Common Place No. 17

RITES & WRITS + SOME OLDER THINGS COMMON PLACE NO. 17 | WINTER 2020

The only claim of affinity to be made for these short pieces is that they reflect the seasons of their writing—an arc extending from one decade to another. I’ve also included some older work, partly from a manuscript I wrote around the start of the millennium that one of my cousins in Norway recently found in her attic and mailed to me.

RITES & WRITS (PART ONE)

Writs are instruments of authority, I read. Rites, to me, are petitions we make to the gods, acts of propitiation.

So, two aspects of the same impulse. This set of short pieces was originally titled “Rites & Privileges,” but I wasn’t sure about the second word. Writs are a form of privileged speech, proclaimed. The word narrows privilege down, even as it empowers it. In current usage, privileges are an affront, although the word still figures in ad copy for luxuries of different sorts. In the ad copy, you deserved it, whatever it is, but in the wider world, it’s likely you didn’t, nor did your forebears and their forebears.

Rites and writs are paired whenever privileged speech wants the weight of tradition behind it. In China, Chairman Xi has turned to Confucius, like so many before him—poster boy of stasis, even as he proclaims good government. It would do Xi good to study the I Ching, leavened by Taoism as it is. As it stands, his rule is onesided, its writs out of sync with the populace and tone deaf; its rites empty. We have our own version of this, of course, but with the other side more visibly and vocally present. It’s less clear how our rites and writs pair—even the so-called majesty of the law is tarnished now by politics, and patriotism only very rarely feels genuine. Tweets are now among the entrails studied, along with the records of their conversations and exchanges that trail behind the mighty, sometimes to their undoing.

I read Robert Graves’s account of matriarchy. Male authority was delegated, and the usurpers kept the outward signs of the queen’s power, originally lent them. In its early forms, kings were sacrificed to ensure a good harvest.

As I read this, I thought about a story I started, Cosmonaut, that is set in a matriarchy. Matriarchs chose close male relatives, not husbands or lovers, to lead battles, per Graves. They married boys who they promptly divorced, then took lovers, including commoners and foreigners. I set my story in the 2600s, believing that a matriarchy would likely exist by then, probably for some time.

The desire to die at one’s birthday party or while singing in a choir—to be an object, however briefly, of everyone’s attention and comment: this same impulse led me briefly to think of placing an ad in the New York Times obituary section that I’m still alive, because after all death is wasted on the dead.

If people are flamboyantly negligent it’s because it’s hard to take seriously an existence like this. Yet they tend to maintain the standards of their set—habitual, unquestioned behaviors that are overlaid by the variants that were introduced to keep things going. Novelists and filmmakers sum up humanity as a gallery of such tics. Gathered, given bodily form, a voice, and agency, these characters cross apparently normal territory like aliens or monsters.

In a novel, we can inhabit such creatures, whereas in a film (and in life, too) their inner worlds are all inference.

Thus, existence is segregated into two primal forms: inner and outer. Our self-knowledge is inexact, clouded by delusion. Our inference is guesswork; a guess is always for our own sake. We’re never outside ourselves really.

The segregation is nominal, even illusory, but it holds. At night, we lock the doors and close the blinds. We could display ourselves, and some do. Love is given to display and licensed to defy convention, as children do. We slip our leashes.

What are the odds, I wondered? If I calculated right, they’re 1 in 19,636 that two persons, significant to me in a specific way, would share the same East Asian and Western zodiacal signs. Both systems have 12 aspects. Robert Graves wrote that the Mediterranean lunar year had 13 months. The 13th zodiacal sign is said to be the serpentbearer Ophiucus, whose dates are 30 November through 18 December.

Walter Benjamin’s circle made much of dialectical unfolding. Does it apply to life? I don’t think so. Rather than progressing dialectally, life as lived is more often like the children’s story in which a man consistently and comically applies the supposed lesson of what just happened to him to the next event to which that lesson has no actual relevance. (This relates to probability: whether events are dependent or independent.) Toward the end of the story, he walks through a town carrying a donkey. The sight of this makes a deeply depressed princess laugh out loud. His reward is her hand in marriage, as her father the king had vowed. The story is about life’s associative randomness, one thing after another. Yet he gets the girl and half the kingdom. (A recent study showed that half of success is due to luck, I read.)

When finding your way is based solely on intuition, life becomes freighted with destiny. The term “successive approximations” is germane here, because intuition is notoriously inexact. When you look back at it, you see more precisely where and why you went wrong. My sense is that the others in this process are there for their own reasons, that their separate destinies are equally in play, overlapping yours but then proceeding on their own paths. Blame attaches to this if for example expectations are raised and unfulfilled. These journeys can be unhinging.

Destiny is a kind of inner necessity to act on what you intuited and make as much sense as you can of the sequence as it unfolds. Who is this other? The question becomes only harder to answer. You try to abandon your initial expectation only to discover that it’s here again, but you meanwhile have changed—changes that make possible something that feels oddly intended.

The sequence has all kinds of aftereffects. The feelings that arose make their current claims. They’re fragments of what was true between you—love, for example, which feeds on moments and is oblivious to larger questions until they impinge on them too much. We have to give love its due: an everything that lives on only in

memory and as bits and pieces of expression, it is practically nothing, laughably nothing. At certain points in life, we can’t seem to do without it.

When love is uncoerced, then I think attaching blame to an unhappy denouement is unfair. Nothing is more human, of course, because unhappiness is injurious and seems to wipe out the memory of happiness for some.

Perhaps it renders love false in their view. “How could it not be, because I was left injured?” The whole episode is fed to the fire, the other put out of mind.

I’m not capable of this, despite injury. If I loved another, I can’t extinguish love altogether, even as I see that it has no real standing here and now. Distance and estrangement take a toll, but memory comes alive in me when invoked. There are occasional glimpses of connection.

Fire weather arrived, sort of, and the power gods played games. There was a preview of this a few weeks ago, when a substation blew and we lost power for half a day. This time, anything deemed to be at risk had its power shut off, including the university campus five blocks to the south. Turning the power back on is no small thing, and the campus will be closed tomorrow while they do so. For whatever reason, our neighborhood was unaffected, but it was unnerving at first to think the power might suddenly be turned off. The local politicians sent emails full of platitudes. They’ve treated it like an Act of God instead of pushing back forcefully to limit its impact. San Francisco, in contrast, got itself exempted. I’m trying to find out who managed this.

A Dutch couple and their young son stayed with us for a few days and then decamped this afternoon for an apartment across the street. The man came by with the keys and praised the sunset view from their new upstairs window. It was pretty striking, probably because there are some fires burning and particulates in the air. One thing the forced outage did was concentrate minds on the seasonal fire risk up and down the state, a byproduct of climate change, it’s said. It’s also a consequence of institutionalized negligence by our public and private monopolies.

In the space of a day, I was invited to a conference in Singapore and received word, after a long delay, that my professional advice is sought. So, the autumn will be more eventful than expected. I’ll give a talk at the conference, based on a paper I helped write that will appear in a book, the fourth in a series (although the first and second books are versions of each other). I hesitate to go into town now if I can possibly avoid it, and yet I’m prepared to cross the great water, as the I Ching puts it, the minute an invitation arrives. I think I’ve always been this way.

A visiting friend raised the topic of human limits, prompting me to write a poem in reply, posted on a different social medium. Off and on, what she wrote comes back to me. In mid-November 2019, I traveled to Melbourne and Singapore. While in those cities, I saw several friends, including two who I only knew through social media and correspondence. These interactions count for something, I think. Correspondence is as a good a way to connect one mind to another as conversation is, although the connections it establishes are different. (I distinguish correspondence from social media, which is incremental and accruing, and texts, which are more like conversation or maybe banter.)

When I first met the friend in Melbourne, I felt the difference, but then we met again the next day, first looking at a part of the city I would never have seen otherwise, and then joining up with a friend of hers to walk some more and then have dinner at an Italian restaurant we chose by successive intuitions, hers and mine. Conversation at dinner broke the ice, I felt, and part of it was the presence of a third party who brought us both out of ourselves. In Singapore, I met another friend who organized an excursion that again took me to new places. We’ve only corresponded about poetry, so our conversation was more focused on our backstories—topics we hadn’t touched on. In both cases, our friendships began with intuitions on my part about them. Sympathetic is the word, I think.

The word friend might be questioned, yet it’s accurate. Something is bridged that makes more of it, and what affords this is time more than space.

I was raised by parents with a cosmopolitan outlook and the self-confidence of people who were tested by wartime and its responsibilities. Spending the formative years of my early childhood traveling around the planet by ship or train—at that pace, with long sojourns in Singapore and Western Europe—left me with a sense of having lived my life in reverse, of experiencing a world that no longer exists.

When I was 11, the Soviet Union and the United States exchanged shows. Nixon famously debated Khrushchev in a mockup of an American kitchen in Moscow, while I visited the USSR’s show at the Coliseum in Manhattan. I kept the catalogue, which smelled of pine tar, for years. A few years later, as part of a program encouraged by the U.S. government, we invited a visiting professor of philosophy from Moscow at Columbia University. He came out twice to see us, both times with a minder, a woman named Ludmilla. He told me his father had been a biologist, and that he’d chosen philosophy because it was safer. When we took him and Ludmilla around, she commented constantly that they had better examples of this or that in the Soviet Union.

The Berlin Crisis occurred when my father and I were camping in Superior National Forest or whatever it was called in Canada—the North Woods that my father had visited with his parents when growing up in Omaha.

Turning on my transistor radio, we heard President Kennedy address the nation on the risk of brinkmanship that the situation had created. “Will the Russians bomb New York,” I asked? It was always assumed to be the number one target. “No,” my father said.

Brinkmanship continued until finally it didn’t. It’s easy to forget that period, but we were episodically convinced we were about to go to war—a form of war unlike any other. Fallout from testing drifted across North America, and we worried about that, too. Not constantly, but it was there the way the Hayward Fault—up the road from my house—is there. The Vietnam War, which Kennedy involved us in and Lyndon Johnson escalated, marked a transition back to plain-old warfare, napalm and Agent Orange substituting for nuclear winter. We all fought it.

The marches on Washington led to Johnson’s resignation and Nixon’s ascendancy. He and Henry Kissinger weaseled out of a war we weren’t winning. Brezhnev took over in the Soviet Union. At some point, competition became mainly economic and warfare took the form of regional, even local conflicts with an overlay of deterrence, always vastly expensive. Missiles on trains was the last of it, by which time Gorbachev and Reagan were in power.

It may not matter how an era ends—what counts is what follows, how the underpinnings of things give way and something else emerges that’s both better and worse that what it replaced. People look back at the AustroHungarian Empire now with a certain admiration, because—like Yugoslavia, arguably its only real successor—it convinced a contentious array of citizens to cohere and lead productive lives rather than squander them pursuing their historic quarrels.

It may be that we oscillate between eras of concord and divisiveness. In the midst of one, some long for the other—for a concord that’s more narrowly drawn, for example, despite the strife this creates, or for an end to that strife, at whatever cost to individual sensibilities. My life traces a version of this arc, marking the end of British power, the ascendancy of America, its slow eclipse, and the emergence of other would-be hegemons, each with its claims. Politics too play out the collapse of any real or pretended consensus, inventing new tribal imperatives.

“No bourgeoisie, no democracy,” I read last night. It may be true. Just now, I read 1848 described as the “failed bourgeois revolution.” I hadn’t thought of it as such, but then Marx extolled the bourgeoisie for overthrowing the monarchy and in Central Europe they had to do it again. They value culture, individuality, private life, and commerce, I read. My career too was wrapped up in commerce, initially with a firm closely identified with corporate modernism and then with a firm that embedded itself in commerce writ large and also discovered niches of it in everything else. Culture radiates from wealth or repudiates it creatively, but needs servants.

The bourgeoisie, the third estate, are in trades and professions. These are hereditary more than is acknowledged, families moving between narrow bands. Individuals break out, but the genetics dog the line. I am an example, trained as an architect, became an editor and publisher. We propitiate our forefathers and gravitate toward what comes naturally to us. Things follow. Things like marriages, houses, children who fill them and depart, furniture and furnishings set off by art, a style that defines us to ourselves, working its way back in time and referencing distant memories of places noted: like this.

The progress others proclaim rarely strikes me as a gain. It’s an imposition on me of something they want for themselves. Appropriating what they want is quite often on the table. I don’t see progress as a zero sum, theirs or mine, but as betterment in a public-realm sense: the betterment of public goods that are communally shared and supported, a greater sum. What’s parochial needs to find its own world.

Squaring the circle appears to be a theme of Agathe, part of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. It makes me think about the imbalances present in close relationships. Marriage’s other shore is a détente or more accurately a withdrawal from the shifting front at which the conflicts play out that these imbalances cause—front in the sense of two forces arrayed against each other, in love.

The book’s introduction speaks of the effort to break through the constraints arrayed against any relationship that departs from orthodoxy. Musil wrote in the late 1930s and early 1940s, long before a dystopic mood was ushered in by mobile phones and surveillance devices. Our lives are subject to replay if not instantaneous tracking.

If 15 years ago you had to break into her email, now you can attach things to her car or just track her phone or her watch. Trust is the cover story for these untoward acts, with its call for a near-obligatory, not always mutual acquiescence. The demand for confessions is similar.

What’s happening is often telegraphed on the home front. It can take opposite forms, cold and hot. Pregnancy produces something similar. Real life is heterodox, and orthodoxy, while it provides plenty of fuel for outrage, is almost useless in resolving anything. If tradition has any value as a guide to behavior, it is either at the very start, steeling you to resist what you desire and in fact know from the outset to be doomed, or much later, when you’re drifting in the wreckage. Tradition can save you from plunging, but only I think if you’re armed with experience. It can tell you where to swim, but whether there will be anything there to find is mostly luck, although aided by the talismanic magic that tradition sometimes gives its objects. This is a long way of saying that I don’t think the circle can be squared, but trying to square it is almost a tradition in itself, although every pair in their heterodoxy see it for the first time.

INTERLUDE

Marriage is an on-the-job kind of thing. About six weeks into it, you hit snow on the path and remember that your jacket and sunglasses are back in the car. This continues. Nothing is as you expected—the lows are often much worse, the highs often totally different than what you expected. Nothing prepares you, for example, for a first child’s birth. The path can be irrevocably altered if someone leaves it, falls off, arrives hobbling. Nothing is for sure. Yet marriage has its rhythm of days and nights, of work, school, and domesticity. It has its tasks. Its sameness can mask its oddity and pain or make them bearable. It can make its joys seem so ordinary they escape our notice.

Questions about love are more about the future than the present. They reveal our knowledge that it’s mostly conditional. “I will love you forever” is a nice sentiment, but it’s not a promise we rarely make legitimately. Nor is it really possible to quantify our feelings. Yet love is crucial to marriage—perhaps the most crucial thing. Love in marriage is bound up with desire and its sexual expression, but is independent of both things. Of all things in a marriage, it is the most vulnerable. We say, “love dies,” but what has died is usually desire—any desire for the other as a lover. This is a catastrophe for most marriages. But love’s starting point is our acknowledging the other as “beloved” and, by implication, as our companion in life. We have no idea where life will take us, but we agree to live it out together, and our love for each other leads us to take this step. It means being attentive to the other. If love turns to hate, this begins with neglect, distraction, reflexive self-assertion—anything and everything that comes between you and your beloved. On the train platform, I saw a couple waiting for a train, he reading his paperback, she trying to get is attention, to engage him. What he conveyed was that it was his choice to engage or not. When he chooses to engage, she’d better be there for him. Imagine how he’ll feel when she’s not.

Love is total. This is the truth about love. You take it on and live it out or it’s not really love. This is not to say that love is unconditional, but that it demands commitment and “right action.” When a young couple marries, there’s often an effort made by the officiant to look beyond immediate infatuation to depict the realities of what may lie ahead. The language of the Christian ceremony, for instance, reflects this, stressing life’s vicissitudes.

Seeking Cures

No one really knows

Narrow is the gate and straight the path, they tell me. I wonder if I’m but a messenger, “The grace of God,” my mother told me.

The real moon in its starless night, snow behind, the pitch of earth before.

This feels like the hinge of the world, with your island on one end of it.

In my dreams, the marriage bed floats miraculously above the loam.

My wounds were etched on my heart.

I went so far away, seeking cures.

The path I took doubled back.

Even our memories, it seems, will end.

No one really knows how near or far.

No sound escapes and yet a hundred hundred heads are turned. A pulse, the hinge itself swinging, the fields made fertile by this glistening river.

Time’s arrow

Krakatoa

Which target then? A field divides us or is it the space of a hair’s breadth?

We feel our way and call to each other as night falls, arm in arm like an old couple.

Out in the sunlight, we strip off our clothes to examine our wounds. Children, husbands, lovers, wives—we pause to trace their history, tear back our skin to show our beating hearts, tendrils that root us as surely as our wounds.

“Life is short, the journey bittersweet.”

As long as it needs to be, its pain searing us with its hapless truth. We lurch flaming, our hearts ablaze, faces blackened, we watch with half an eye, incense clouds our sight.

These others walk upright and stare at us.

How unseemly this pulled-back flesh. Yet there’s a kind of bliss amid the bittersweet.

Husbands and wives stand outside this circle and we work such magic as we know to pull them in. Sometimes we walk the streets and a stranger meets our eye, a second’s worth of eternity, parallel world if we could jump.

The circle seems like this, a wall or chasm.

We look at it disbelieving, the children, too, wondering how it came to be. Our eyes meet, you and me, but of course we’ll never know.

Ellipses of eyes, her brows two black strokes, a shock of hair, lips pressed, bowed to form a Borromini curve.

Their season Paths have their ferns, scenes of her walking on a tightrope to the pier. Clouds part, mountains appear in layers, blue and grey.

Their season, the season of their world.

A dog follows them to a rock-strewn beach, chases the terns, acts like a dog would act.

Later, they sit and he pretends to read.

Blown away, she says, and he thinks no, it’s him, clinging to this table by a thread.

A romance He saw her palace wrapped in fog.

No bower, those roses, the same that walled her beauty in. They say a flower opened to a kiss, sunlight glinting off the thorns, and threads were banded lines, golden where it touched bedclothes lying on her floor.

(The prose piece and the poems were written in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The bowl is by the master potter Miyajima Masayuki, bought at his studio in Motegi, Japan. Miyajima is in the lineage of Shoji Hamada.)

RITES & WRITS (PART TWO)

In the winter, I live mainly for the spring. I know that winter is the earth’s necessity, even mine. I no longer have to slog through it as much, and I therefore see how I pull back from it, even the barn behind the house getting short shrift compared to the “winter palace” of my upstairs room and the kitchen’s late afternoon light and warmth. It rained hard earlier, and then cleared. In the midst of it, I saw a small bird light on the deck’s north enclosure, as if taking stock of the situation, winter. I remembered the bird feeder visible from my parents’ living room, attracting the gamut of winged fauna of those parts. The deck must seem to them a platform, safe from cats, a vantage point to survey the garden and surrounding yards with their beds, grass, bushes, trees—sources of whatever it is they eat.

Early spring arrives, as it once did in Tokyo, in winter. Not even in late winter here, things revive and bloom.

Gradually my expanse of space and time enlarges, blossoms marking the path with color and the sound of bees. In Tokyo, it snowed on that announced first day, a storm I ran into coming back to Roppongi by taxi from a dinner.

We went out, I remember, because my friend’s house was unheated in February to save money. Heat in winter is a feature of bourgeois life. The lack of heat is one reason why homelessness is such a curse. Shelter is a human right.

Berkeley was at one point a place for San Franciscans to get away from its dreadful summer. Some old houses are just shacks, and many are completely uninsulated. Over time, we’ve rebuilt parts of our 1902 house to make it bearable in the winter and cooler in the summer, but for a long time I found it uncomfortable in the coldest season.

The fog in San Francisco in July and August means that the heat of midday there gives way to something like winter in a plunge of 20 or 25 degrees in the space of 30 minutes. The fog crosses the Bay also in those months, and my house is directly in its path, pushed by the wind through the Gate. The “writings in a bottle” in the interlude spark a specific memory of making my way back from a dinner just north of downtown, walking south on Montgomery to BART in my linen jacket, freezing the whole way. I should have remembered, but my mind was on other things.

Looking back, it’s obvious that my marriage took precedence. This reflects the order or chronology of things, but in unfolding time, I often lost sight entirely of the woods I was traversing, let alone the path through it. I was unhinged by love, even as it healed certain wounds. I was bereft. In retrospect, I think one has to be bereft to break through to something else. I suppose that poems and novels are written in an effort to chart this, identify its shoals.

Sometimes I think that I could write a novel of fragments. Perhaps this is what I’m writing, in a way, calling it a memoir or reflections. Some autobiographers call their works novels. A life provides a handy plot, but mine, such as it is, seems as discursive as my writing, A sum larger than its parts is said to be the goal in life, but isn’t each part a microcosm of the life itself, no more nor no less than it? We think of death as terminating a narrative, but being is a cosmos bigger than we can see or know. Hence Walter Benjamin’s idea of reception: the narrative continues.

What causes us to fall in love, to commit to another, even if this commitment falls short of some other or we find ourselves adrift or deserted because the other’s commitment fell short, is a mystery. I chalk it up to destiny. My theory is that love is the main game in life, and that we play it across time with the same cohort of players. Blame can attach to this in life, because love is prone to transgress and to ignore fundamental rules and traditions as it seeks to be the exception. It would be better to absolve everyone in some kind of regular ceremony, to let people get on with their lives unhindered by guilt or regrets, to reverse course without being nailed for hypocrisy. Love has its own integrity, however flimsy or ephemeral. I edited my bottled-up poems, which in the original are filled with the language lovemaking produces. A disinterested reader suggested at the time that I find an editor, but the elapsed time has qualified me to do the work. It’s helpful to have it raw, though, as a reminder how every phrase that survives is loaded nonetheless, like “her woman’s gait,” as I’ve remarked. At a certain point, you just imagine.

Agathe is a Jungian novel or construct, I wrote my daughter. We’re both reading it. It seems to be about the desire of anima and animus to conjoin within one person, but there are two—siblings—so, it’s displaced. I often think about this desire. Twins are a more conventional way to present this, but Agathe has an older brother and younger sister. This corresponds to my own sense of anima and animus, one taking precedence and both distinct.

(Later.) There’s something incestuous or transgressive about this desire for them to conjoin, and yet that impulse is an ancient one, the polymorphous perversity (as Freud called it, in Norman O. Brown’s translation) that is a hallmark of childhood. In Agathe, the desire appears (from what I’ve read so far) to be amoral in the sense of being outside or beyond the dictates of convention. “West of gravity” is how I once described this. In another way, their conjoining is a form of self-reliance, to borrow Emerson’s term. It could be criticized as a Hinayana move, a lesser or ungenerous use of the whole we make of our several selves. Mahayana in this case would be the outward and socially useful forms of reconciling these dichotomies. Musil is externalizing the Hinayana form, posing a dyad that forms in opposition to society’s traditionally collective or communal, self-sacrificing demands. I never thought of this, but Hinayana is a radical assertion of self. It seems equally valid if the dharma is in fact the only refuge.

The state of the realm here is a topic of dinner conversation. Last night, the one across the table recounted the homeless breakfasts she helps run and how those who appear there aren’t deranged, but appear unable to cope.

We talked about the need for asylums, sheltered workshops, and other places that could give stability and support to them, not “shelters” and certainly not tent cities or arrays of tiny homes, but havens that would offer tenure and safety, lifting the terrible burden of abject poverty and providing ways forward that could benefit selves and others.

Banned on Tumblr: A year ago, when Yahoo still owned Tumblr, it took down images it deemed pornographic.

Some 20 of my photo-collages were removed. There’s an example on the previous spread, and I thought to include others that speak to a silliness inexplicably maintained by Tumblr’s new owner. I’ve blogged on Tumblr for 10 years and my poems and photo-collages go there first. Much as poems find their beginnings in a word or a phrase, photo-collages riff on things seen. Tumblr is still a good source, but not quite as good, because some who pushed boundaries surfaced content that lent itself to collaging. (My process is similar to Kurt Schwitters: I collect things and at some point, put them to use. This requires a lot of sifting, so, the more material to draw on, the better.)

I asked the gardener how things looked. “The deer are eating the vegetables,” she said. We went back to check the fences I’d had put up. They were intact. Returning to the vegetable bed, she pointed to the kale as exemplifying the damage the deer had done. I remembered that my wife made something that features “homegrown kale.” I noted this and the gardener’s eyes widened. She reached over and carefully removed a leaf of kale so that no trace of human intervention was visible. I kept a straight face. “Destroyer of Worlds,” I wrote my daughter later. Kale is evidently just a variant of the goddess’s name. The gardeners—there are several—worship at a different altar.

Another Chinese retrovirus threatens to become a global plague. “Only a few weeks ago, we thought a missile from North Korea would take us out,” I wrote a friend in Portland. The impeachment trial is in motion, gathering the headlines, but this is steadily supplanting it. Quarantines in 10 Chinese cities caused the price of oil to tank. I read in the dissertation of a friend and neighbor that quarantines were how China dealt with epidemics in the past.

(True here, too. Chicken pox and measles both resulted in the house being quarantined when I was a kid.) China’s Xi finally spoke out and sent army doctors in, but, as some epidemiologist said, “The horse is out of the barn.” It’s probably debatable that the penchant in China for roosting chickens above pigs is the root cause of retrovirus mutations there, but that’s what I’ve read. If it’s true, then it’s probably time to ban the practice.

“Serge Chermayeff,” a friend of a friend wrote when I told him I planned to write on urban density. I owned one of his books and bought two others. That he and his collaborators—Christopher Alexander and Alexander Tzonis— are relevant to the topic is absolutely true. I’d never read the best-known book, Community & Privacy, although I think I bought it when it appeared. When I was an undergraduate, Chermayeff gave a talk that I attended. I don’t remember it, but he impressed me and we had a conversation afterward. At the end of it, he said, “You’re much too smart to be an architect.” That was an interesting take on the matter, as I found designing buildings difficult. I’ve always had a strong spatial sense, and can immediately imagine a space from looking at plans and sections, but it only works in one direction. This made me a good critic, and some of my classmates used me in that capacity. An oddity of architecture as a field is that relatively few architects engage with it conceptually, especially in big firms.

Yet the study of it continues to emphasize design and the licensing tests still have a mandatory design component.

My undergraduate program was led by followers of Le Corbusier, although its graduates went off to Miesdominated Chicago. Later, a colleague in a small Berkeley practice told me that it didn’t much matter what school students followed as long as they were grounded in its precepts. In my third year in high school, the English teacher told me to absorb the house style of the New York Times in order to give my writing some order. It was wonderful advice. He could see that I wrote by ear, drawing on my childhood exposure to expatriate British English and parents who spoke in full, well-formed sentences—a background that made me articulate in speech but less sure with prose. (If asked now, I’d point younger writers to the Financial Times.) I took my colleague’s remark about schools in the same vein. The faculty who admired Le Corbusier were true believers, intolerant of dissent.

Apostasy in architecture takes different forms, all linked by skepticism toward the received wisdom of the day.

Chermayeff is startingly relevant to the issues of urban density, which were as present when he wrote his books as they are now. No less concerned than Jane Jacobs was with reviving the vitality of cities, Chermayeff declined to rule modernism out, as Alexander did later. Like Team X, the impulse was to save modernism, not transcend it.

This raises a separate question: Is Alexander a postmodernist? Is he a new urbanist? The Pattern Language emerged from work Alexander writes about in Community & Privacy and developed in his dissertation, but that work brought him back to premodern traditions. Alexander also strikes me as fundamentally a polemicist whose elaborate but improbable rules and theories, rarely demonstrated convincingly in his own work, rest nonetheless on an intuited truth—equivalent to Dōgen’s famous “Just sit” summation of Zen—and a remarkable eye for beauty and urbanity in the world. “Does this have life or not?” is Alexander’s basic question. He knew it when he saw it, which is not the same as being able to generate it anew. The appeal of tradition is that the beauty and urbanity it produced emerged from everyday variations to widely understood rules, patterns, and constraints—ordinary people in dialogue with the community as an organized place that took in the surrounding countryside (as Jacobs noted).

In a dream, set in Poland, I was sentenced to death. The woman who announced this to me and some others is in real life a human resources person, and she put it “as nicely as possible,” the way that people in that profession do.

“I’ve done nothing wrong,” I pointed out. “Can I apply for a pardon?” No, she said, although I think her no was conveyed by a look of surprise that I would even ask. I woke up, realizing that the dream was about life’s innate and unavoidable hazard. I recounted the dream later to a friend, noting how the tech elite approach death like Egyptian pharaohs. First it was cryogenics, but now the fad is to upload your brain to the cloud, as if this were possible.

Cloning must also figure, but it shares the same drawback that the successor is something or someone else. The appeal of an immortal soul is its persistence across time, retaining just enough to intuit things in the current life.

Swedenborg wrote that souls are the offspring of married couples in Heaven. “We arrive intact,” he said, and so of course all aspects of our humanity continue. The good grow younger there, whereas those who embrace evil are revealed as their real selves—there’s no dissembling in the afterlife. But as a dispensation, they don’t see each other as such. Do the evildoers also have offspring? I don’t remember Swedenborg touching on this. (The source is Heaven & Hell, his account of visiting the afterlife thanks to a warrant from Christ, who appeared to him several times. The first appearance was in London, Swedenborg recounted, when Christ told him to lose weight.)

Swedenborg asserted that couples find their intended in Heaven, correcting for the errors of their actual lives. In Conjugal Love, he also argued that adultery is morally justified if love deserts the marriage. Swedenborg believed that relatively few people are actually good; most are self-serving and deluded. In the afterlife, the Lord is merciful, condemning no one and aiding all comers, but people seek out what they love. Hell is a conscious choice.

Phone solitaire must count as time entirely wasted. I win 12 percent of the time the app tells me. I’ve taken it off my phone only to put it back. It regularly invites me to join a community of players. I don’t. Not for nothing is the game called what it is. I started playing it with real playing cards as a kid. Back then, my game was clock solitaire; now I play Klondike, according to the app. I used to play some hands over, but now I don’t. Despite often scoring several hundred points, I realized finally that only winning counts. This loosened my attachment to individual hands, even when I saw clearly where I went wrong. Another factor is that I never won a repeated hand. Somewhere in this there may be an iota of insight, but clearly even if it’s there, once absorbed, there’s nothing else to gain. Oh, but I could count the constant reminder it gives of how I squander time and how it leaks out at the margins, too.

Some poets write first thing. Others hold out as long as possible. Joanne Kyger told an interviewer that she might get around to writing something late in the day, although her wonderful Japan and India Journals suggests devotedness, which may be more useful than timing per se. Waking from a nap earlier, I looked at the top shelf of the bookcase, which has several impressive sets of books that I bought intending to educate myself on their topics.

Will it happen? I tend to read in sections whenever possible. This seems to relate to my ability to hold on to what I read or, alternatively, to savor it. Since leaving school, I mostly refuse to read at the mandatory school pace. Some writers feel similarly driven. A few days ago, I saw a quote from someone that writers should be focused on their masterpieces. How would they know, I wondered? Writers should just write in whatever way works for them.

Postmodernism and new urbanism both sought to get past modernism. The postmodernists were grandiose and funny; the new urbanists, true believers, were never funny, and their work was often formulaic and sterile. The postmodernists drew on art, while the new urbanists drew on kitsch and twee, but without its spontaneity. Modern architecture rolled on, despite the efforts of academics to declare it an historic category. Every aspect of modern persists—minimal to maximal, industrially form-begetting to banal—at the behest of its hegemonic backers. We live as if in a catalogue of forms, and anything that deviates is a target now for urban activists and their enablers.

Girlfriends who broke up with you appear when they appear, certain of getting a hearing and a ready response to whatever errand prompts their visit. And yet there’s a measure of shared enjoyment to these encounters, also, as you both remember whatever it was that kept you momentarily enthralled when you were together eons ago.

The heart of urbanity is a variation on themes that reflects small but telling differences traceable to the variety of their owners, builders, and residents. Neighborhoods make urbanity possible by setting the stage for it. Today, cities and districts all but rule it out by encouraging site consolidation and “sculpted” height and bulk. Even a superblock development like Hudson Yards opts for the safety of a laid-out pastiche of towers and pavilions that form a “destination” permitting commerce to rake off custom from commuters and day-tripping suburbanites. It is a suburban idea of Manhattan, reachable directly and secured from the city proper, traversed by the High Line that is itself a defended passage, ending at The Whitney in a progression similar to reaching MoMA via Fifth Avenue.

Rockefeller Center is the model, although a more consistent assembly of towers, plazas, shops, and entertainment.

Inner-city Melbourne shows how porosity makes for urbanity. The side streets are subdivided into even smaller alleys and arcades, all lined with cafés, restaurants, and shops that are open from morning to late afternoon. A few stay open into the evening, so people out walking can find a bar or a restaurant. Trams circle the area and are free.

One maddening thing about Singapore, despite its excellent transit and overall walkability, is the lack of obvious passages through walls of buildings. Usually there is actually a way through, but it’s often far from obvious.

Transit and housing should be joined at the hip. If you have to choose, make transit the priority. The Bay Region’s inner core is overloaded because investment in transit dried up after the big push in the 1960s. We have nascent urban centers within and outside the inner core, but they’re underdeveloped because you can’t get there quickly. If this failure to invest continues, it will destroy many of the region’s existing residential neighborhoods.

A friend’s tweet makes me think about the duration of guilt. Anything untoward remains on my conscience, I find, and are a source of regret. I think Jesus got it right when he asked the crowd who among them would cast the first stone—who is truly without sin? He was also saying that it’s enough to live with our regrets. I agree with my friend that they cannot be erased. I’m less sure that another’s sins, as we judge them, can be placed legitimately ahead of all other considerations, as my friend proposed, not least because this applies a kind of automatism to judgement itself, which to me is necessarily provisional. How many people do we actually admire unreservedly?

AFTERWORD

Richmond, Indiana

Two Vignettes

I bet you never knew the daughter whose mother tried to kill her who killed herself, the daughter who became herself the mother.

I think you don’t remember. You think of horses grazing, grey afternoons, but I passed by in the rain. I knew her. We passed one night together.

Shall I tell you what I would tell her?

First, I would thank her for her kindness.

Second, I wouldn’t speak for fear of hurting and would be talking always in a circle around the feeling I carry for your daughter.

Did you know I went twice to see her?

So, she repaid me for visiting her after her mother tried to kill her.

I saw a girl just now as beautiful as you.

When she passed, we were, each of us without breath, not even a word.

What pleasure He saw he was approaching sainthood, an assemblyman bargaining for fish.

It was a matter of pride with him to know the borders of his knowledge, borders like walls and gentility like a knife, and to be moved by the sight of grass.

Yet what was the pleasure, what pleasure in this sidestepping? Strange though how the civility of his existence sustained him until the grass replayed how the moon stirred up the floodtide, the fertile earth.

A woman stood by a table littered with Marx.

I noted streams of indifference. She replied, “I have the strength of the entire working class.”

The leader of her party, I forget his name, had a newspaper. “In jail. Want to buy one?”

Remembering He stood and prodded the mollusk with his scalpel, its folds giving way, writhing in the pan, slowly running down as they did. I am anonymous myself, the Emperor thought.

The throbbing of their organs, the breath and movement of their bodies, blood congealing on stairways where they fell.

We are anonymous ourselves, he thought.

We were with the mollusks, touching the wall and peering at the sky. It was all arranged.

(Written in the late 1960s and early 1970s.)

Common Place No. 17 | Text and images Š 2020 by John J. Parman | complace.j2parman.com