The families my wife and I combined also have histories. On my wife’s side, there’s Edmund Burke’s sister Mary. On mine, although I’m not sure by what route, there’s James Lawrence, the Naval hero who reputedly implored his men, “Don’t give up the ship!” My great-grandfather was a Knight of the Danish Court, someone said, in honor of his giant school-room maps. There’s a state senator from Del Norte, Colorado. There are also bookies, farmers, and engineers. The families gathered by my marriage are mostly bourgeois. My great-grandfather brought that part of the family into the upper middle class, a kind of aristocracy of merit that persists through its adherence to such givens as educating the children and prodding them to work. The work ethic looms large, although my wife’s father’s family, landed gentry in steep decline on the grandfather’s side, rejected it in part. (Her grandfather never really worked, but he married a woman with opposite instincts, a force of nature that my wife is said to resemble.) The bourgeoisie threw off the aristocracy. This happened in Japan, too, despite its isolation, led by the “arrogant merchants” of Osaka. In Hagakure, written by a samurai in the employ of a baronial family, these merchants are condemned. Aristocracy wants its privileges and will go to war for them; the bourgeoisie will also go to war, but would rather not. I’m bourgeois to the core, but as a child, living in a British Crown Colony, my nascent sense of loyalty and patriotism became attached to the aristocracy whose visits required me and my classmates to turn out. Aristocracy is family of a sort, especially if encountered in childhood. The attachment formed is emotional and irrational. When Diana and Charles married, I cried involuntarily while watching their wedding, to my wife’s horror. (“They’re just Krauts,” she memorably told our oldest son.) Vladimir Putin has let the Romanovs be rehabilitated by the Russian Orthodox Church. He casts himself as the Consort of Mother Russia, a Napoleonic emperor—self-anointed. The trappings are imperial. The latest election is a plebiscite meant to seal his popular mandate. It’s the opposite of Xi’s end game of party politics, eliminating his rivals in a corporate takeover. Unlike hereditary aristocracies, these autocracies lack the standing that tradition might give them. Putin and Xi rule by their wits, at considerable personal danger. They’ve accumulated enemies. Despite their ruthlessness, they’re innately vulnerable. They can’t show weakness, yet they have to be seen as human, parentally empathetic, compassionate in a tough-love way. Charles de Gaulle saw countries like China and Russia as being stereotypically themselves. Who’s in charge is incidental to their behavior in a larger sense: innate, indelible, predictable. This sounds like stasis, but it can also be a predilection to play a long game, to work doggedly to bring reality—or at least perception—into sync with national myth. It’s an evolutionary strategy. Aristocracies used marriage to cement ties and infuse waning dynasties with new blood. That their fortunes derived from land was a problem the aristocracy never fully resolved. Aristocrats were tied by blood to territories that they personify. Landless younger sons ended up competing with and then marrying their tenants. My wife’s grandfather, scion of near-landless provincial gentry, was accepted by a rising local family on the strength of his name. Their first son secured a bank loan at age 10 because he embodied the prospect of revival their union represented. Perhaps Putin also trades on this idea—Mother Russia a queen in danger, and this self-made Man of the Future as her savior, prodding their progeny on to greater things. Xi meanwhile has stepped into a traditional role in China, securing the new dynasty. But the kids may get restless.
Self Our sense of self is illusory, the Buddhists say, because our lives are contingent. Judging from my children, though, our natures—the raw material of identity and character—arrive with us. We are divided, I think, by sense of our lives as unfolding like a novel in which we’re both author and actor, with others who may come and go, but whose places in our story are never clear or final; and of our lives as discontinuous events in which others figure provisionally and can be shed. Although “one damn thing after another” is a cliché, I failed to understand it as lived human experience until I quoted the phrase, having just read an interview with Lucian Freud in which he said it to justify cutting off friends and relations. “That’s me,” one of my hearers exclaimed. She meant the discontinuity of things, not the cutting off, but it made me think about both. My memory is associative. When triggered, often by people who I haven’t seen in a while, our shared past comes forward. This makes it easy to pick up the thread because the emotional ties are still there. The idea of social capital similarly reflects an accrual of experience in which the good persists and makes anything less than good seem exceptional. My associative memory may bridge across intervening time, but the novel’s plot twists sometimes disrupt the flow.
Family “The Founders’ Dinner” is what our children jokingly call our anniversary celebrations. Families vary immensely, but ours is extensive and connected by unconditional affection. I learned as I grew up that this applies to parents, siblings, and cousins. The idea that there are family friends who figure in this picture I learned from my wife’s friends of that description, and my sister’s. A desire runs across our family to want each one to do well, whatever this might mean to her or him. It’s a desire rather than an expectation, but active support comes along with it. “Start where you are” is another Buddhist saying that speaks to unconditional affection. It’s a pragmatic admonition meant to bring you back to yourself. It points to Buddha’s ladder, as I call it—accepting that we unfold with everything else in a world that’s both organized and random. Families embody this paradox. History depicts their persistence and contingency. Unconditional affection is a kind of optimism about the family’s attributes, its ability to persist and improvise. It honors evolutionary traits like bearing and intelligence, and upholds traditional obligations, from marriage itself to the effort and money invested in the progeny’s education and upbringing.
That families do this in the face of the contingencies that dog most marriages and the fraught transitions their children make in their dependencies—is evidence of their dynastic nature. It also speaks to the world that revolves around families: relations, friends, colleagues and friends of friends, and acquaintances, initially of the founding couple and later of their adult children. I started reading the first of Anthony Powell’s journals—a writer for whom family in this respect was his principal subject. The outlook it depicts is novelistic: everyday life depicted as a series of linked encounters, with the narrator and his intimate circle as the link. (The Alan Clark political diary, in contrast, reads like dispatches to the future. It reminded me of Stendhal’s Memories.) “Novelistic” means experience is overlaid by speculation. Powell quotes someone saying that one consolation of old age is learning how careers, marriages, and reputations turn out. The affection the narrator feels is like a novelist’s affection for her characters. However deplorable, there they are, still a focus of her attention. Our memories of them are never entirely fixed. Not even death accomplishes this. Powell’s great work, which I have yet to read, keeps things open. Work I thought of myself as a workaholic. At certain points, I privileged work over other aspects of life. Relieved now of the exigencies of fulltime work, I’m less sure I was ever addicted to it. It was a lifestyle, in my wife’s view—one that retains its attractions. My work combined art and skill with a degree of influence. While all of it was ephemeral, it gave form to the ambitions of the firms that commissioned it. This was especially true in the second half of my career, when I produced a magazine and other “statements of intent” that helped my firm explain itself. Given its size and reach, explaining itself to itself was a big part of this. I’m not sure the firm’s leaders grasped that this is better done indirectly than propagandistically with an internal audience. Some argue that writing of one type—commercial, say—works against writing of purer types. Poets are recommended to be bakers, lest their day jobs sully or sap their creative forces. I can’t speak for others, but the main issue is facility. Writing commercially and for journals involves deadlines and limits what can be said. The creativity is in making things worth reading. Writing for leisure is nominally free of these constraints. Any constraints are directed at the work itself. Writing is the heart of my odd career, which began and has continued to be my means to be in a field—architecture and design—in which I had no talent. I can’t really draw, and while I have a strong spatial sense, it only serves my critical sense. To design at all, I resorted to drugs. Even then, the results weren’t much good, but my explanations amused the gods, especially the Chicago architect Harry Weese, who saved me from being tossed out of undergraduate school. In parallel, beginning really as a child, I wrote. The writing was largely at the prompting of others, starting with my mother. In high school, an insightful English teacher told me to absorb the New York Times’ house style, which I did by reading it in full daily, a practice that continues. This augmented my childhood in Singapore, where I heard English spoken by educated people (and spoke it as an absorbed variant on the standard American English spoken by my parents). The American East Coast to which I returned was marked by a standard way of speaking among the educated that was reinforced by newscasters, cultural program hosts, and talking heads. (The writing of my father and sister is similar to mine in form and word choices, I’ve noticed.) Writing for oneself is less about a distinctive voice and more about finding suitable forms. I write most easily in correspondence, short essays and commentary, and poems. Concision is a common feature, although one man’s brief may be one woman’s too long. As an editor, I prefer concision. As a writer, I unfold things—poems with extraneous preludes and essays with asides. My writing wanders discursively, yet somehow is relatively brief. When I edit it, I sometimes aim for the supposed heart, but more often I let it beat within the plumage.
Self A book I liked is Alexander Nehamas’ The Art of Living, which traces the care of the self from Socrates to Foucault. This is a simplification, but it’s what I retain from reading it once through. On the strength of it, I bought and read Foucault’s The Care of the Self, stopping when he gets to boys. I was a boy myself, of course, and mixing with my own kind came with that territory. When we’re young, gender differences are less pronounced. Then puberty kicks in. I wonder if the profusion of identities and the striving for a more fluid spectrum are a working out of this bodily imposition, which haphazardly makes us “men” or “women.” Three women friends have at different times noted that, as the first put it, “my figure didn’t come in.” Humans vary around a shifting norm; in high school, that nightmare of post-puberty, they try to get near it and fit in. Making something of ourselves, as older people admonish us, is one of life’s main projects. The criteria handed us are often ill-suited to our nature, talents, and inclinations, which means that the breakthroughs in this project center on our willingness, sooner or later, to embrace our differences, to vary quite distantly from what others want of us to pursue our own agenda. In a way, this repeats our early adventures, when real life hammered us with its lessons about sharp objects, gravity, and our peers. Dennis Winnicott says we build our egos early on. Later, tempted to push beyond the limits of common sense, we crack that carapace, but we learn again why we built it. This second time, we gain self-reliance or go under. Going under is one way to learn. Authenticity is crucial to the project of making something of ourselves. We can’t help but see how the terms on offer to realize our ambitions work against what we’re really here to do. We may acquiesce, defer, evade, or rebel, but those choices are reactive. The other option is to do what we’re here to do from the outset, but this involves a different kind of trial and error. When I was in my thirties, with two young children, a friend used to torture me by asking, “What’s your 10-year plan?” He had one, presumably, but then his marriage went off the rails. On New Years’ Day, I used to write out a kind of prospective. Some things reappeared from year to year, not getting done; other things took place, but rarely as envisioned. The supposed path through a life is really an accumulation of experiences from which we learn or not. Making something of yourself means staying open to life and learning from it. There’s no other way. Work When I was younger, the therapists claimed that marriages “took work.” I saw it differently. The household and its responsibilities take work, no doubt, but marriage itself as a close relationship that can be fraught or pleasurable or stagnant in turns isn’t something “to work on.” Anything involving love is a creative act first and foremost, to which the phrase “the art of living” speaks. We tend to divide life into the categories handed us as soon as we’re packed off to school. We may question them, even rebel at certain points, but it’s rare that we act effectively on the impulse to transcend them. Those who do—the fashion/street photographer Bill Cunningham and the artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz come to mind—seem as modest as they are passionate about living without the usual divisions. I see them as “working models,” not for how to balance but how simply to refuse to set boundaries on one’s activities or to categorize them. The divvying up reflects the way we allow time to infiltrate our lives for others’ convenience. We live factory-like existences, showing up here and there at appointed times, and being counted present because we literally are. The higher their status, the more people flaunt this convention with impunity, often with breathtaking hypocrisy on full but unconscious display. The frequent lapses into bad behavior in the workplace strike me as an untoward but logical extension of an attitude that assumes bodily possession of employees by those higher up. If we work as serfs for 10 or 12 hours, recovering from it is a tiny bit like it was for the real serfs Alexander Herzen describes in his autobiography: freedom is like staggering into the light.
So, most of us are proletarians of a sort, alienated from our birthright as the creators of our own lives. The working world is organized otherwise, and to resist takes courage, frugality, persistence, and imagination. It may also take insight that the world “as given” is a fragile construct, much more ephemeral than its overlords dare themselves to think. The paranoia the powerful often display reflects their unease about the hierarchy they’ve surmounted. And yet, like school, the workplace in its different forms involves relationships that, if not “close” are proximate. We’re among familiars and there’s a kind of camaraderie. In the end, we are all human, and the imbalances in power—also found in marriages and families—distort this. If there’s a fundamental reason for refusing to divide life up arbitrarily and work according to the dictates of the factory, it’s that it diminishes our humanity—the root of every creative act. We are exhorted to “work on it,” but work of this kind is spiritually toxic, equally for marriage. When the Zen reformer Dōgen was in China, he encountered an old monk gathering wood for the kitchen. “Aren’t you too old to be doing that?” he asked. “Who else should do it?” the monk replied. The episode relates to Dōgen’s contention that, taken seriously, being the cook in a monastery was the fastest path to enlightenment. I take this to mean not only that gathering wood for the stove is cooking, but that cooking—as life-affirming work—is a spiritual practice. It tempers self-awareness with a devotion to every other sentient being. Buddhism is a philosophy of transcendence. Marx’s “everything solid melts into air” is how it is. Solidity and melting are distinct, yet inextricably paired, the Dharma—the reality of life’s transience—our only refuge. If work fails to sustain spiritual as well as material life, then forget about fulfillment. We may choose to live a disciplined life within time. We may even choose a factory-like workplace as an easier way to organize works of interest. But these choices should be conscious, voluntary, and provisional. What we mean by discipline, how we deal with time—these are always in flux. “The art of living” applies to life in full. Each of life’s major categories comes with the vast weight of its tradition and the sheer momentum of its unproductive habits. This is why the true artists of life are so rare. Yet they alone accept life as it really is and live creatively within it. As it was when we were young, and as it still is in dreams, the world they inhabit is raw material for their work, its medium, and its audience. That world has life, as Christopher Alexander says.
NEW POEMS & SKETCHES THE FACT OF THE HOUSE, THE ROOMS The fact of the house, the rooms, curtains gusting out of frames, books, boots, cats, coats, an easel, lives present and lives absent, a tinge never quite dispelled, domesticity bespoke hour by hour: was this a narrative or a list? HAD SHE BEEN, THEN Had she been, then nine, sixteen, nineteen, twenty-one, the mother dead. ON READING BASIL BUNTING’S PASIPHAË Grant this sacrifice, oh gods, fill with heft this warped vessel. TWO SKETCHES 01 It’s only a few years since the last time, which went badly. She’s between lovers, unattached, and her desire is spontaneous and affectionate. I’ve landed here from later, freed from the terror of her turning opaque. We’re in an apartment in an old building I vaguely place, summoned telepathically, I suppose. She’s here to alter the narrative. It happens: on the phone, laughter; across a table, a look; in bed, lovemaking. 02 I tried and failed to remember what I’d just remembered—how amused they’d be and how it would die with me if I didn’t write it out. I read a series of haikus and one-line poems, then fragments of a longer poem that made no sense. (‘Stop making sense!’ I thought later. Was it meant literally?) Knowing the poet’s wife is an obstacle. Where did she fit? A fallacy to imagine this, I read afterwards. Art lies to tell its truth, an artist said. It sounds too pat, I thought, the sort of thing he’d say as his work went up, priced to sell as my wife says. If I shouted, who replies? A title sparks this thought. Somewhere mountainous, a nymph I think, inspired his display. Discursive feels untrue, so it must be art.
I STOOD NOT FAR FROM YOU. A GLANCE I stood not far from you. A glance, I think it was a glance, the way particles dissipate when chance spares them collision, a rebirth— the sort that warrants us to pray. Of prayers there was a dearth; just mirth of a funereal sort. A few preened, gossiped, until grief broke in. We can speak of it or something new, the measure of what we’ll miss. Musil pointing the crowd ahead, Berlin ambling toward an abyss, toward a nil, yet cracking jokes in the middle. We edge away from it, often unnerved if life proves too brittle. He had his work, future, promise. Saw him just weeks before, so thin, hopeful. Is it the work we’ll miss? Or is it up to us to write it? In my case, occasional talk, cigarettes and spare words, his wit, his surprising affection, like a dog or guide on a walk that turns and looks for attention. (For Rob Gayle, 1952–2017.)
IT MUST BE THAT WE FELL It must be that we fell (out of love?) (photographs, naked men having sex); it must be that I could (one act is like others: this is a fallacy); it must be that I left (twice, as if in a trance the first time, a reverse); it must be how it ends (again, again, again, but then there is no link); it must be that I fail (again and then again the thread leads back to me); it must be, it must be (out of love, singular amid the talk, laughter). THE WORLD ORDERED IN CHAOS The world ordered in chaos, foreseen in dreams and omens, spoken as oracles, swayed almost incidentally, a god’s affection captured without intending, a truth perceived without one’s knowing. We set the myths on the side and leave the gods’ altars bare. We treat their world as ours, dismal stewards throwing crumbs. Days we take for granted pass unrecognized, fruit rotting in baskets, friendships squandered. Hermes appears nonetheless. Charon’s ferry plies the Styx. Near Hades’ gate, gathered shades gossip as they wait, looking for what they thought they had, death leaving little trace. Life’s short, the Muses sing. Art is long. (This poem was included in Little River 8, March 2018, edited by Katherine Osborne.)
Common Place—A Personal Journal Text and photos @ 2018 by John J. Parman ✍ j2parman@gmail.com ☞ complace.j2parman.com ☞ www.j2parman.com