WORKS POSSIBLY IN PROGRESS COMMON PLACE No. 36 | WINTER 2022
I've been taking the second session of a writing class led by Clare Wigfall from her apartment in Berlin. Yesterday (Tuesday, 15 February 2022), we had the first of two workshops on work in progress. It made me think about several projects "in motion" that I would like to document in their current state. I have plans to complete them, but when is unclear. Common Place has also taken a back seat to a small book series I started, and part of its function is to track my activities as a writer. For both reasons, this issue came to mind.
Instruction Manuals 1. Opening Thoughts
The Decalogue lays down the law. It sets out its rules as absolutes. When Jesus interpreted them, he tempered them by pointing to three kinds of love—for the wonders of creation (and the miracle of our being here), for ourselves, and for others. He linked self-love to a love of neighbors that makes no distinction between the differences that might arise between us and them. They're us; we're them. I've always felt that Jesus is most of all a reformer who sought to liberate Judaism from its trappings. He resembles reformers like Dōgen and Hakuin who wanted to reconnect Zen to its starting point in the Buddha's concise visual restatement of what he understood, freed of Hindu trappings and the delusions of crowds—the tendency of a founder's insights to be elaborated and turned into cults. The split between Jews and Christians reflects this, turning a reformer into an object of worship and making him hard to find among the trappings. When you live in the world, as Jesus and the Buddha did, you live with the world's haphazard reality. Miracles may have accompanied Jesus, as depicted, but what he tried to do isn't dependent on them. Even now, aspects of his preaching are woven into the Christian faiths that claim him, but centuries of immersion in the world have distorted it and left us with ironies, like Rome becoming one of its main centers, its empire becoming Christian; or like Vladimir Putin claiming to be a bulwark of Christianity when it serves his purposes.
The monotheistic trio—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—set their single, all-knowing God as a judge of our earthly acts. Buddhism's cycles of birth and rebirth posit a journey through realms of karmic aptness. Swedenborg, whose theology I admire, proposed that everything we experience here has a spiritual correspondence—"as above, so below." Not surprisingly, the Heaven and Hell he depicts are like ordinary life except that the Saved are spared the dissembling—they see others as they really are, not as they present themselves. Those in Hell remain caught up in their delusions, which God grants them as a dispensation. They find the light of Heaven blinding. Hell is oppressive, but it suits them, Swedenborg suggests. Heaven is work. As a godless religion, Buddhism has to contend with the nihilism that arises when people face up to the likelihood of their personal annihilation. The trappings included reincarnation, realms, and even deities; the Buddha said of them, "Who knows?" His position as I understand it is rooted in a sense that the world is transient. As sentient beings. we have possibilities and obligations. They won't save us—nothing is imperishable, as far as we know— but they may ease our suffering and that of others. This then is our only refuge. The universe is an unfolding, transient affair and, as part of it, we have no choice but to unfold ourselves in ways that best suit its momentary contingencies. The precepts are therefore not a guide to salvation, but a guide to living in and with the planet as we find it. Dogen's "Instructions to the Cook" is in this tradition.
2. A Bridge for Crossing Over
3. Lost among Causes and Effects
Reading Reb Anderson's book on the Buddhist precepts, I found this quote from Dōgen:
The 12 Steps differ from the Decalogue, Jesus's gloss, and the Buddhist Precepts. Reading them, I was reminded of a family member's comment that many people struggle to cope with the everyday, which in these United States is mostly devoid of readily found supports. There's public school and then there's criminal justice—two overlapping "systems" that interface with the denizens of the everyday whatever their abilities are to cope with it. Alcoholics Anonymous is a voluntary community that offers support to those whose lives have been upended by alcoholism and other addictions. Its 12 Steps lay out a practice—a practice of sobriety, one could call it—that aims to reorient practitioners to an everyday from which, in one way or another and for myriad reasons, they've distanced themselves. (This is my sense of AA and its Steps. I have no direct experience with it and read them in full for the first time while preparing to write this essay.) Alcohol is only mentioned in Step One and alcoholism only appears in Step Twelve. I think that's significant. It could be omitted, although it is presumably a shared factor among AA's members. If omitted, then the 12 Steps begin and end: 1. We admitted we were powerless—that our lives had
The body is manifested, the dharma is unfolded, and there is a bridge for crossing over. Their virtue returns to the ocean of all-knowing wisdom. They are unfathomable. Receive them with devotion and respect.
He also quotes from the Dhammapada, sayings attributed to the Buddha, verse 185: Abstain from all evil, practice all that is good purify your mind. This is the teaching of all buddhas.
The bodhisattva vow as he sets it out unfolds this summary. "A disciple of buddha," it says, does not kill does not take what is not given does not abuse sexuality does not lie does not intoxicate mind or body of self or other does not speak of the faults of others does not praise self at the expense of others is not possessive of anything, especially the dharma does not harbor ill will does not disparage the Triple Treasures.
(The Triple Treasures are Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. We could gloss them as the Buddha and other teachers in his lineage, their teachings, and the communities that formed around them.) When I read all of this, I thought that what links the precepts to the Decalogue in its long and short versions and also to the 12 Steps are forgiveness (or compassion) and community in the face of regret and isolation. The latter two push us to the former. Anderson says that the precepts operate on two levels—within ordinary life and within a universe that is inherently in flux, "nothing to hold onto." The "bridge for crossing over" might be the "Just sit!" which Dōgen said is all that Zen is, shorn of its trappings, or it might be the community that supports it, a bridge between the two levels. When I read it, I thought of Robert Musil's distinction between the ordinary and extraordinary in life. It's like the difference between Newton's and quantum physics, the one with its implacable laws and the other that moves beyond them at the extremes. We live within both, but the ordinary predominates. As we pass through it, sentient and self-aware at least in theory, we run up against causes and effects that, if not quite as implacable as gravity, come close.
become unmanageable. 12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps. we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
Here are the other 10: 2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. 3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. 4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. 5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. 6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. 7. Humbly asked him to remove our shortcomings. 8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. 9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. 10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it. 11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
In Confucian China and its Modern Fate, Joseph R. Levenson notes the hostility to Buddhism and Taoism current among 17thcentury critics of Sung Dynasty Confucianism. Reading this, I thought of Stephen Batchelor's Buddhism without Belief, which sees Buddhism as an effort to reconcile randomness—the ephemeral nature of material existence in its entirety—with our sentient presence in it. Buddhism categorizes everything material as transient, notes the suffering this causes, and suggests a strategy for living with it: acknowledge randomness and the relentless nature of cause and effect in relation both to nature and civilization, and learn to be content with a life that aims for goodness, avoids evil, and wants to see clearly—my gloss of the teachings noted above. Buddhism sees and values sentient beings as fellow-travelers in a world of flux. Jesus's "love your neighbor as yourself" is like this, but Buddhism makes no reference to a Creator. Speculation, the Buddha said, and anyway, not our concern. What matters is that we suffer as long as we resist the true nature of material existence and our part in it. We have to learn to unfold with it, living a good life as best we can as we navigate its contingencies. At its heart, a good life benefits all sentient beings and an evil life hurts them. In making no distinctions, the Buddha anticipates Jesus: we are a community of like beings within a universe of flux. Within it, we find our roles, our talents for goodness. They may go unseen. We may have no skill at navigation. As part of evil is negligence or even accident, we may cause it or be visited by it. But we learn from this that to be is to be good as a practice, and to take flux as it comes, preparing when it's possible to do so and accepting what unfolds when it isn't. We make a vow to return to this come what may. It's here, I think, that the stance Buddhism takes overlaps that of the 12 Steps. Both emphasize the importance of compassion towards self and others, acknowledging that good and evil are a continuum in the world as we experience it, that slippage is as much part of its flux as everything else. We will do harm even as we struggle to do good, but still, we have to struggle to do good. Doing good per se is not our practice; returning to the struggle is. But the 12 Steps refer to a higher being. There's a secular version of them, I read, and—as written— the Steps try to make this higher being religiously neutral: whatever higher being you might imagine.
Buddhism omits this part, at least as its founder laid it out. His account of the universe is strictly material, strictly subject to materiality's endgame-a transient universe in flux. This insight is the one thing we can depend on and the one thing we can share with suffering others: be one with it—one with its randomness, its transience, its causes and effects that mimic design, an invisible hand, karma, the machinations of the gods. Within this, we live a consciously upright life when our awareness allows it. Practice is not live like this or to be aware, but to return again and again to consciousness, recover awareness in the service of living an upright life, and share these acts with other sentient beings, so they can see not only the full range of our actions, but how in spite of them, we continue to practice. Compassion, then, seems to be crucial. It may be a better word than love—a word that enables us to face our own shortcomings, our evils, squarely, and take such steps as are needed or demanded to redress the harm, even if unjust. Compassion is a radical act that sees how the flux of unfolding life requires responses that have their own reasons— that are the best we can do, sometimes, to be true to our effort to live a good life, to navigate the flux. Buddhism tells us we have nothing on which to stand and no higher being to absolve us, but also that this our lot, individually and collectively. Flux animates life's raw material, including us. We owe our lives to it. We learn to live in it. Compassion grows as we witness harm, injustice, and tragedy. Life's unfolding is like a book of cautionary tales, but a cautious life won't keep us from harm. In reality, we grasp that experience places us at risk, that everything is freighted by what we failed to anticipate—by the flux that dogs our interactions. Yet we have to act—to live is to act, even if the act is to shrink back. More often, we plunge in. The 12 Steps help us waken to the harm we do. They help us to be aware and bring us back to a place in which living consciously is at least possible to contemplate. (This is my interpretation.) What gives them potency is the other who witnesses our accounting—the community whose compassion we share or perhaps whose compassion is shared. The 12 Steps assume that we have no more immunity to the randomness of life than any other sentient being but we can acknowledge this in its particulars and resolve to live otherwise for another day, another week. In short, we can learn to live in a world of flux without slipping under.
4. A God who Makes Room for Us to Exist "If we accept no matter what void, what stroke of fate can prevent us from loving the universe? / We have the assurance that, come what may, the universe is full."— Simon Weil, Gravity and Grace, Routledge, 2002, p. 18.
I'm just beginning to read Simone Weil, but she's pertinent to the issues just raised: how we contend with flux; how we stay upright despite the world's turmoil. She asserts that God withdraws to make room for us—to allow us to exist separately. This existence is weighed down by gravity—the weight of mortal life that demands a constant renewal of our energies simply to withstand it. Grace, God's light, enters through the voids that make our lives seem empty—an emptiness we try to fill, equating it with a squandering of our energies, stasis, death. At moments, this light penetrates us nonetheless. Our emptiness makes room for God to enter us. The universe, potent and fecund, includes us. Weil writes that attachment is false to unfolding reality, an attempt to grant immortality to what we imagine we possess when we have no such power. To be in the world is to be separate and different— to have a name and a fate. For what purpose? Is it to experience this universe of possibilities without attaching to any of them without illusions or any expectation of consolation or compensation? Yet attachment may be what we are wired to do, our pretensions to maturity constantly undone by our raw need for others to sustain us. The regimented nature of school, the military, and prison speak to how those claiming to be in charge substitute their imposed regimes for the sustenance we crave but find so difficult to achieve. You'd think that these regimes would aim to wean us from dependence, but they make us crave order rather than learn to find it in the relative chaos of ordinary life. We get bits and pieces of instruction, but we are too many to be given much that's personally relevant. Those who figure it out always cite something—a book, a teacher, a friend, an episode—that got them started in a learning process that begins instinctively but runs out of gas or is incapacitated without help. Beauty and talent, although God's gifts, are in some sense unfair to use because others lack them. Sorting through modern society's many injustices, we have to distinguish between the conditioned and the innate. We don't think of luck, having it, but some people seem to have no luck at all.
Weil's "full" cuts through what amounts to a form of having—either possessing attributes that we associate with luck, like beauty and talent, or desiring them and cursing a universe that fails to provide them. Our having them can be an affront to others, inviting their envy or leading them to exploit us for their own ends. We end up denying and even cursing our own luck—trying not to draw attention due to the danger or to ward off hubris. Weil's "full" relates to the Buddha's "be." With Jesus, it says that "full" is "full," that to the universe there are no imperfections—existing is the one gift. Whatever else one might say, we are here. We take our place and live it out with a certain confidence. But this kind of fundamental confidence is often missing or, more accurately, has been undermined or suppressed. Confidence is admired if others feel that it's either earned or innate. People are quick to attack what they see as false confidence. Displays of confidence are also rebuked by those threatened by them—those in authority with thin skins, e.g.— or who feel it their duty to challenge such displays, erecting barriers to prompt greater achievement. What is rarely if ever taught is the importance of forging your own relationship with the universe, accepting that a place was made for us and it's up to us to define ourselves on our own terms. This feels expansive, but where we find ourselves is a limiting factor, although mutable—perhaps more so if what limits us is innate. (Helen Keller, e.g.) Although I laid out the 12 Steps, the sense I get from someone who participates in it is that it is to some extent an active sharing of experiences that may prove instructive. The sharing itself gives the sharers a measure of support, but it's also an oral tradition, and handing down of knowledge about a world that seems chaotic to many who live it out. My own upbringing had a lot of this—my parents, my schooling, exposure through travel to human diversity and of course to the planet's topography, and the moral lessons of established religion and a cultural, social, and political order far surer of itself in my childhood than it is now. Some point to an upbringing like this and decry it as unearned, an advantage like beauty and talent. It's true, this was my luck. From another perspective, it channeled me toward a career in the learned professions, to extend rather than rebel against the conventions of my family, intuiting that I would find my way in that direction. The I Ching calls this the "law of least resistance," and I followed it assiduously.
Early Autumn 1. Comin' through the rye
The desire for another is a bodily desire. In lovemaking, our bodies take over, which is to say that they make use of everything at their disposal to arouse each other. Women express their arousal viscerally—a sensory profusion that is arousing by nature. In between, the minds compare notes while the bodies cool down. Our bodily nature is a problematic, as they say— an imaginary, as they also say—that accompanies us despite our frequent wish that we could turn it off. Our bodies are constantly aroused, constantly desirous in ways that compromise or undo our determination to be unaffected. Affect is in the air and in the blood. We can sense it. The autumnal equinox signals summer's end and the onset of winter and nature's apparent death. It stands in contrast to the vernal equinox. It gives us the profusion of colors that its brief and final beauty. By rights, it should hold our bodies in check, our minds aware of transience and precarity. It can be unseasonably hot, with a dry wind that
strips the trees of their leaves, invites wildfires, and unsettles us. This wind has various names. What remains of the ridge house garden is a lexicon of what survives a summer's mix of aridity and fog. The trees catch the fogs and then shed water on small patches of greenery immediately below them, but what was a lawn in the winter and early spring is stubble punctuated by explosions of stalks, each with yellow flowers that attract bees in the heat. Even a pot of cactuses is three-quarters dead, yet bushes persist. Love too must survive in this season, bodies being what they are. Desire at least must survive, if only to await spring.
Cosmopolis Banqueting
The finery of a family dinner, her mother decked out and her father present, the siblings and cousins, the servants coming in and out, the dancing outside, and the expectation of a suitor acceptable to her mother: all of this made them both long to be out at the edge again testing the limits of the frontier, the place where their expectations fell away and they were just themselves, but of course not just themselves but representatives of her mother and the empire, the blood bond they served and were born to or married into, sworn to perpetuate. The colors and pattern of her dress, the work of a seamstress, reminded her of her childhood. It had its pull, she knew—the soft life that cushioned the will women show when what they value is besieged. I could give it up, she thought, but for what, exactly? It felt often like a reflected version of nature's rawness, modulated by a window, the leather of a saddle, a world always mediated by the
safety of empire, the spell of unreality it cast on everything. Her father spoke sometimes of this off-kilter picture, imposed to the empire's various edges. Beyond them were such terra incognita as the Great Basin, the wilderness and barrenness of mountains, the treachery of passes—journeys made once or twice in a lifetime, if at all. Some of them were suitors' journeys, like her father's, to prove their valor, cement the value they placed on the ones they courted, and their own value, players in a kind of lottery of merit, and stifle their self-doubts. She had that same impulse to court—certain of the women did. She has her mother's beauty, he thought. He looked from one to the other. On these occasions, when the banquet hall was lit, talk and laughter rising and falling along the table, she was in her element, animated by these others, a woman among her people, whether family or retainers. We are hers, causes for anxiety when undistracted, but not now. If their daughter's reticence was mixed
with her pleasure in familiar company, if she was also anxious, these traits were a mix of theirs. Yet they lived on the surface, roiled by the way she worked or perhaps roiling that slow, deliberate process, a contrast to her flashes of insight, her intuition. They were opposites, he and his wife. The witch Karen told him once that they went way back, finding each other across hundreds of lives. It seemed true that behind their differences there was a deep familiarity. Her sense of possession came from her family's long connection to land as agriculture, forestry, extraction, and the underlay of towns and their activities. Its several branches extended in rings from their epicenter in the hills, the castle where they lived. He scanned the room. There were three or four possibilities, Charlotte had told him. He paid no close attention at this stage, some distance still before the sorting out that women do. He was once here, she thought—one purpose of the long journey the young men hazard. She looked over at him, leaning forward a little to take it in, a break from conversation with her aunt, who was talking now with one of the guests. Her cousin, her aunt's daughter, sat across from her. She took to society without hesitation—with less of it, in any case, than she did. Her father saw the world as individuals. Then there was the immediate family, the familiars, the larger family, chains of relations, including his own relations, and then society, of which there was empire and the rest. Not that he failed to categorize their factions, how they operate. It was his business to know this, in general and in specific—the role he was raised to play. She had no predetermined role, unlike her brothers and male cousins. Some stayed and others journeyed, attaching themselves to distant families, mixing their blood with that of others. Each family put their stamp on the men, brought up to serve the empire the women ran in different capacities. He was raised to be a Cosmopolitan, the hereditary calling of his family's men. They were the intermediaries, the buffers, the interpreters, especially beyond the frontiers, which were multiple, the empire being mainly coastal settlements and their environs and hinterlands. She had journeyed with him and alone, traveling by schooner or bark. Her mother had done so.
She envied the men their preordained roles, but many of them chafed, jealous of the women's freedom to pursue whatever they liked, to forego marriage if they wanted. For the men, only stunning talent offered an escape, as it also did for the untitled. Most men took up what was given them, made the marriages expected of them, served the empire as the women intended. She envied her father the scope of action his role allowed him, how it took him out of himself. Increasingly they partnered and her abilities complemented his—her facility with languages, her ease with the oddities and proclivities of outlanders, her sixth sense. He had it too but in a less developed way—enough to initiate a conversation to which she could add details. Hers went much farther. "You're something of a witch," Karen had told her more than once. Charlotte wondered if any of these men would suit. Her sister seemed more confident that her daughter would make a good choice, but Cat made a conundrum of these matters or drew them out—despite her gifts or possibly because of them. Her own ruling emotion when she met Magnus was longevity. In her parents' marriage, her mother played this role, and Charlotte knew her nature was her father's. Magnus was a poet, she understood. It came through in his letters. His calmness was deceptive; he felt pain, but it rarely surfaced as anger. Unusually for a Cosmopolitan, he allowed himself to be read by others. That openness attracted her, and not only her—other women desired him. It came out in time that he was loyal to her, but she'd thought otherwise. The thought had pushed her to fall in love. No wonder Cat was wary, but then marriage was how it worked. Would anyone ever suit? "Sir, a gentleman is here with a letter of introduction from his father, who he says is your old friend." The steward handed Magnus the letter and he rose to find better light. The writer was his old classmate, a Cosmopolitan whose bent for architecture and history turned a sojourn in Nihon into the rest of his life, marrying into an ancient family that traced back to the Empress Himiko, and devoting himself increasingly to teaching and scholarship. "Here at last is my son Yasuhiro," he wrote, "if the gods look as kindly on his journey as they did on ours."
A man in his mid-thirties stood in the entry hall. Magnus could see his friend in him, on first glance, a red-haired youth when he first met him, halfraised in the upland country that formed a part of his mother's family's demesne. Memphis was their base and when he traveled east, it was by river, gulf, and ocean. "Yasuhiro?" The man bowed and then extended his hand. "Hiro." "I am deeply sorry to arrive late," he said. "I misjudged how long it would take me to get here." Magnus nodded. "No matter. We'll find a place for you." A room was also found. Magnus took his guest into the banquet hall and introduced him to Charlotte. "This is Hiro, the son of my old friend and classmate Terence Hume. His mother's family are the Yamatai." Charlotte took in this stranger. "I am so sorry to be late," he said. "You've come a long way," she replied. Cat was aware how her cohort paused to absorb the visitor's late arrival. A feature of the season was that one never knew exactly who'd appear. Distance and difficulty were points in favor of the suitors, and from his appearance, this one had clearly come some distance. Magnus rang a goblet with his knife and then introduced the guest. Nara was the distant place, an ancient city and one of the known seats of matriarchy. Naming it set off a low buzz among Cat's cohort—acknowledgement of a lineage closer to empire's highest circle. It mattered to some. Even Charlotte was a bit intrigued, but Cat wondered how he'd taken to his mixed parentage, the fusion of two disparate cultures. And what was the other one? Hume, a Scots name, could be from anywhere. You had to know the family's name to place him. Eastward journeys from Nihon, threading their way to other islands, only face typhoons, his rivals reasoned, but the young women were inclined to admire him for it. It varied the usual crop of backeast boys who risked the outlands or sometimes came by ship. The great canals still operated, outposts the empire maintained, but they were plagued with privateers. Their human cargo was of value if their families or the empire valued them, so even the merchant ships were warships of a kind. The outlands were traversed by convoys, but some young men set out alone, making a real journey of it. That stance was attractive, a source of merit. It
was how Magnus came, and one source of his understanding and sympathy for their denizens. The empire was tolerant, as empires tend to be, of shades of difference that mattered more at the tribal level. Catholic, Charlotte's family, but what that meant reflected the upheavals that saw the male hierarchy pitched over, the last pope supplanted by the nuns' convention, finding communion with their Orthodox sisters and with Anglican and Lutheran schismatics. Irish, too— the women's beauty was Irish. Their lineage and culture absorbed the men. Magnus woke from a vivid dream in which the characters of men were like the trees in a pine grove—they were men, but they resembled so many trunks. There was another thread to the dream—how character is made ever deeper by locale. His journey reflected his upbringing as a son of a Cosmopolitan father, but not every son took up that calling or made the journey. Some were rooted, marrying into local families. That was important, too. Cat had danced. Banqueting was followed by round dancing that deliberately mixed partners. May evenings were warm, with a long dusk. Conversations might follow. He hadn't stayed up, but heard murmurs of talk as he drifted to sleep, his rooms facing away from the terrace. What was said, what Cat and her cohort thought of these young men, he would find out later. Magnus spent his childhood embedded in his parents' nomadic life, then he was sent away. Away is how he thought of what followed, exiled from it. When he looked back, each of their postings was remembered as an oasis. And he became a sort of camel, self-sufficient enough to survive in the desert that away seemed to him. He made friends, of course, like Hiro's father. The central question that followed Hiro from Nara remained unanswered: why was he here? Was it to ally himself by marriage to a distant family, perhaps spirit one their daughters across the Pacific? Or to supplant the women, as he and his friends often discussed? The trick would be to avoid his forefathers' mistake of letting the women's families retain power indirectly. His mother was a Fujiwara on her father's side, a lineage that spoke to how lineages mix back and
forth. They survived civil wars, stagnation and revival, total war and its long aftermath, and the Reckoning and its spread. But the men were restless. Like their Heian ancestors, they resented what they saw as political stasis. They admired the martyrs of the Russian aristocracy who tried to challenge the czar. The women could be as cruel if cornered. They had their Janissaries, their enforcers. The empire's long Pacific coast was remote, naturally walled, less of a garrison. Hiro was of two minds—six or seven minds, more likely. Sons of the empire were often conflicted.
were—self-possessed and unafraid. They were, of course, quite terrified, but had learned to project their terror, find words and looks. We knew things, Charlotte thought. We knew things, but Cat is wracked by them sometimes. Her grandmother was like this, too. It was Irish, her mother said, to be wracked by things that only you could sense. You could spend the day recovering from your sense of them. She put this aside. Cat was Cat. Her grandmother was dead. The domain needed to be tended.
Cat tried to sleep, but she'd felt an undercurrent from the moment of the stranger's arrival.
Hiro sat alone on the terrace reading. Cat saw him from an upstairs window. Standing very still, she let herself slip, let the colors form, but only for an instant. She drew back. Hiro was facing away from her, but she saw him half turn, as she'd anticipated. It registered, but barely, unless he was truly adept and feigned a vague awareness, like hers when he was still at the doorway. That couldn't be ruled out. Nihon was a place where perfecting reigned. She had an idea. "You half-turned. Did you know it was me?" He started laughing. "What do you make of it?" That was an admission; he knew he was being read. "I should be asking that of you." This was a very Karen-like feint. "I would be hard-pressed to draw a clear conclusion," he said. "I'm pulled between loyalty and apostasy, serving others or my own ambitions. Do others wobble thus?" His "wobble" made her laugh. "They do," she said, "but the ocean snaps them awake. You should take up surfing." A pause. "What I saw suggests a fork or forks in the path. Getting here from Nara, despite distance and likely perils, was straightforward, A to B. From the moment you arrived here, it's been forks everywhere you turn. Even the balconies are mysterious." He looked at her. "I might as well say it. When I saw you, I knew that you were what drew me here—someone so familiar, but not her, not this so familiar one, but who she is this time. Life is like this, full of signs we feel viscerally but only partly understand. I see you and I know that we will marry, have children, perpetuate what we are here to perpetuate, but neither of us is sure if this is really true or, if it is, what comes along with it. We see quickly and know things that others miss, but our knowing is still partial. It seems fated, but could just be arbitrary. In saying this, I may have
Banns
Charlotte's mind was on the mundane aspects of her domain. It was constant work. People who assume that having a staff relieves you of it are mistaken. On the contrary, the work expands in proportion to these others, despite their good intentions, loyalty, honest effort. She knew them and valued them, but the domain was hers—the family was hers. That was always there. Each one cares for what's hers or his, and the rest is what's owed. When they go home, what's owed is put aside, but Charlotte didn't have that luxury. It was hers. Her oldest son alone shared this. They planned their days and weeks around the details, took them seriously. His brothers had deserted her. Cat was a mystery to them both. Only Magnus seemed to understand her. Charlotte dreaded the season in a way, knowing Cat's resistance. Left to her own devices, she would be out on horseback at the edge, practically a man. She spent more time with Karen than with her cohort. She knows things, Magnus reported. He spent time with Karen, too—superstitious as Cosmopolitans often were, aware of fate. He came and went. He served the Empire and was at its beck and call. His mother traveled with his father, but Charlotte had her own life to consider. Not that she hadn't seen a great deal. She and her sisters spoke a dozen languages, had brazened their way through places that were improper for family women to visit, followed by leering, catcalling men and sometimes cursed by their wives and sisters simply for being who they
made it possible for you to disregard it, but I don't think so." Another pause, longer than the first. "Yes," she finally said, "that kind of fork." On the road, he sometimes marveled how well she rode. He rode because riding was what he had to do. He'd mastered it, learned how strange a horse could be, the more so if bred for speed. Packhorses and warhorses were bred for as much calm reliance on heft as an animal that was something else's prey could muster. Despite their size, they had to be reined in. But she had a rapport with them he never had. Not that he was clumsy or inept, but they were a pair, his daughter and her horse. Women too are prey, he thought. They say that men keep half an ear cocked for danger, but women feel it in the air, feel it rising from the ground. They broke for camp. In the morning, she drank her coffee with a particular relish. As a child, too, with hot chocolate—the heat of it, perhaps. She looked at him. "I intend to marry Hiro." What will it mean, he wondered? "Does Charlotte know?" he asked. She shook her head no. "He asked me and I agreed. I always resisted it, but here he is and here it is, whatever it is."
A Visitor 1. River's a good choice
I was lying awake trying to decide what to do next given my failure, when a doorway drew itself on the wall — there’s no other way to describe it. It opened out to a terrace, a lawn and hedges behind it. A rustling sound grew louder as an angel drifted down, alighting on the terrace. He pulled in his wings and came through the doorway. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. His spoke very clearly. He sounded like one of my father’s friends. “Forgive me, but when you plunged into the river, they sent me. It’s not necessarily sinful. It depends.” He looked around the room. “You may as well know that the Axis will be defeated. Your empire won’t long survive the war, though, and the repercussions of that will play out here for a long time. Your husband will recover and live on.” He hovered above the floor in the manner of an Italian painting. “Others leave marks on the floor,” he explained. He paused, then spoke again. “Your reputation is secure.” Another pause. “It may seem incongruous that I’m not trying to talk you out of it, but it’s not like that. People do what they do. Most of it is pointless, but there are exceptions. When they hear of one, I pay a visit — provide a bit of reassurance, knowing how things will go, and some practical advice, if I may. The river’s a good choice, but put some stones in your pockets.” 2. The Suitcase
Turned away, a document demanded that I lack, I'm back in this small room. I should be out asking who to bribe or locating a guide, but do I have the funds? More to the point, would I survive the journey? I will nap and then decide. Ah, but I must be dreaming, because there's an angel standing here! Am I dead? No, he assures me that I'm not. He's speaking French, a voice like the baker back in Paris, but softer. He tells me that if I go tomorrow, they will let me through and I will end up in New York. If I don't get up tomorrow, then the suitcase I'm carrying will be lost, but everything else will be safe. Some lives are odd, he says, apparently starcrossed and thwarted as you live through them, but in retrospect they make sense.
Now and then, he encounters someone like me, carrying a suitcase with some hastily written notes that are the fragments of a work that's bigger even than a metropolis and just as discursive. The suitcase weighs not much, but the work itself presses down like so many gold ingots, immensely valuable but no longer supportable. He pauses, then speaks again, but this time in German, a voice like the porter in a good Berlin hotel. Not every ending is an ending in truth, he says. This is an example: you could press on, suitcase in hand, but everything that matters is behind you. You will have to set it aside for five years, try to make your way in a new language. A project like this not easily set aside, but you've given it a separate existence. Here, let me take your suitcase. It's superfluous, but its aura will linger, part of your reception. There is, he adds, no reason to linger.
Winter Fugues 1. Like the tattoo of some faculty in Bergen on seventeen May, assertively itself, and a history: this is the rhythm of my days. Aboriginal, ambivalent, two or three or four ways of being or maybe more in one person, made flesh, incarnate, arrived. Unknowing and yet knowing, drinking it in and yet walking more than running, at leisure as if born to it. Workaholic. Or, like Narcarrow, a backbeat at odds with the foregrounded motif, a front, although maintained, even brought out by an opposite when she came along. Straight and narrow in a bourgeois way, the ties and striped or solid city shirts, like the cuffs of khakis, slightly frayed from negligence, myopia, carelessness, the last diminutive of the first, though blame attaches. On the train, noticed but then forgotten, close observation thrown elsewhere, where the fish were. 2. What blame falls on the one who fishes? The fish claim he lured them, a spoon or Hula Popper cast intuitively, reeled in to form an illusion as he imagined it, as he imagined they imagined it, fish he pictured in the flatness of morning, the stillness of a lake's inlet, a haven. He saw them gathered, awaiting him. His legendary patience started there where the fish gathered in his mind as a hypothesis that went unspoken or barely spoken, an approximation.
3. The way up and way down are different, I remembered. Even a step down differs from a step up. The young boy shares my hesitation, having some sense now of gravity and momentum, but he's better padded, looser, short. Almost four acres, I learned at lunch. I climbed above the family house below to see a sequence of dwellings that could be one house or several. How one defines it varies by dweller, tax assessor, building inspector. These are separate and connected realms, one vision to animate and then a spectrum of interpretations grappling with practicalities, the way hard realities intrude, whether lack of funds or biological clocks. Slow progress following long stasis is the downhill condition—walls to hold back the crushed granite, a new stove and pipe against a weather inclement except for false springs, rosemary alive with bees. 4. The subject is a subject of controversy, like narrative or landscape or a human. Do I dare to represent it, that, or her? Emotions attach, but how to convey?
Here too, Ireland, England: a great migration, driven off an ancient land and washing up or, conversely, taken bodily and sold, property of another.
Let's take the word ESTRANGED and stencil it on a wall or make a sign in neon letters or pixelated so it shifts leftward, looping back from the right.
Creole is lumped in by Apartheid's logic, fenced out, ESTRANGED, the city bifurcated as us and them. the latter radioing their dissonance.
Imagine a city of such walls and signs, streetwalkers carrying knock-off bags rendered imprecisely, brightly colored, torsos, hairdos rendered as pure forms.
As for the customers, the whores mix easily with them, all swinging, the metropolis a matter of woogie seeking boogie, no representation,
Who then is the customer? Capitalism struggles to bridge the gap culture sets, to level up to metropolis the great plain of farms, factories, faith, freeways, food.
only the movement of flashing dots across the tsunami of lightboards, acres of paint dripped, obscured, seeking woogie in all the wailing.
Imagine that they all come in, China in the nineties, the walls of characters spelling out ENNUI with Chinese characteristics, French Concession.
Common Place No. 36 | © 2022 John J. Parman | complace.j2parman.com