Diverse Theses & De Minimis
Common Place No. 13: Summer 2019
This new issue includes a set of short pieces and a longer-than-usual poem inspired by reading the opening of Charles Olson’s Maximus poems, referred to by Robert Duncan in a book of interviews, A Poet’s Mind, that I read over the summer. They are in some ways complementary, reflecting how prose and poetry differ in what they convey and how they convey it. Both are self-reflecting, and what the self reflects has inner and outer origins. History, Hayden White said, is narrative, which is to say that it’s loosely tethered to what it tries to describe. Friedrich Hayek argued that description is a valid endeavor in the social sciences, and I do this always as an observant participant, to borrow the anthropologist Vasilina Orlova’s wonderful term. This is no science, of course, just some theses drawn from life, like the speculations of those Greeks, which are then set to music, although evidently not: an editor tells me that I’m no lyric poet.
DIVERSE THESES “In making a selection from the infinite flux of what has been, we give it a shape, and all shapes suggest some primitive species of starting point and imply some vaguely adumbrated end.”—Stefan Collini, The Nostalgic Imagination (Oxford, 2019), quoted by Jack Ingram in “Backwards,” TLS, 28 June 2019, p. 24.
1. Possible evidence for other worlds In correspondence with a Melbourne friend, I mentioned applying quantum theory to life, how what we try to grasp eludes us and how so much that seems solid proves not to be. This could be mere contingency, of course, and not the physicist’s conjuring act or the cat in Schrödinger’s box, reminiscent of another in Zen lore, neither cat particularly lucky. But let’s go with it, extend quantum theory to love, for example, with its time-bound, evaporating truths. I read, vaguely apropos of this, an introduction to five short stories about women written by Robert Musil. He was praised for writing about love. I haven’t read the stories yet, but love isn’t easy to write about. I wrote a letter to the aforementioned friend that accurately recounted an experience, then I wondered later how it would be received. A film arises when I think of the event, but it’s not a film I could exactly make. A given afternoon is a series of incidents that string together as a whole—my correspondent made this point, how things have a beginning and an end, although she was thinking of a relationship’s trajectory, as opposed to its playing out over several hours. Yet this is also a whole, especially in memory: I remember it whole. I read almost accidentally of the death of a woman friend from undergraduate days. Our friendship was derailed by my inability to make love to her when she wanted me. It took me a long time to get past this block with women, desire inhibited by inexperience. In a truly crazy gesture, she arranged for me to lose my virginity to her mentally unstable friend. I liked the woman, but the experience was horrid and it seemed to unhinge my classmate, also. Before this, though, we spent time driving around St. Louis in her aunt’s Chevy. We went to the Bellefontaine Cemetery, which has some remarkable Victorian tomb statuary, and out into the country. I found her an easy companion, and these travels were memorable. My friend died in 2007 at the age of 59, I read. Her survivors didn’t provide a cause. Unlike me, she had stayed on in St. Louis, although her father made motorboats in Florida. When I noted her death on social media, a colleague wrote that he’d worked with her and found her a helpful mentor. Her given name was from the Greek, she told me: “Bearer of Victory.” I used to pronounce every vowel when I said it. She was taller than me, with long blonde hair. She had sufficient funds to buy Marimekko fabric by the bolt when we were in Manhattan together. On that occasion, when I proposed that we share a bed, she responded, “What’s the point?” So, I slept on the floor. Yet I really did enjoy her friendship. Last night, writing about her, I was reminded of a trip I made in college to visit my sister at New Year’s. She had a guest, a woman around 30 who said she preferred women to men. At one point we danced slow and I got a hard on, which made her laugh. Yet this was a new and singular experience for me. I think it reflected her having taken herself out of contention, relieving me of any inner pressure to respond.
In an interview, Robert Duncan used the term “male lesbian.” I’ll have to look at it again to get his definition right, but my own would be any man who’s attracted to women because he identifies with them, in whole or in part. Duncan went on to define “bisexual” in this context. My sexuality might be better described as hermaphroditic in that I have masculine and feminine aspects that are fluidly present. Fluctuations in my weight and body shape growing up—being initially quite tiny and then ballooning in grade school and into high school, and then losing weight, all without understanding the mechanisms—caused some anguish and confusion. It’s been helpful to see, as the I Ching argues, that these traits pair internally as complements, Receptivity and Creativity, each with its contingent moments of ascendancy. A good friend has noted that he knew early on that he was homosexual. Even as a boy, I saw sexuality as playfulness, and my initial problem with women as sexual partners was my failing to see that lovemaking with them, too, was improvisational, a game played with the senses. As a boy, I played such games with other boys, but had girls been available, it might have been them. I was in love with several when I was young, one deeply enough to be stung when we quarreled. I had one close friend, Paul, who caused me heartache when he moved away. I was angry in a way that scared and embarrassed me, so that when he came back later to visit, I couldn’t bring myself to meet him. I still regret this, because he was a good friend. Youth is especially fraught because we don’t know what we don’t know, and are caught out by our actions, which seem inexplicable to us at the time and later. We examine them, but they remain blotches on life’s fabric, still there when time’s distance has faded so much else. There was a girl I loved in grade school. She was quite beautiful, I thought. She had a dog that I let run with its leash on and she panicked, thinking it would choke. It must have happened before, so her anxiety was triggered. I had no idea, and was taken aback by her reaction—she seemed set against me. It’s not in my nature to turn against a friend, so this too was a shock. Duncan used the term “male lesbian” in relation to Native American shamanism (as discussed by Jaime de Angulo). He defined “shamanism” as a matter of crossing or transgressing gender and other boundaries. He defined “bisexuality” as the desire for a partner who could play both roles, masculine and feminine. He bemoaned the loss of conviviality, which is the desire for others without the need to have sex with them (therefore avoiding the coercive element that the conflating of sex and love brings into play). And he pointed to marriage as an alternative to breaking off a relationship—a means to keep it going, to put it positively. Collectively, this relates to some things I want to touch on here. I’m neither a male lesbian nor a shaman, but I’ve crossed boundaries, usually with specific consequences. Having tried and failed to mix sex with close friendship, I’m lately an advocate of or convert to conviviality. The dilemma, which apparently extends to physical love in general (as Duncan notes), is indeed that marriage is where the close relationships want to go, need to go, to continue. It’s possible that I didn’t test this theory adequately, but the stress of boundary transgression shouldn’t be underestimated. Goethe understood this and warned against it, but I hoped he wasn’t right.
As a result, we failed to form an enduringly close friendship. But is this true? It’s hard to know how other possible courses of action might have gone. When I think back, it’s also clear that many things are in play when an offer is put on the table, including sexuality and ego. The spark of desire is one factor among several. The sense that a relationship makes is rarely how it appears initially. Both parties can be breaking through some blockage inside themselves, which may be the point. Understanding that it was is only clear in retrospect, and at different paces. Lovemaking occasions a particular intimacy. The interludes are especially memorable, but much else happens that becomes indelible. Truly close friendships have aspects of this, and it may be that age and the falling away of the tics that dogged relationships earlier, the baggage brought along from benighted past experience, free them to have a deeper intimacy. We also learn the limits of destiny—how even when something uncanny happens, it isn’t enough. We imagine we can glide through life, but find that it’s a minefield. Fragments of the past are like dynamite, and they’re always there, surfacing inevitably and inconveniently in the present. A range of feelings attaches to love’s talismans and places, everything from guilt to longing. As we live it—testing life’s limits, trying and failing to do no harm—we seem to be repeating old mistakes, but mostly we’re facing new situations and applying the wrong lessons to them. 2. Space-time disturbances That “something uncanny” was an bona fide of authentication. No matter how indelible, such markers of connection may pay off long-held expectations, but they come with no instructions. My thesis, on seeing it, was that we are a cohort of time travelers who find each other in life after life, and use the intervals to set things up. The origin is something that my psychic friend said to me about my wife and daughter—how long those connections stretch back, changing their stripes. No instructions, so we do what we can. And there’s a kind of conviction about it, because we saw what we saw. Yet life rolls on, everything gets frayed as missteps multiply. Is it really the “whole” my correspondent mentioned, bounded by a start and a finish? I hope not. For some time, I’ve been awakened by vivid dreams of hangings and beheadings—executions that play out in my head with great realism and diversity. This morning, I had a vision of two of the basket cases in which severed heads were placed. Why am I having these dreams? My first thought was past lives, but their variety argues against this. Then I remembered an article I read about the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami in Tohoku—how certain survivors of that disaster were plagued by dreams in which the dead recounted their horrific experiences. What was happening was that some survivors were, unwittingly, mediums for spirits who needed to tell their stories because they were caught up in their experience and unable to get past it. This may explain what’s happening—that I am an inadvertent medium who these executed dead seek out to share their experience and get free of it. I imagine a spirit world in which I’m seen as a portal they find and pass through on their way, finally, to somewhere else. Unlike the survivors in Tohoku, I’m not overwhelmed by them, but sometimes the experiences are realistic enough that I find them disturbing. A working theory about their origins makes them less so.
3. Reflections on writing In an essay about writing in The Little Virtues, Natalia Ginzburg notes the shifting emotions that arise, how the act of writing can be pleasurable, necessary, and hard going. Her point is the necessity of writing and how life can interfere with that, put it out of reach despite our desire. Eventually I started to identify myself as an editor and writer, activities I share with Ginzburg, who made her living as a book editor. She published novels and books of essays, finding an audience, but—unlike Trollope and his mother—was never financially independent because of this. The money her books produced was extra. I also made my living as an editor, and my own writing is a vocation, to use Ginzburg’s word, “something I do,” as I have since childhood. A vocation is a summoning or a calling. “Inner necessity” might be another way to define it, but without the compulsion that necessity seems to imply. A lot of writers on writing describe it as a practice, but “something I do” is truer to my own approach. I divide this “something” into three parts: done for money, done out of friendship, and done entirely of my own volition. The first shifted from writing to editing, because I made a good living as an editor. The second has been a long collaboration with my main graduate school advisor around our shared interests. The third is whatever I choose to write: letters, poems, and brief prose pieces. In 2008, I started this personal journal to honor David Diderot, who passed manuscripts around to his friends, and Virginia Wolff, who started a press in order to publish her work exactly as she wanted. Ginzburg wrote poems, then stories, and finally novels. The Little Virtues are personal essays. The novel I’m reading, Happiness, As Such, is epistolary. It’s also experimental, I would say, in that it shifts its vantage point. The question of form seems quite important. I’m not much good with long pieces, although I can generate sets of shorter ones like this. I give them titles and even imagine they have themes, but that’s doubtful. If anything ties them together, it’s the season of their writing. The last one I wrote spanned a year, interrupted by a comment my daughter made that I had to digest, so two seasons, maybe, distinct yet related. These letters, poems, and short prose pieces lend themselves to specific subject matter, because they differ as means or vehicles of self-expression. My letters to friends are often rambling essays which permit themselves to be discursive and informal. Short pieces (I hesitate to call them essays) are more pointed if polemical; or they sidestep digression by spreading it out across a set. Poems provide a scrim of varying porosity or opacity. Only poems can say certain things, because—unlike prose—they can touch on life without needing to explain it. 4. Narcissism’s taxonomy A correspondent wrote describing how psychology parses narcissism. She located her field between neuroscience and philosophy—an interesting placement. Narcissism to me falls into two categories, ordinary and toxic. The first, which takes in solipsism and self-regard, is universal, wrapped up in ego, and sometimes harmful to self and others. The second overlaps and I think may be overtaken by behaviors attributed to sociopaths and psychopaths. There’s a border area to toxic transgression, and sociopaths and psychopaths are on the far side of it. I took a semester of abnormal psychology at my first university. It was mostly sexual. The male professor said that knitting was sublimated masturbation. He may have been joking. The remembered content of this course came in handy when I ghostwrote a letter a psychiatrist
signed. Sometimes you need letters of this sort, and he was willing to sign them. My letter was speculative: under the pressures of that, this could result. It was probably true, now that I’ve read Robert Duncan’s account of a similar situation. When I studied abnormal psychology, it was clear to me that much of it applied to me in some fashion, so what was this “normal”? Ordinary narcissism turns toxic when the heart is injured. I read an account of this in a book by A.H. Almaas, The Point of Existence, that’s mostly a long riff on Dennis Winnicott, the child psychologist. Winnicott posits that we are pure beings as toddlers, and the hard knocks life deals us—gravity, the actual limits of our tiny bodies, the impositions of adults—make us wrap ourselves in ego as a kind of protective layer. This is what Wilhelm Reich called character armor, and he was speaking of adults for whom the ego had become a hindrance. Almaas observed that because love immerses us accidentally in moments of being, if our lover breaks it off, it’s like being forced to quit cold turkey from a habit-forming intoxicant. Not understanding the mechanism, we try obsessively to recover what we lost instead of shedding our shattered ego and letting ourselves “just be,” consciously embracing being as an acceptably human state. The Zen philosopher Dōgen Eihei enters the picture here for me, arguing that being is a state like any other, so our awareness or consciousness of it is more on the order of recognizing it. To put this in another way, recovery from narcissistic grief and acting out means that we recognize our ego when it surfaces. Imperfectly, tentatively, this enables us to be better humans—better to others and of course better to ourselves, more willing to let life unfold, tell us what to do, and less prone to cast blame angrily or to feel hurt, humiliated, or spurned. Narcissism makes too much of us and too little. We puff ourselves up and beat ourselves up, delusively. Toxic narcissism dials this up: we resolve to puff up and beat down all comers, sometimes even us. Ordinary narcissism is more readily seen through, despite the pain involved. We can recover. A nun wrote or said that we are better than our worst moments. Is there a point at which their sheer accumulation overwhelms that possibility? Winston Churchill thought that the Nazi leaders should be rounded up and shot. The trials were meant to establish their guilt and set a precedent for the dispassionate administration of justice. It worked in Germany, but it didn’t work in Japan, whose hidebound elite is still trying to revise history to conform to a view reminiscent of diehard partisans of the Confederacy, with their War of Northern Aggression. The shrine visits and the government’s on-again, off-again attitude toward wartime guilt and reparations reflect this. Yet the majority of Japanese citizens acknowledge the actual legacy of Japan’s imperialist-militarist past and resist right-wing efforts to change its pacifist constitution. The recent suicide of Jeffrey Epstein reminded me of the nun’s comment. A Catholic prelate, an advisor to Pope Benedict XVI on the issue of priests molesting boys in their charge, described such priests as incorrigible—an evil that had to be confronted and uprooted. Epstein appeared to fall in this category, preying incessantly on underage women. The question that arises from his suicide is its motivation. Hitler and Goebbels also committed suicide rather than face the wrath of the crowd or death by tribunal. Epstein’s victims feel he cheated them of a reckoning. Suicide is an assertion of control in a situation that offers little or none of it. Epstein’s world had come apart, and—as in the game of go—you don’t play a sequence out if it has a known ending. Narcissism in its toxic forms seem to be about control, organizing life so your whims are at the center. As long as you can keep the game going, keep control of it, anything goes.
As the Vatican prelate noted, some narcissists are evil. If there are shreds of humanity, as the nun reminds us, are they real or just part of the act? How psychopathic are narcissists like this? And how, as a society, should we deal with them? Epstein’s death exceeded what justice could have demanded. To be confronted by his victims was seen by both as the greater suffering. When Norway executed Vidkun Quisling, its wartime fascist leader, it repealed for a day its constitutional ban on capital punishment, acknowledging the gravity of his betrayal and the lives it cost. This placed him in the same situation that he’d thrust on his countrymen, using state murder as a political weapon. The crimes of Anders Breivik, a terrorist and mass murderer now serving a 21-year sentence, might seem to deserve a similar fate, but his punishment is tempered by Norway’s unwillingness to sacrifice its hard-won values to provocation. So, he lives on and will eventually be released. He seems unrepentant, the mark to me of a real monster. I described my theory of narcissism to a friend. There are three categories: ordinary, toxic, and monstrous. You don’t see monsters now like the militant atheist Sigismondo Malatesta, who had two priests hanged before him on his deathbed for offering to hear his confession. Monsters are part of our human capacity. Men are said to be more monstrous than women, and It seems true at the margins—men are evildoers at an epic scale, but everyday life is filled with the lesser evils that women and children also inflict. Mea culpa—every monstrous act I ever committed lives on in my stricken conscience, but garden-variety monsters like me can seek absolution for their sins and repent of them. Epic monsters retain this possibility, the nun reminds us. History has its enlightened humanists who started out as ruthless warlords. These instances of unexpected, fundamental change are exceptions that show the contingent nature of life and the situational nature of ethics. They point to the spectra of character that the enneagram depicts. Its thesis is that the flaws embedded in human nature are early coping strategies and we can draw on insights from our lived experience to transcend them. Dōgen Eihei’s radical nondualism also sees our spectra of behavior as implicitly human. We never lose the capacity to be flawed, and we share that capacity with our fellows, but we retain the capacity to live otherwise. What’s sometimes called the art of living speaks to this—loving our neighbors as ourselves, as Jesus taught, and extending self-care to others. We do this because we gradually understand the consequences of our actions and connect them to flaws that we always seemed to be “who we are.” As we experience the limitations and pitfalls of our flawed ways of life, we can end up knowing too much to continue as we are. The knowledge fills us with shame, and all we can humanly do is change—a slow, uncertain, very human process. Let him who is without sin cast the first stone, Jesus also taught. In the era of social media, crowd-shaming and the assignment of guilt as a matter of not-to-be-questioned belief are prevalent. I see it as a holdover from adolescence, a peak period for behavior of this sort. What others think of us, what we think ourselves, is a constantly shifting thing. Much of what we do in life, however flawed it may be, reflects our willingness to experiment, to test the limits of what it means to be human. If toddlers construct an ego to deal with their hard knocks, we emerge disabused. What constraints are fundamental, what actions cause grief—learning this, we do less harm, but we also learn how to live well with ourselves and others in this milieu. It’s a kind of heightened realism that attracts us more than the distorted one we thought we knew. This describes most of us, in reality. There are monsters out there, but fewer than we imagine.
5. Friendship between women and men, unfolding A friend translated a Chinese saying: “Fated to meet but not to stay together.” She wrote it out in Chinese as calligraphy and gave it to me as a gift. We both have some experience with this, I said, mentioning La Rochefoucauld, the author of such maxims as “There are only three cures for love, none of them foolproof.” His life was a series of reversals, but he found a close woman friend, Madame de Lafayette. What makes for a close friendship, I asked, and why, between men and women, are they so fraught? Attraction, affection, and desire overlap, and we encounter each other “out of order,” yet sometimes feel the hand of destiny. What do we do with it when we sense it? It took me a long time to work this out. We intuit destiny in different ways. It’s like we arrived here with certain expectations, a kind of foretelling or foreshadowing of our life’s narrative to which events answer. As it unfolds, we start to see how destiny works—that it’s triggered by intuitions about others, but offers no guarantees as to the outcomes. We construct a narrative around these events and constantly rework it in light of experience. While life is a series of wholes, episodes with beginnings and ends, as my Melbourne friend asserts, the important human connections persist, even after death. (Stendhal made a theme of this.) Another correspondent applies this idea to human history, arguing that the collapse of a political system or the failure of a collective dream of progress is never final. When we look back, Walter Benjamin pointed out, we find emissaries from the present alive in earlier periods. It follows that emissaries from the future are also among us, together with fragments of all periods, vying for significance in our here and now. Some say that life is best considered in seven-year increments that, grouped together, define broad periods within our lifespan, each of which is about some things and not others. (This isn’t a very elegant way of putting it, and of course there are many exceptions.) To the extent that we learn things from each period, life may progress dialectically, but—like destiny’s hand—this imposes a narrative on life that we may “make true” by artful revision. And many seem to live without much sense of a narrative at all. This is relevant because my calligrapher friend, an historian, shares my view that “narrative” is a valid term when it comes to describing life. My sense of friendships between women and men is that they depend on an asynchronous open-endedness to thrive. You vow not to possess and yet still honor the unfolding connection. You share an acceptance and empathy, leavened by affection, that appreciates the luxury of being free of love’s complications. Marriage too moves toward friendship, a rediscovery. Heartbreak is love’s hazard, as La Rochefoucauld noted. A close friendship between a woman and a man consciously seeks to forestall it. Heartbreak puts you out of sync with life. You close it off, fixated on what you think you lost. Only when you let yourself swim again in time do you recover. “The glittering sea,” a translator of Horace’s Odes put it: a half-drowned sailor drying his clothes in a temple and, we infer, planning another journey. Bon voyage, I say to him.
6. Profiles of inference I’m working on an oral history of one friend, and once wrote an introduction to the oral history of another. Of three oral histories in my possession, two are full-blown—by people who write them for a living—and one assembles interviews conducted by the subject’s friends. Writing “my past and thoughts,” as Alexander Herzen put it, makes an oral history feel superfluous. But the presence of interlocutors may prompt thoughts that might not surface in self-reflection. It’s also more spontaneous than a written text. For real spontaneity, though, consider the profiles we create inadvertently as our online transactions are tracked as data points and analyzed. Amazon provides a version of this when it offers us related goods, sometimes prompted by an immediate purchase, but also gathered as “things you might like.” Ads washing up on social media are franker, I think, in responding to the edge conditions of web forays. But they may also be calculated bets that our demographic might bite for someone/something like this. It’s possible, I read, to obtain these profiles. They’re reminiscent of personality tests that paint a portrait in mannerisms, all the tics that surface as we encounter other humans. INFJs crave society and then, quickly drained by it, rush off precipitously in order to recover. The enneagram’s character types similarly touch on live wires of self-recognition: how charm wards off pain, for example, and how gluttony is the worst sin because it permits all the others. Ubiquitous monitoring, which the CCP imposes on China, constructs profiles based on tracked data and then uses them for social control by turning privileges on or off. We do the same, of course, but limit the data. It’s still possible here to avoid being tracked, but you have to work at it and a lack of certain data can be held against you by financial institutions. What’s oppressive about both regimes is the algorithmic certainty of their cause and effect. “Nothing is hidden,” Dōgen Eihei remarked. It seems true—every last thing will surface in time, so it’s tempting to reveal it yourself. The liberating move of living openly is better than late-in-life confessions, but both can still make you look silly. The real question is if anyone will care. The Stasi investigator in The Lives of Others was focused on figures of cultural importance, even celebrity; ordinary people were left to their neighbors to denounce. The CCP now has block wardens on a mass scale, but the sheer numbers involved, even with AI doing the sorting, means triage. And workarounds emerge, of course, when the algorithm shuts people off from something like a train ticket. For a price, scalpers stand ready to help. If I write openly about the ambiguities of my life, it’s to lend support to the idea of nuance. We’re presented with a binary world, but some realize early on that this is a hoax, and the people who see things this way are deluded. I write to make sense of a life that never entirely makes sense, and will probably never align with how convention wants to construct it. One of life’s dilemmas is that we have to live with these conventions, even if they’re shams. If we mostly live as privately as possible, it’s to put some distance from our lives and them. Yet this may be an era when it’s better to go public with our nonconformance so we can quickly find our cohort and our cohort’s cohort, parading our idiosyncrasies in a spirit of solidarity.
Sources Robert Duncan’s interviews are in A Poet’s Mind, edited by Christopher Wagstaff, New Atlantic, 2012. The tsunami story is from Richard Lloyd Parry, “Ghosts of the Tsunami,” London Review of Books, vol. 36, no. 3, 6 February 2017, pp. 13–17, excerpted from his book. Natalia Ginzburg’s essay “My Vocation” is in The Little Virtues, translated by Dick Davis, Arcade, 2017, pp. 69–88. A.H. Almaas’s gloss on Dennis Winnicott is in The Point of Existence, Shambhala, 2000. Sister Helen Prejean, an opponent of capital punishment, is the nun I cited. Hee-Jin Kim discusses Dōgen Eihei’s radical non-duality in Dōgen on Meditation and Thinking, SUNY, 2006. My edition of the Maxims of François de la Rochefoucauld is a 1982 Penguin edition translated by Leonard Tancock. See Claudio Naranjo’s Ennea-type Structures, Gateways, 1991, for the character flaws that system depicts, insights into which Naranjo credits to his teacher, Oscar Ichazo. Letters, conversations, encounters, and manuscripts also prompted this, for which many, many thanks.
DE MINIMIS Prologue Does he declaim, climbing the stairs? Poetry’s king, waving ancient books, the macaw and the rooster gone, Cadillac parked on the street, his lights a beacon in the dark when deer come through the fence (I heard). Does he declaim? I’ve heard him yelling, his guitar. He looks more and more the role.
in late August, wanderers in the east. August found us living on the hillside above the stadium, a brief vestibule to marriage that gave us a first son, wanderer with his parents, imbiber of our wedding day champagne, who made his presence felt on the train near Edmonton. “I’m pregnant,” said with the certainty of an oldest sister.
I, Minimis, am a poet too. This shared place is diagonally linked, visibly, audibly tied. I’ve lived here thirty-five years, this house. In storms, airplanes descend snorting. In late afternoons, a dog, craving humans, croons his loneliness. I hear them both. Behind the one, another, even smaller. Looking up, the house rises impressively owing to the pitch. Looking out, the garden, yet another place, brick-floored, fenced, an expanse of plants around a terrace, path deceptively foreshortened when the trees form the forest where it’s set, a fairy tale if I chose to tell it, territory unpossessed. I, Minimis, only half believe in possession. What we own slips out of grasp. Women give themselves entirely, then renege. We too come and go, or stay on provisionally.
A digression Sometime in March, driving east, we stopped at Little America, four a.m., heard a waitress tell a truck driver she was pregnant with his child. And later, somewhere in Wyoming, a woman wouldn’t sell me cokes because “Indians in your car.” No, they’re Chinese. “Oh, in that case.” And before that, in Salt Lake City, the boys pumping gas did their work then, finished, rolled tires at us, godless hippies in their estimation. Later, we lived off Telegraph, Dwight near the corner store. I dropped acid. This was summer, nineteen seventy.
Marriage Across a counter, that connection, instances of which run life to life, find their line. How smitten I was, how doubtful such a one could be courted. Yes, her sister said, write. I, Minimis, awoke to find, surprisingly, offspring were desired, so marriage loomed into view. I wrote the letter, projective prose, one could say. Sent, It garnered no firm commitment, but she returned in May and we married
A list If I, Minimis, inventoried this place’s foibles, then there’d be instances of marijuana’s pungent smell, how the same six people ask for money, now gaunt, now bold, now dying. How a neighbor, temporary, set out to mesmerize the block, fucking. How the sound of it is like a dog the way it cuts through all else. Only the sound, not the scent, the way that beds are like boats pitching in their waving rooms, the window sill a jetty’s edge.
An echo “An American sound,” Peter said as the train wooed the Flats, horned its way south. This was another song. Poetic notes An open field, per Robert Duncan, is like a continent one ambles onto, as a woman is to an infant or a lover, he doesn’t say, when A to B isn’t the itinerary, when digressions rule the afternoon, are its essence. Book four of Paterson released him, Duncan says of W.C. Williams. More poured out of that source, unplanned. I, Minimis, have more, too. Plans for me are names of things: food, items, tasks. “Imagination is my ground,” Duncan adds. Good intentions here form a collage, or, in the midst of it, try to make light appear, Fiat Lux, but that’s self-created, Duncan notes, a city reinventing itself. Topography is a clue, although the hills became the flats except for Albany’s. Climate and topography mark progression, their intercourse produces weather, views. An interlude The shades of poets reappear, carrying signs of judgement, posthumous reputations worn like bandanas were, a code for those we intend to suffer. The town rattles on, plans becoming bulks of stuff. In media res I, Minimis, live on Arch Street, fourteen hundred; Chez Panisse is four intersections west, then south.
An event Wing sent a cup. I love her blue but it’s a tempest, grey and white. Walking downstairs, she stopped in front of a painting that stems from Matisse, his model, his last student. “This is a good painting,” Wing said. I told my gallery friend Jack I was relieved. Would they have taken back Henrik’s volcano? This is high drama on Arch Street. The museum here exists in parts. Classical and contemporary, only the latter by friends save this one, cousin by marriage, Janie, the cusp where modern slips into history. The cusp Where now is that cusp? A fault, maybe, ready to collapse the junk that mars the beauty hereabouts. There was a region here once, architects proclaimed. Slippage legislated and imposed, “It will be dense.” Bulk rules. Diagram City and its clerks, date-stamped on issue, untouched by hearts that race at form, untouchable now, such beating hearts, taste left to Alice and the pizza line. Mortality Now only two, a duo, aristocracy and immigrant like their elders. There were three. The other’s heart gave out in Bolinas, coastal town of poets, with its missing road sign and channel, dangerous to swim. Dead of complications, he read, and born in Butte, a favored son.
Uphill, up steps, an aristocrat with books, a terrace, views in two directions, connections near and far. A blow, a blow. Vast as the sea it once was, shallow, teeming with things like nightmares, but larger, or only vegetarians, mouths agape, their bones sidled up to mountainsides, if sidled has some sense of smashed. The remaining two journeyed there and back; these creatures traveled east until the Rockies stopped them, a slap audible a long way off. Montana looms. A doorway—staring in, contrast strong and hard to see, someone knows where, and instinctively. Off Bolinas, but no, off Stinson, these creatures test the shoals and spit out rubber and flesh. My daughter! My daughter! I wail, and my silent fear’s a talisman against the sharks, Our Lady or some local saint dangling from a wetsuit collar. Someone stopped. The rest, hereafter, is all that’s left. Visitors A mother and her son sing a childhood song. The driveway makes it slope away. The gate scrapes loudly as they enter and close it behind them. Cries follow from the baby, audible even now, colic maybe, ailment of infants, grasping their guts.
In/out of dreams At night, a creature out of Bosch visits. I felt someone sit down next to me where I slept alone. A materialist view of all possible phenomena papers over gaps left by emptiness, pregnant as they are with the uncanny, as if night made its garden here, near my solid bed amid bookshelves, paintings, things my daughter left. I shook it off, I wrote later, dreams being involuntary, pushed at us like clips surfacing in the ether. A lone mosquito joined the chorus and I fled from bed to bed, pursued only by my early-rising wife, who lit the room up to read the clock. Six it was, early for Saturday. She started to find me there, but it was quieter. They are our worst predators, I read, these tiny flying reedy things, blood on their minds. I, Minimis, am a treat they seek out, like lamb in the spring. Thus, reality blurs with what minds produce, painting from the same box. Bosch just set it down. I see it yet, gelatinous, feasting, a kind of horror that arrives unbidden, night terror. In winter The road south from Olema weaves through encroaching woods. Nearer Bolinas it opens out. Along the lagoon there’s a stretch that crawls in summer. I slept alone in an upstairs cot. The sea and wind lay beachward half a block. The Way comes and goes, the I Ching says, handing us a rhythm then disregarding it.
Oceans swell and fall to the moon’s pull. Its movements trace stories on the floor. Certainty arises, tangible at moments as feeling or conviction, and we know it. It’s never clear how the remnants add up. Shells, rocks and sea glass aren’t a beach, just ephemera with histories attached, eyes rolled back in ecstatic blankness. Between zero and infinite you need a rule that unfolds to catch the prime numbers spiking up amid ordered life, like the rocks out there with their gulls, seals, and sharks. Memory too has truths and perils. Shrines litter its byways, left by time in disrepair. The trek seems daunting, a pilgrimage without its Compostela—Stinson Beach. The street How long together, these opposites? Post-carousing, he lists complaints while she demurs sotto voce until at the kitchen window, enraged, returns held-back ripostes. Servants are another topic: to wait for them. But a compromise is worked out. Several fast cars, characteristic when throttled, signal movement. Cats and women, moving, yowl. A dying parent leads a couple to speculate about conception. “I think I’m too old,” one says. “Six months to get the drugs out,” the other answers, not hearing. Conditional futures The grave is tended, a blue-wire fence around it, the marker slants, a nod to modernity, to the dream of progress to which he contributed, manning a bulldozer, clearing a path.
His namesake’s post explains how despite accidents of gender she took up his name, lived up to it, writing out the village stories told her by his former neighbors. The ice gave way, the weight was too much for it, plunging him with it into the icy waters of the Angara River. His name floated east until she caught it. How far they fly, winter’s birds, and yet return along the river or under wood houses’ eaves. I imagine this, thinking of her, graveside in the village summer. Her son will soon be grown, this place a memory of youth. Those who knew it as it was will all be gone. Only the words live on, their memories’ archive. A line dies out, a promise goes missing. Where did progress go? Tie your Pioneer scarf, young hero and set your mind where your name points you, far away and back again.
Common Place No. 13 SUMMER 2019 Š 2019 by John J. Parman (calligraphy excepted) Written, edited, and produced in Berkeley, California $ complace.j2parman.com * j2parman@gmail.com