Common Place No. 12 by John J. Parman

WALKING CURE & SOME RECENT POEMS COMMON PLACE NO. 12 | SPRING 2019

“Walking Cure” was originally entitled, “A Walk in the Woods,” but I realized that the flânerie it reflects on is both an urban phenomenon and a kind of walking meditation. Instead of woods, there’s the everyday with its oxymoronic demands, to gloss the Zen idea of a koan. At my age, I find myself with days of leisure and “time left” of uncertain duration—an old dilemma now hidden much less effectively. I’ve also included poems.

WALKING CURE My life has been a mix of work—my unlikely career—and various relationships and friendships, and considerable travel. I’m now at an age, the I Ching reminds me, when one puts one’s career aside and gets on with the work that leisure makes possible. It was said of Alexander Herzen that all his writing was autobiographical. Mine is self-reflective. This isn’t simply solipsistic: one task of memoir is to situate oneself.

To look ahead is to imagine it in a concrete sense. This may be the central issue or the main predicament of this juncture. I have a distorted view, perhaps, as what might pass for a routine has to compete with remembered decades of “career.” While they varied, they had a gyroscopic quality, observable again when I went several times to the office a few weeks ago to encounter again that specific atmosphere wherein one accounts for time but never questions how it’s spent because, in effect, others are paying for it.

When I had a job, I pursued my own work in a more compressed way, fitting it in amid the rest. Weaving, which I took up and mastered, was the closest I came to leisure pursued as a practice. I don’t think of my own writing as a practice. The poetry editor with whom I consult sets to work early, but I write when I have something to say. There’s a remark in the Tao Te Ching that I’ve taken to heart: “He treats his body as separate and thus it’s preserved.” It seems paradoxical that Master Lao wrote this, despite his reservations about carving things up, yet I’m sure it’s true: on every level, one is one’s own project. In my career, I was often the means for others to further theirs. Now I need to leave that situation and take up this other. This means to do it. Lethargy often hides out as good intentions or wishful thinking. It means preparation, some of it open-ended and intuitive to spark ideas that may grow into something. Correspondence with my anthropologist friend Vasilina Orlova, writing from the village in Siberia that’s the site of her fieldwork, brings into focus my reading this summer of an introduction to and an intellectual biography of Walter Benjamin. Talking with my daughter last night, I tried to summarize our recent exchange and elaborate on it. Benjamin coined the term now-time, insisting that the past is always actually in the present, but fragmentary—fragments as pregnant with meaning as metaphors, and like them accessed through resonance rather than through explanation. Past, present, and future in this conception are exempt from mechanical time. Now-time forms a territory that is within and outside of us, personal and impersonal, but impossible to transmit or share except in fragments. For Benjamin, the more fragments, the better in order to up the odds of putting something across. In her introduction to Illuminations, a collection of Benjamin’s writings, Hannah Arendt calls his approach poetic. In writing about my own past, poetry is the easiest way to access it as experience and avoid the need to explain that prose requires. Reading the opening of Umberto Eco’s version of Instructions to the Cook led me to look through papers I made in graduate school for a funded research project that, in an ideal world, would have led to my doctoral dissertation. While I assembled preliminary and final reports on this work, and an article good enough to be excerpted later in a reader, I failed to finish. Later, however, I taught a course, “How to Write a Thesis,” as part of a graduate architecture studio. I clarified the assignment by showing half a dozen different examples of theses that were acceptable to the faculty—a range sufficient to cover most possibilities. Mainly, though, I read what the students wrote. I’d proposed the course because the studio masters only did so late in the semester. To develop their ideas, the students needed criticism and support in equal measure. When I was a graduate student, I once published more articles in one academic year than any of the faculty. They were on point, too, but instead of rolling up conveniently into a dissertation, they extinguished any interest I had in the topic. I recently went this material again, marveling at the industrious person who wrote it. Having read enough of Eco to know that even turning it into a thesis, let alone a dissertation, would require considerable additional work, I’m wondering how best to write it up, as the content is valuable. (As Eco writes emphatically, “Do what you can do!”)

The writer and scholar Eva Hagberg once shared her list of 40 things that her students must scrupulously avoid. Like Eco’s book, it was written from kindness and generosity. I was quick to note how many of these things I did, sometimes simply because language has changed—modern no longer also means contemporary, for example. I used to read with a dictionary next to me; now I keep my iPhone handy. When I don’t understand a term, I look it up. My neighbor asked a visitor to explain “critical theory,” receiving an explanation that was cogent and memorable. I try to ask such questions without embarrassment—to acknowledge that I don’t know, if it seems valuable to know. There are words I’ve looked up many times, but their infrequency means that I only remember that I looked them up before. I’m unlikely to use these words, but academic writers do so because they have precise meanings.

My books elude me, even within the confines of my house and study. For two days, I’ve searched for Kafka’s diary. While looking, I found others by Adorno and Judd for which I’d searched even longer. The Adorno book was in a different lower shelf, a hardback not a paperback, while the Judd book was thicker and a different color than I remembered. Kafka’s diary in my imagination may also be at odds with the book itself.

Before we remodeled our kitchen, we had a cabinet in the dining room that I told the family was clearly the portal to the fourth dimension. Cameras stored in it would disappear for years at a stretch, then reappear unexpectedly exactly as they’d been. By removing it, we may have condemned certain objects to their fate, but I doubt ours is the only fourth-dimensional portal in the universe, so they’ll turn up somewhere. A lifetime spent acquiring books leaves me with too many. Should I should cull or reorganize them. Cull and reorganize, maybe, or the reverse. (I just read Eric Griffiths’s lecture on timing, so perhaps cull while reorganizing.) The books flow into hallways and bedrooms, doubled up on shelves in a way that reflects their purchase, privileging new over old and expediency over importance. My guess is that whatever process I adopt, if that ever happens, would need to be place-specific, ideally with some annotation. One quality of a library is to reflect the evolution of one’s interests, especially the paths anticipated, like journeys you plan and then postpone. Unlike these possible destinations, a book stays as it was (subject to external depredations). There are also a few books that I’ve reread episodically for pleasure, advice, or to lift a mood. William Morris’s News from Nowhere is the only book that will revive me when I’ve lost all interest in everything else. (As my friend Ray Lifchez said, it’s the only good utopia.) An old friend visits and I recall moments of discomfort he used to cause me by asking about my 10-year plan. Nearly 80, he’s turned his attention to life’s endgame. It’s clear that he’s making the most of it, involving himself in a variety of activities. He swims and bikes, he spends planned time with his grandchildren, he writes and publishes on organizational topics, and he’s involved in a primary school in his neighborhood. All this is worthy and leads me to wonder about my own largely unplanned, wandering life. It’s not that I don’t plan in a larger sense. For me, this consists of moving toward while moving away, and the latter is much clearer to me at the outset than the former. I tend to “move toward” in steps, letting the situation unfold, whereas the impulse to move away arises from specific causes and is weighed against inertia and sunk costs. I should interject that planning in the sense of “living in the future” is said by Claudio Naranjo to be one of the bad habits of Enneagram Sevens, of which I am one (based on his Enneagram Structures, a useful book on this system.) Citing Oscar Ichazo, Naranjo says that Sevens seek refuge in the future to ward off pain. But I also have elements of Enneagram Five, a detached and observant diagnostician. Paired together, they enable me to provide a pithy summary of what’s happening and then use my synthetic and narrative abilities to extract foresight from these insights. Robert Grudin’s Time & The Art of Living makes the crucial point that our lives can have shape in time if we pay attention to it, but we’re shockingly blind to this possibility. Byung-Chul Han’s The Scent of Time argues for lingering rather than rushing through our everyday, in particular dodging the force-feed of the Web, which has replaced TV and other time sinks. (I’m not immune to this at all, I acknowledge.) Yet there’s the counterexample of Walter Benjamin, ever open to experiences in all media, ever willing to push his synthesis engine further, yet orbiting always around the lodestar of his being.

Buddhism’s oxymoronic willingness to accept life’s bargain at face value is its main attraction to me. Being is transient and having is an illusion, but life is rooted in both. In practice, then, living obliges us to live well regardless, detached from the outcome but mindful of our actions, the need to live as the situation warrants.

Something here too of human limits, time as necessarily finite in regard to our capacities even as we test it. Most of our mistakes are bound up in the attempt. This is the “ground” in which we plan, which is why I tend to approach it intuitively—that is, as intimations from an unfolding present. We can learn from Benjamin not to abandon any ambition entirely. His death in Port Bou did not negate the reception he foresaw for his work, like Stendhal before him. Moreover, any great work is also a departure point.

I wrote a “personal synopsis” that, when I reread it, felt remarkably thin. Is this it, I wondered? My daughter meanwhile pointed to the English diarist James Lees-Milne. Having recently splurged on Anthony Powell’s three volumes of diaries, I bought an abridged compilation of Lees-Milne’s. In his introduction, the editor describes him as a slow starter—a failure in his own view who nonetheless continued to write. Powell, a far better known and regarded writer when alive, resented being considered less of one than his friend and contemporary Evelyn Waugh. Powell’s great novel series sits near my collection of Benjamin on a top shelf in the barn. Since I’d doubted I’d ever get to his Selected Works, Powell’s lengthy series may yet get read. Diaries and letters still occasion most of my writing, and much else I write lifts off from them. Even my poems are reflections by other means on the raw material life hands me. My photo-collages are a version of this strategy. Behind these activities is a sense of an immediate audience and another that is speculative. When I left the film Obit, screened at the University Art Museum, I noted some grim faces among the men older than me. We lesser mortals should know our places, but of course we don’t. Obituaries compress time, even as they try to register the ups and downs of life as lived. Those who take the most care to enforce their reputations when alive indulge in a form of hubris that invites reprisal. It’s better simply to acknowledge that we do what we love, as Swedenborg wrote. This at least is my own experience. Swedenborg wrote that it could land us in Heaven or Hell. But wherever, it’s our own doing, our desire. One point that the I Ching makes is the “law of least resistance,” which I take to mean, “Work on whatever come easiest and make it your own.” I don’t see this as a constraint, but as a reliable starting point. Virginia Woolf was a constant diarist and correspondent. Those diaries and letters live on as a window into her life and mind, a meta-narrative or leitmotif to her novels, essays, reviews, and radio talks. It’s not a coincidence that Woolf’s formative education came from the library of her father, editor of the National Biography. Leslie Stephen wasn’t quite the eminent Victorian skewered by Lytton Strachey. Like an obituary writer, he assessed reputations. To be noticed at all was an honor, of course. The paid death announcements in the New York Times attest to the human impulse to redress: tributes from institutions, companies, and friends; and obituary-like synopses of the dead. Berkeleyside, a local online daily, now runs article-like obituaries of our dead. It’s an improvement on the display ad format. Freed from the clichés of funeral home writing, they’re often quite interesting because the writer knew the person and liked her or him. This resembles the memorable parts of funerals and memorials—moments where we laugh knowingly about the foibles of the deceased, and are moved by things we forgot or never knew, by the human fact of resonance expressed as grief, admiration, and love. Seventeen days of family visits ended at midday with the departure of my second son and his family. The older of his partner’s two sons will stay on with us for the academic year. I wrote in my diary just now that lethargy is my main problem, but then added that in light of these 17 days, this conclusion may be premature.

I don’t yet take advantage of my momentary abundance of time. I think this points to a lack of a working theory about leisure. It can be approached like work, but it has other aspects that, once under way, are evidently also worth doing. Like school before it, work is structured to spark action by scheduling it, demanding progress toward goals, and setting limits on “extra” time for leisure. That limited time is a microcosm of what happens as structured work falls away. Looking back, I see much squandering or, more accurately, much wringing of hands when the productive leisure I anticipated over a long weekend went unmet. Retirement puts this ordeal on repeat. If I were to write my own prescription, it might be to establish a weekly routine expansive enough to accommodate, concertina-like, productive leisure as well as life’s impingements. The corollary of lethargy is resentment. Reestablishing a modus vivendi that suits self and chosen others is the necessity of this moment. When the Buddhists say that death is the great question, I think they really mean that transience is a reality we should accept as our human condition. Just as we’re whirling along in space, we’re moving inexorably and unpredictably in time. Nothing we do can alter this, despite our nostalgia for the potent immortality we imagined for ourselves as children. I followed an online persona created, I eventually established, by an English poet. Although he stated clearly that Charlotte “is not a real person,” I began to see her as one. Hints around the edges suggest her creator’s affinity with Fernando Pessoa, who seems to have inhabited the different personae in whose voices he wrote. But Charlotte was never completely inhabited, I felt. That she came intermittently came into focus was part of my interest in following her.

I think sometimes about my own theater of gender and how I’ve navigated outer life in light of my oxymoronic nature. Gender is a placeholder for many different things that we bring along with us and loosely chalk up to our nature. Reading Stephen Batchelor’s account of Nagarjuna, I was impressed by his contention that life is entirely contingent. Gender’s fluidity reflects the influence of others as we fall in or out of love with them. I collected poems under the title, “The Middle Country,” that express how the years of desire and turmoil were territories I crossed, even sought out, only to wonder later how and why. Who is the self that did this? And who is the self that now considers the question? I have regrets galore about the mess love causes, but love has the purity of any calamity. Would it be simpler or truer to think of it as something that befalls us? This is some distance from gender. That seems right. Gender is the wrong place to start. Where are we carried when we’re carried away? And to what do we return? A friend recounted over coffee how another left her and then promptly poured salt into her wounds. I remembered how I became marooned in time or, more accurately, fixed on the status quo ante and mired in its contrast to current discontents. My friend used the word grief. When I searched for a cure, I read that what had me in its grip was narcissistic grief. Yet grief is grief, no less terrible when it arises from events that tore your ego off layer by layer. It’s said that part of the process of confronting death is a stage of bargaining with it. We look for a version of reality that can encompass the ways that we’re diverging from it—a more capacious reality that will somehow solve our problem, ignoring the fact that reality inevitably excludes parts of what we’re trying to maintain. It is the essence of being human that, falling or failing, we wonder how it could have happened. But I want to interrupt these thoughts and return to gender. In my own case, the only case I know intimately, the fluidity of gender has to do with: my body, which has varied; my internal sexuality; and my erstwhile lovers. “My mind is like the dressing room at the Kabuki Theater,” I wrote in a poem. As this suggests, gender is improvised but also ritualized, and a quality rather than a given. When we finally return to our dressing room, we find again that mirrored self who puts these props aside and finally just is—the same self who lives constantly in death’s shadow, I believe. I’m reading Eric Karpeles’s biography of the Polish artist and writer Józef Czapski. Last night, I read an account of Poland’s defeat by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union— treachery all around, despite the real resistance the Poles put up. Had its allies, Britain and France, intervened, it’s likely the Poland would have held out, although the Soviet Union still might have come in. I can’t bring myself to start the next chapter, which is on the terrible aftermath of Poland’s defeat for its officer class. Czapski survived, almost inexplicably, but thousands of his compatriots were murdered on Stalin’s orders. It was in this period, in 1940, that Czapski gave talks on Proust to his fellow prisoners that two of them transcribed. Karpeles made a translation that I also read. I haven’t read Proust. I’ve seen two films based on his work, and also read Alain de Botton’s book on him. Czapski gives an account of Proust that’s like a bildungsroman, explaining how Proust clarified for himself why he had to write what he wrote: to bring back to life the

entirety of what he’d seen. Before reading Crapski’s talks, I found in Galen Strawson’s Things That Bother Me the assertion that Proust was writing from fragments of memory rather than from a seamless narrative. Perhaps what Strawson says is that Proust wasn’t living his life as if it was a narrative, but instead recovered his past piecemeal in the fragments of it that surfaced. This is like Benjamin’s idea that fragments arise in the context of the remembering one’s unfolding now. Why do I write and what’s my aim in doing so? I write to explain myself to myself, I think, and describe the territories I’ve passed through on different planes.

At a certain point in a marriage, intimacy attaches to the household and extended family, recreating our past in an altered form. Adolescence rebels against the familial, a rebellion that sets the stage for later conflict by casting the desire for intimacy as a transgression of agreed-on boundaries rather than as a natural, even a necessary act. A woman begged Czapski to marry her, but he felt it would be untrue to his true desire for men, a desire he recognized but distrusted. Yet he loved her and they managed to become friends. This was difficult to live through for both of them, and rare to achieve. No longer acting on desire led me to a friendship in which it surfaces only in poems. It has to surface somewhere, I imagine. Poems are not to be taken literally, although the poet may mean every word. I can write, “her woman’s gait” and recall everything I read into it at the time. To act on desire is to want to know, down to the bone, what’s there. Friendship leaves this knowing to others. You could say this decision was forced on me by age, but it’s really experience that led to it—a sense that consummated desire, like thwarted desire, is an obstacle to friendship. But it’s a dilemma.

It’s a dilemma because lovemaking includes conversations of a kind that are unusual between friends—the transparency that loosened boundaries makes possible, one of the most remarkable, ephemeral things we experience as human beings. Quantum theory captures the way something so tangible can be so fleeting. We want gravity to turn off and yet we want solidity, ground beneath our feet. The teleology of desire in traditional terms is family and perpetuation. Everything else strikes us as improvised and unsatisfactory. Where are we when we’re carried away? Still looking for a mooring. I read Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematograph in two days, thinking the whole time how applicable it was to writing in general and to poetry in specific. I’m unsure about his approach to film, although I found Lancelot du Lac, the only film of his I’ve seen, memorable in its oddity. Bresson’s thesis, as I understand it, is that by having his non-actors repeat their lines without understanding their context, their own natures are revealed. And this, for Bresson, is the uniquely revelatory power of film. He is at pains to say that he respects actors but sees their realm as the theater. To him, film isn’t theater, and it goes wrong when it tries to be. I once saw the film version of The English Patient, which had one scene in which a woman gets out of bed in a way that seemed real—that is, unconsciously performed not acted. Is this naturalness what Bresson had in mind? My intermittent efforts to transcend the limits of time and space, to lead parallel lives to what now seems like the main one, have a mock-epic quality. We follow our hearts sometimes in life, driven not just by desire but also by hope and imagination. In a lecture by Peter Pragnell I heard once at Berkeley, he showed Corbusier’s sketch of a worker reading his newspaper on a balcony or perhaps a kitchen table in the Radiant City. “He saw us as gods,” he said, and I think this is perfectly accurate: we are as gods. Love carries us to their world, with its moments of eternity—slices of it, in reality, each lived as a slow-moving eddy within life’s normal rush. Briefly, we have all the time in the world, but we’re like two musicians—composers, players, and instruments all at once—caught up in the sheer pleasure of improvising. Caught up and caught out, when gravity reasserts itself, yet our human métier, perhaps, and another reason for being. If love and death are famously paired, it’s because the one shades into the other, that both exemplify passion and its extinguishment. In his gloss on Dōgen’s Instructions to the Cook, Socho Uchimaya’s How to Cook Your Life, he explains that mind in a Buddhist sense means the totality of our life as lived—the raw material that we try to express with all the means at our disposal, knowing it will come out as fragments. Poetry is my favored medium because poems are fragmentary in the same way that Heraclitus is the best kind of notes in a bottle. Floating imperviously across time, they are constantly rediscovered, inviting each reader to make them hers. When I consider the totality of what I personally lived through, there are things that are worth setting out. Some of it has to be transmuted, and there are aspects of life that elude all direct attempts to capture them meaningfully. Painting and poetry come closest—related arts, in my view, although I’m thinking of particular forms of them.

SOME RECENT POEMS Life-of-Jesus poems: Like a breeze? Or nothing, air still, his finger raised, I thought? Silent despite rippled silk, its color hard to place, eyes averted in the moment. After, I was ravenous, and later swollen and sick. He has these dreams, he tells me. In one, travelers gather around us, their words portents; another, a calming hand extends, points west, insistent. He stores things. We leave at night. A moon. The babyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s quiet. She seemed not to notice. Or if noticing, not caring. Enters rustling, glides over tile or dirt, never speaks. Thoughts take root anyway. We must flee, I tell her. He wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t also must be said. Poems after nature: Write about nature: many here before me. Anything to add? On the bridge, grey hues. We drove angularly west. Sun broke through amid redwoods. An incline needing first gear. A view, narrow Tomales. A left turn, barely a road I parked alongside. We walked. Humans now, talking paving, fire, taxes, volunteers, then eating. We left early. As we climbed, a bird spoke up. It smells like Norway, I said.

Close observation stirs up resonance, they say. A bird hunts for food across a deck. Myriad droplets of rain cover west-facing windows. Walking yesterday, the ferns drew her notice. Woods cut back bring them forward, she told me. The hills from here were outlines, dark against a lighter gray. Two corners away, more rain, though it had stopped when I left. With sport coat, no umbrella, a man crossed my path ahead as I neared the left turn home. Poems from life: And she married her old man, her intended, I call him. At the concert, came to mind, sun lighting a house, steep hill rising behind it, birds sang as he played Liszt, his left hand crossing the right one, upper notes plinking, the Yamaha unresonant, yet a prompt for accompaniment, birds and a bobbing dowager falling in, the sun lower, slicing the audience, I put on my dark glasses. I never remarried, the sin Paris fell into, choosing. License, I said, thinking how Heian aristocrats loved according to their tastes, not locked in pairs. We sat angled, sometimes eye to eye, that close to her, in mind writing thisâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; our heads turned, voice quiet

but the consonants set off, an accent she remarked on. I wrote when she was away. She brought back calligraphy, a poem I propped up, seen every morning from my bed. The last character is mine, the mountain they climbed to view. Laughing on the street, passersby amused too by it, how she waves a bit, among men, the dance work lunch imposes if not alone with her thoughts, eyes fixed inwardly, reptile of a machine for sidewalk striding—they fall back, daren’t catch her gaze, its rays. But now it’s turned off, with the boys, out. ‘I am the King of Bread,’ said while waving a baguette, draws an appreciative chortle from young Simone, forgetting how her brother thumped her, cries rising from the next room, not one to suffer in silence, Simone. I predict great things. Poems mostly about women: Panoply of forms—she shifts, another writes in Polish. Shifts, is thin and thick, a race, a truce with love, a truce with them, student days coming to an end. Hope seeps into texts. Desire mixes with contempt. Men. What Polish words describe how women are in bed? Who is this, before a wall, floor held despite their gaze?

One wafts, I think; this other’s gravity turns off and on. My hand, each finger blurs, balled up and taken in, metronome, a coming tune: too much, too much. Form foregone, only rode it out. Horses roll, the Polish rider unruffled sits, some distance from authority, wanting (well, not him). Saddle sore come Monday, one confides. Heft rolled her close to death. The Polish rider looks away. Whose gravity, then? We must rewrite things to account, theorize when there’s no proof, touch the root, the spot, roof or seat, fount, spout. These are not Romantic words. Form follows function as night betrays the day. In red, I think of her, red or some other solid hue. She glances from man to man in search of bona fides. Who will bring her a future to justify the effort? Red like a flag, a banner, a parade of one, waiting for a car, a text, a sign. In my heart little has changed. How much else, marks apparent, slippage, a journey scattered seaward, foam below where two friends make their homage, another hand held, yet gone as going goes, circling back— trembling like a cello, that lives. How far away it must seem now. Folly all of it, that distance says, yet to my senses proximate.