I
Memoir & Reflection
John J. Parman
P a l l a s This book is a joint publication of Pallas, 1111 Geary Blvd., San Francisco, CA 94109, and Snowden & Parman editorial studio. Text and images © 2021 John J. Parman.
Preface
My daughter and editorial partner, Elizabeth Snowden, founder and director of the Pallas Gallery, suggested that we publish our writing and sell it through her gallery as well as send it to interested friends. My father's family has been involved with publishing since the 16th century, and much of my own career was devoted to it. Short run printing, which gets better and better, spares us such problems as press checks and inventory.
My prose includes short stories and essays or sketches. A story is less beholden to actual events but in some ways closer to the feelings that attached to them. Like a poem. it makes use of sensory memory and imagination. Stories narrate events from life like any historical account, Hayden White asserted. Both are subjective fictions.
During the pandemic, I gathered prose pieces written over the past two decades. Some of them fall into the categories of memoir and reflection, which ask what lived experience means. These are prose explorations, as opposed to the poems that draw on the same raw material. To make this selection manageable, I've divided it into two parts. This is the first.
I make photo collages on an iPad using an app called Procreate. They draw on imagery found on the web a random walk strategy pioneered by Kurt Schwitters.
Two Stories, One Incomplete
Caucasia
I often picture my father in his Jaguar coupe, one hand draped outside the window, holding a cigarette. This would have been in the second half of the 1950s he quit smoking when he was 45. He still has the car and his tortoiseshell glasses. He’s quite elegant, even with the wrinkles. An early taste for bespoke suits continues. Despite his age, despite having made a ton of money, or perhaps because of it, he still drives himself to the station three days a week, down from five, rides into Penn Station, and makes his way to his desk. That desk is the one he had made from the teak crates he shipped back from Singapore. The walls too attest to his past a childhood in Hanoi, student days in Paris and London, wartime in Malaya, a trader’s life, first in Singapore and then in New York, and all the travel back and forth to Asia as China and Indochina opened up. Despite that focus, my father is a Europhile having spent his formative years on that continent and in its colonies. At my age, I’m lucky that he’s still alive. When your father dies, the end of your own life comes into view, my father notes in his journal. His father died at age 76, so “borrowed time.” He already owes someone 17 years. When he turned 90, my father invited me to lunch. “I’m not really immortal,” he said, adding that when he looked back at the totality of his life, it seemed like a story worth telling. “Yet, having lived most of it, it’s hard for me to know where to begin. And I would be tempted to leave things out. You know you don’t want to hurt people, and yet there they were.” In short, he needed someone to get the broad outline from conversations and then read the letters and the journals, all of which he’d somehow managed to keep despite the war, the moves, and my mother. Apparently, that someone was me. Although born in Hanoi, my father is of Chinese descent, the son of a wealthy merchant who traded with France and China. My mother shares this background, but they first met in Paris. According to the family legend,
“We aren’t very alike,” he told me at lunch. “Marriage throws you together with another whose differences become clearer as you grow older. Yet you have these ties family, property, and the ease of long familiarity.” Then there was the war. “I was in the Malay highlands, out of reach. There was no way for her to know what would happen. In a situation like that, you have to be very tactful when you reenter the world you left. And I had my own life to consider.”
My father’s private papers include letters, poems, and the diaries he’s kept since he was a student. The letters are voluminous. The diaries are difficult to read, written in his tiny script. They and the letters often overlap, but the diaries comment on things that the letters address in the moment, creating a kind of double reflection.
"When will you retire?" When people ask this of my father, he always smiles and says nothing. “When there’s no more reason to head into town” is what he thinks. (Written around 2007?)
he knew immediately that they would marry. Despite provocations on both sides, they still are. My mother is more or less the opposite of my father, who is happiest at his desk or in intimate company. My mother likes to socialize. She also enjoys sticking her nose in everyone’s business except my father’s. They ask no questions of each other. Roughly once a day, they talk about topics of mutual interest. For every trip they take together, there are five or six they make alone. Yet they discuss every potential destination. “You should go,” he tells her.
He’s been saying that all their married life, beginning in 1940 when he presciently sent her to New York to spend the war out of the line of fire. Neither of them wasted much time being lonely, but my sister is the more tangible evidence of this. My father loved her from the moment he first learned of her existence.
the water.
Love & Marriage I:
PART
SUMMER
Smoke rising, the sun warm for once, children running and yelling, but his eyes were on the ferry. Two rings of smoke nothing to do but wait and then a sigh. Hot suddenly and what was all that noise? The whole day had been like this, and now half an hour before the next boat. He leaned against a wall, feeling its heat on his back. Fingering the cigar, looking across the pier, how many summers was it now that he’d headed out there, supper at four, Charlotte in her country attire and him still in his cityNothingclothes?to do, no runner to cross the fjord like Jesus to tell Charlotte he missed the damn boat. He pulled at the cigar, shifted his back, finally looked for a place to sit, the boat off in the distance now, smoking too. A beer, he thought, or tea, the manuscript. I could give myself a headache, reading it in the sun. Squinting, he leaned against the wall again. Another sigh, two or three more rings, wafting, growing larger. Two children stopped to look. Magnus obliged them with another. “I missed the boat and now I have to stand here and blow rings until the next one comes.” A hell. Oda would like that, an eternity at the pier while small demons surround him demanding rings. Somewhere out there, one boat was passing another. Young men, probably, were on their way in, while he was trying to abandon the city, his work finished, or parts of it, the rest stuffed in his satchel. A week, a rare week during which the sun
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And now, another summer. Oda was angry, but his heart was afloat and the ferry approached. Tarot might be the game they all played. The stakes? “There are children, Magnus!” Oda had hissed. You bear down
Like layers of the earth with fragments of himself scattered through it, bones with no marrow, and yet he was standing here again he, Magnus, with his cigar between his fingers another summer, the ferry slowly coming into view that would take him to Charlotte in her summer clothes, to Charlotte in her element the garden, her children and in time her grandchildren. Still standing, he thought, the green light that Greta said she saw pouring out of him like a lantern Greta with her sixth sight. He ground the cigar out in the wall. He could see the other boat off in the distance, with its varnished seats, its smells of food, coal, and human bodies, overdressed and ready to shed it all, find each other in the summer twilight. Many of the women would soon be pregnant. Then in April or May, the babes. To them too, once. Magnus would spend the rest of the year paying for the real bacchanal six weeks in when Charlotte, ravenous, would keep him up all night. Autumn and in darkness by then, her arms wrapped around him, holding him so close that he felt he could hardly breathe.
The devil, Oda more or less told him. He pulled on the cigar and let the smoke curl up from his mouth. Well, yes and no. At dinner, she’d cut him off in mid sentence. Would it be like this on the Styx two or three millennia of his anecdotes cut short? More smoke, like a horse in winter. Her anger seemed to bring her to life, but not as she’d been mouth open, that half angered look, or was it bliss, up above him, her long hair falling around her head? Or that look of ice she gave him on the road? Everyone adores her, and so had he.
would hardly set and he would sit out on the lawn and read close to midnight, a cigar lit to hold off the nits.
Five minutes, Magnus guessed, lighting a cigar. People gathered men in suits, youngsters and their mothers, the priest and his wife, who nodded at him when he caught her eye. He leaned back against the wall, smoke wafting, the smell of it mixing with the summer afternoon, and winter over. The men slid the wooden walkway from the ferry to the dock and the passengers disembarked, mostly young men, dressed for an evening, but some families, too, heading in for parties, weekends in town.
Standing to the side with the others, Magnus nodded to several of them friends of his children, children of his friends. He felt for his ticket, hauling it out. It always felt like a race, everyone heading for the same wide portal. Two ticket takers stood guarding it, their blue jackets stained with coffee and grease and God knows what. He pushed through with all the others and found a seat. Most headed for the upper deck to enjoy the sun, so the cabin was emptier than usual. He put his hand down on the bench and looked at it against the wood. It was all like this, wood planks and strips trapped in amber like leaves or insects. His hand always looked the same, enough hair growing to his knuckles to confirm Darwin. A smell of sausage from the shop between the stairs, and he was tempted dinner still a long way off. Children and their mothers crowded around to buy ice cream and drinks, and the men to get beer to drink out in the sun. Magnus walked over. "Coffee and a sausage, please." The woman nodded, her hair knotted above her head, the sleeves of her blouse rolled up from the heat. Winter and summer, there she was, someone's sister, probably. By now, the
and place your bet. The cards face up and down, but no broken tower for Magnus, only the hanging man. The men falling from the tower don't look happy. There are always two, and now he knew why.
Several weeks since Charlotte had quit the town for the summer house. On Saturdays, he left his office at midday and took the boat over there, but today he'd lingered. Company, Charlotte had written. I dread it, he told Kat when he saw her at the park. I dread it, but then I end up having a good time. In his satchel, the afternoon paper, still folded up, a book, several manuscripts to be read and acted on, and her letter, handed to him, which he'd sat and read before walking to the boat. His heart would race, going to meet her, so he paused to calm down. She’d given him her conspiratorial look and a quick, almost furtive kiss. Her letters rehearsed her days in all their texture, so that he could feel how they were or would be. He thought how her eyes would sometimes catch his as they walked, her expression warming. In the spring and summer, Kristiana had its beauty, even its modest glamour. They’d walk near the castle, into a new district with coffee and aquavit, smoked salmon, the oysters Kat ate by the half dozen, those times they ventured there. He loved the proportions of the buildings and their spare elegance. Modern, he told her, the rage in cities to the south. Everything will change. Its harbingers were in the theaters and galleries. The frankness of the times will tear away the gilding and free the women to live as they please.
boat was some distance out, the castle behind them. Soon they'd pass the lighthouse and, halfway there, the returning ferry, the one he'd missed. He sipped his coffee and ate the sausage, a small feast of salty juice.
Magnus rose and climbed the stairs to the upper deck. The point and pier were visible, and, distant, the entry to a favorite sailing haunt, with its cottages and summer inns. He longed to take Kat there, a proposal that always drew a sardonic, indulgent smile. Men and women alike had shed their clothes, the sun being generous. The rich chased after it in winter, to Sorrento or the Canaries, but the rest stayed and
slogged along, a few hours of sunlight at the solstice, and now it was reversed, with just a bare hint of night. He wrapped his hands around the varnished railing and looked out at the water. Sailboats dotted the fjord, along with a steamer headed in to port. Closer in, there would be double enders and children fishing. He cupped his hands and lit a cigar, the smoke billowing back. Charlotte would be in the kitchen at this point, the doors and windows open, her recipe book open on the table, glanced at once, and the smells of cooking. They had money now, but Charlotte rarely left things to her helpers. She had many, of course, here and in town, along with the children when she could get their attention. The older ones were off, especially in the summer. The house in town was their base, but they were hardly ever there now, Magnus knew.
At a dinner in town, an argument broke out about a politician, his career eclipsed by scandal. Was he to blame for the deplorable things that followed? No, it was beside the point, Magnus said, but he felt as he said it that he was defending himself, in reality, with Oda saying in so many words that he wasn’t far from scandal himself. Their world was so small, all of them friends. Kat was the cause. "Anyone else I could tolerate.” He thought how some painters leave in what others leave out. You'd see one's jealousy and
He drew on his cigar, listening as conversations hummed around him. Like bees, he thought. He loved the fat black ones that flew slowly through the garden. The dog liked to chase them, occasionally suffering for it, his nose swollen like a balloon. As the city warmed up, he and Kat would sometimes sit together near the pier, talking about their day and their families. She’d reach over and take his hand, or hold his eyes. His whole world then was suffused with her, brown and radiant in the summer sun.
Sometimes he and Kat sat off by themselves, hidden in markets, in cafés filled with a crush of travelers, sailors, students, hidden by such anonymity as the city afforded. Someone in the future might open a drawer to find more than one sheaf of correspondence. In the midst of conversations, that smile of hers. How often did it come to mind? Her letters could take his breath away, the ink aflame. There were bundles of letters to and from Oda, too, that year of comings and goings. A strange life he led, pushed by fate and pulled by intuition. He thought suddenly of the small and spindly child he'd been, taking the measure of the world he was dropped into, every last attribute of it. A little hedonist, but there were feuds and quarrels, friendships and crushes, liaisons that were so charged and full of risk. All this before he was 10. And the beauty, and everything alight with it their meeting point, he knew. Paintings, plays, and novels spoke to it, but most people were oblivious, even hostile to those who saw and drew attention to it. The pier was clearly in view, a crowd waiting. He looked for the launch. It was tied up, its pilot trying his luck with the fish. People roused themselves, the women’s tanned arms like Kat’s in her light dress. The world renewed: he'd told her this as she ate an oyster. The priest and his wife were ahead of him, with several others, but the launch pilot’s back was to them, his attention elsewhere. Soon they would be in earshot, and his mind would be dragged from his imagined fish. The priest cleared his throat, and Magnus could see the sound registering. The pilot reeled his line in, stood up, and faced his tormentor. The priest helped his wife aboard and then stepped in, nodding to the pilot. "No
pain, another's loneliness and anger. They spend half their lives unwinding from each other or themselves, the kind of lives you saw played out at the theater.
A barn and a field with a horse Magnus could see the painting. Then another came to mind, Peter in his full formal regalia, cosmopolitan and the opposite of bucolic. Now here he was, or at least one of him was.
The launch rounded the point, 30 feet out or so and parallel with the narrow shoreline along the steep hillside. Here and there, roads zigzagged down and a house or cottage jutted out. Small jetties marked these moments of settlement, with children fishing and swimming. Wood and pipe smoke blotted out any other smell. He thought of Oda’s waterside cottage, Christian's easel in one room and their bed in the next. "Charlotte has company," the priest's wife said. "An older man with a red face." Magnus looked at her. “He paints barns.” She shook her head. “He doesn’t look like a worker.” The priest nodded. Magnus laughed. "He's a professor at the academy who paints country scenes, but likes them close at hand. We're handy and we have a barn. More than that, we have food, drink, and conversation, so he'll be staying for a while, I think." The priest's manner shifted. “I’d be honored to meet him." Magnus looked at him. "He’s a pantheist. Perhaps you can convert him."
luck?" The pilot stared at him. "Maybe it's too hot," the priest ventured. The pilot grunted and began feeding the fire. Magnus stepped in and sat down. "How is Charlotte?" the priest's wife asked him. "I've been in town these six days, so you've probably seen her more than I have. How is she?" The priest's wife laughed. "I've seen your sons, but Charlotte I haven't seen." He nodded. "Probably gardening." The priest lit his pipe. "Two funerals this week.” "Any births? Surely these things balance out." "Weddings. It's the season," the wife said. “Right. So, March before we'll see any replacements." She colored slightly. "It's like the theater," Magnus added. "People are always coming on or going off."
Magnus admired his energy. He taught his mostly female art students by day and haunted what passed for the city’s demimonde by night. He was courteous and familiar with these women, evasive with their fathers and with men in authority. He hid behind his society face, closeted in his evening clothes, but in the countryside, he was himself amid animals and farm folk. “His pantheism is stronger in the summer,” Magnus said. “Nature brings out the worst in him.”
The priest nodded, still angling for an invitation. “I won’t try to convert him.”
The pilot slowed the launch. The cart driver was at the dock waiting for them. "The fish may bite later," Magnus told the pilot. "Maybe," he answered. His mind was still at the pier. A theory had formed, about five minutes back, that the electrical magnetism of his body might flow better if he stripped the cork off his rod. He could lead the fish the way the fiddlers did at solstice, the girls dancing past midnight and falling for the hooks. He’d snagged the priest's wife's maid last summer, so why not a fish? Picking at the cork with his thumbnail, he thought of looking for his knife, but now the jetty needed his attention. There were two horses to pull the cart, one pawing the ground with a hoof as the driver fed it an apple. He averted his eyes as the priest's wife shifted her skirt,
Peter would be chatting Charlotte up, laying siege to her larder and his wine cabinet, but mostly he'd be out walking and sketching. He rose early, working until mid afternoon, then eating, resting, and carousing.
By now they could see the priests' dock, not far from the flat rocks where the children swam, where he sometimes went to sit and look out at the fjord, watching the skiffs and double enders pass. He’d spent most of one summer contemplating this scene while struggling to loosen Oda’s grip on his heart.
The priest felt his text slipping out of his grasp. He was proud of it, a theme begun at seminary and then expanded. Like funerals, weddings were a chore, especially if he had no real knowledge of the families. The couples stood there, anxious to be off, yet wanting to hear themselves named and honored. His piece did the job, even if every young person attending found it ludicrous. And he knew it by heart.
"That's exactly what she wrote! You know her well!" This reverberated among them for a moment. "What does he say to these couples when he marries them?" he asked. The priest answered for her. “The verities faith, hope, and charity. The parents love it.” She nodded. “You may have an opportunity to try it on us,” Magnus said. “Our third son is headed for marriage.” Smiles broke out. “Such good news! But surely the wedding will be in town?” He shook his head. “The young woman loves it here. She’s a romantic like our artist friend.” The priest’s wife turned to her husband. “You’ll have to write a new piece for them!”
At last, the road flattened out, the church first and the priest's house after it. The cart stopped and they all
then clambered up to take his seat, shaking the reins. The road from the pier turned and angled up to meet the road that came down the hill. The other way would take them near the rocks, past the white clapboard house with its wide, unfenced lawn. A swim would be nice, Magnus thought, as the cart began its slow ascent. The hillside was thick with trees and ferns. Here and there the edge dropped away so the tips of the trees were at eye level. In early spring, the road still dark and wet, this could be an unnerving half hour. "Charlotte wrote me a letter, Magnus,” the priest’s wife said. She waited for him to ask about its contents, but he nodded. "Strange you haven't seen her," he said, "but her garden takes all her attention at first. After that, she'll be round for a visit."
Ten years since his father died, a wall in view. You end up pressed against it, only touch to tell you where you are, crawling or laid out like a corpse, what's left of your hair grazing the footing. When your father dies, your first instinct is to bolt, but that door has already shut behind you. Yet how life quickens from moment to moment from your mother's swelling ears right through to that last tinge of orange! And those women! He pictured them in Heaven Charlotte, Kat, and Oda. They'd laugh at the folly of their quarrels.
Charlotte would cook and Magnus would host. Later, he’d retire to his room and Kat would join him, loosening her hair, her eyes meeting his. The thought aroused him. That will survive death, Swedenborg assured him. At the rise, the woods opened onto a field, an old barn at the far end of it. Like the woods, the field was his, farmed by a tenant. And there, at the edge of the road, Peter sat, painting the barn. He shifted slightly as he worked, looking like a peasant in his straw hat and loose, long sleeved work shirt. If a subject pleased him, his endurance was remarkable, but it was also penance for a winter of earnest if partial dissolution.
got out. "I'll walk from here," Magnus said, paying the driver. "I'll ask Charlotte about a dinner," he added to the priest's wife. "I'm here for a week, so you'll see more of me than you can stand, probably." She smiled and shook her head. “Perhaps I can help you rework the wedding piece,” Magnus said to the priest. Later he remembered how once after making love he'd said to Charlotte that it seemed consequential because the couple brought their ancestries along, generations upon generations, "like two colliding constellations."
Magnus glanced sideways at the cemetery wall and its low gate. The long sleep of death, or is it Swedenborg’s nap and then more of the same, stripped of its illusions?
Across the road from the field and barn was a long allée of linden trees, the summer house’s back entry. Originally part of the parish, seized and sold off in the Reformation. the land crossed the main road, taking in the woods and fields around the old Romanesque church, now Lutheran, and its jetty. The priest and his wife leased out a remnant of it, which supplemented his stipend. Magnus got some cash and crops from his tenant, but their livelihoods didn't depend on it. The summer house was like a ship anchored in the wood, he thought, its larder below decks, a trapdoor in the kitchen with a ladder, a raised front porch and steps, and a veranda out back surveying all he owned a private joke, as Charlotte ran the house, chose its yellow color, gave the dinners, oversaw the garden, and the rest. Only the dog was his. Small tawny birds flitted along the edge of the path. They made their homes in the trees and bushes, invisible except for their chirping. In town, they’d land boldly on a chair or table, demanding food. Here, there was no need. Once the children found a baby bird in the garden, covered with ants. They brought it inside, raised it in a box and then in a wicker wastebasket turned upside down. When it came of age, they taught it to fly by throwing it gently back and forth. Once it got the knack, it moved out to the garden, but sometimes flew through the house, greeting them.
He crossed the road. The sun was high up, warmer here than at the dock. He shaded his eyes with his hand. "Peter!" he called out, and his friend turned, nodding in acknowledgement. Reaching him, Magnus put a hand on his shoulder and glanced at the painting. "I’ve painted for hours, only stopping to piss," he said. "Don't tell the farmer!" "It's my land, piss where you want. How do you like my barn?" Magnus asked him. "It's a revelation. I'll dream about it all winter."
Like my grown sons, he thought, rarely seen yet also close at hand, present in brief moments, flashing their smiles, giving Charlotte a kiss. Their outside lives figured now, but the house was still a desired place in summer, and for some of their young women, also. A week ahead to catch up. In the summer, it was harder to do this kind of work reading and editing manuscripts. This was what set books in motion, the meetings with authors and printers, planning, exhorting all the things a publisher did. The success of his school maps was unexpected, and he was made a Knight, with a medal and sash Charlotte made him wear to grand social events. Her estimation of him rose. The success of translations and books aimed at the Norwegian diaspora raised his stock still further. He never cut a flamboyant figure the way Leon did when he dazzled Charlotte and they went off together, but he began to fit the part she foresaw for him when they first married. Their life together mended and improved.Thereare two poles, and he and Charlotte moved from one to the other, Greta told him. It seemed true. Other partners brought their polarities out and suppressed their native ambiguities. For Charlotte, Leon was the necessary man. Twenty years since he captured her heart and upended things. Older and childless, he found Charlotte irresistible. For her, it was an excursion back in time. But here was the house! Her garden hummed with bees. It was pleasure enough just to breathe it in. Charlotte looked at it approvingly, framed now in the open doorway layers of herbs, flowers, and vegetables that formed squares within a square, separated from the house by a terrace, and from the woods by gravel paths and hedges, "like the French," as Peter had put it. She’d nodded exuberantly, pouring him another cup of tea. His comment set her mind wandering. She pictured a
conservatory at the back of the garden, extending into the woods like the Dutch reclaiming land from the sea, a second terrace and four beds to make a small park. "Magnus will take it over," Peter laughed when she told him. "He’ll be out there working, surrounded by your orchids." She considered this. He sometimes wrote in the garden, but she rarely read any of it, preferring novels to his essays and poems. For her, writing was a talent like cooking you were born with it. It had passed through her to their second son, "a writer like his father." But then her younger daughter was also a writer, like Charlotte’s sister Astrid. It was a bond between those two and Magnus. Out in the sun, she surveyed her beds. Informed by advice from all quarters and from her own reading and observations, the garden played out its envisioned possibilities. In the winter, the house in town and her properties occupied her, but a piece of her was always here, picturing how it could be, what could be added or taken away. How eager she was to get here, to work on it and see it flourish. Only certain things mattered, she felt, and the garden was one. She placed it in the genus family, along with Magnus, the children, the houses, properties, and furnishings their whole realm, much of acquired through her efforts. Magnus had risen in her eyes and she had stayed with him despite the pull. She shook her head to dispel the memory. Leon was Leon, with his black eyebrows, sardonic grin, and unambiguous desire. Every woman needs her wolf, his hunger for her visible on his face. But how many of her friends who'd left their marriages for another had found happiness? The scandal of it led many of them to live abroad. Impractical, she concluded.
Ruthless, she thought as she tore out the weeds she’d done exactly as she liked. Although she felt that Magnus had acted similarly, she saw the toll it took on
him. So much was left unspoken between them, yet it was all there in plain sight, the souvenirs of her trips with Leon here and there in her rooms, and his diaries, daybooks, and correspondence, the life he wrote out, there to be read, had she chosen to do so. It was not a surprise to her when Kat's man appeared one morning, waving a sheaf of letters. She recognized the small, hard-to-read script and the paper. Rein him in, Kat's man demanded. Magnus is a poet, she told him, and people get carried away. Don't take it so seriously. He looked at her incredulously. “The devil,” he said. So, Kat was the heart of this quarrel, Kat who she liked, who also enjoyed her garden and gave her advice and books, with a husband who was the jealous god of his centrality. Did Kat want to marry Magnus? She hoped not. He was married, after all. And now her garden was taking form, the house and grounds her canvas, the summer her chance to remake them, drawing on all the places she'd visited. It was all there to mull over, try out, see what worked. In between their separate lives was their real life, she felt, and this house and its garden made their contribution to it. It was always her sense that if you made them beautiful, everything else would follow. She said this once to Magnus, at a moment when the full weight of the affair with Leon pressed on their marriage, and it seemed incongruous to her as she said it. Yet it was true: their marriage was bound up in these two places and their family. Her love for Magnus was part and parcel of her love of them, an indissoluble whole. Magnus was still in his dream when he awoke, the clothes in his closet and the books on his shelves swaying as if a hidden current ran through the room. He struggled to hold on to it, then the room became itself again. He could hear Charlotte talking to herself, among other sounds in the house. He thought of
Peter’s small, efficient brushstrokes as the barn took shape on his canvas, every nuance set down. He'd been with Peter when he met Kat, standing on a train platform. They were returning from a lecture. Away, visiting a son, he realized how much he desired her. In his mind, his heart had several chambers. Charlotte had staked her claim early, but others might be admitted. Oda came and went, not without considerable pain, but Kat seemed to have a place there already, as if he’d long expected her.
No such intuition preceded Oda’s declaring her love He watched his desire for her uncoil, wondering if Charlotte saw Leon similarly, as a pure type demanding its opposite. Later, incensed, Oda took their time together and threw it in his face. “So soothing,” she mocked. He was reminded how the cremated dead end up as ashes in pots, all their beauty and substance burned away. And which version was true? Perhaps both. Even ashes have value, Charlotte reminded him. We arrive with our inheritance: writing from his father, intuition and devotion from both parents, his love of women from his mother's father. And a compass of a kind to cross the ravines and deserts of midlife, bleak and yet sometimes as radiant as Charlotte in her garden or Kat's face in the setting sun. Is this destiny or just happenstance?
A wedding set piece came to him: “Life unfolds. You follow the rules until they diverge from life, really diverge, and you understand that it’s just you and your compass. Meanwhile there are children to raise and work to do. What's real persists and what isn't falls away. Life answers so many questions, and you learn to wait and trust your own ways of knowing. Marriage has primacy because so much orbits around it, but how you honor it can’t be prescribed. This is the one truly private thing, about which no one else can venture an opinion, although of course everyone will. Ignore
Supper was in the air, and he roused himself. He heard Peter's soft voice in the garden and saw him talking with a younger man. Magnus brushed his hair and then went downstairs. He overheard Charlotte in the kitchen talking in English with the other guest. Light poured in through the windows. He made his way to the garden where Peter sat enraptured by this young and handsome visitor. "Mr. Grant," he said to Magnus. Grant nodded. "Gunnar met us, but he went on into town. Something about a girl." On the table was Peter's open sketchbook. "He’s painting my barn." Magnus said. "Oh, but in my haste, I forgot the essentials!" He went back into the house, this time to the kitchen where he introduced himself to the other young man and then fetched wine and cigars. Looking out at Charlotte's garden as he descended, he thought how methodically she gave it form. Writing wasn’t like this. The barest hint of an idea floated in, prompting him to add more and more, with no apparent thread. Yet it would gradually emerge, tying one idea to another. It always amazed him when the piece finally took shape. Charlotte only expressed satisfaction or dissatisfaction with her garden, never amazement. How she cooked was closer to how he wrote: children and servants scrambled to obtain missing items as the meal emerged, delicious. Like her garden, it displayed her mind's clarity. Magnus's several desks were always in order, but whatever he was writing reflected his innately discursive nature. He set the bottle on the table and stepped back to light a cigar. "I'll have one later," Peter said. "So, gentlemen, what news from England? Surely a new era is upon you." Grant nodded. "Yes, and some aren’t
them. Now kiss, enjoy the party, go forth and multiply. It will be fine. You're not the first.” I should give this to the priest, he thought. Enough of his verities.
Grant thought of his own encouraging parents The sympathetic Bussy saw his promising future, but the Slade’s dreadful Tonks only saw his own reflection.
pleased." It was like a door opening onto a new world, he felt. Now here he was, visiting this summer house with a family friend who’d fallen in love with him. How could he stanch the wound he was about to make? All those sketches had reduced his friend to a pair of shoes and his remarkably long legs.
Magnus surveyed the table, with its plates and platters, crystal and silver, and all the linen this heaping up of things that played off the simplicity of the house, modest by the standards of the times and made of wood instead of stone or brick. The painted walls with their portraits and landscapes, the flowers on the credenza, the old brass sconces with their candles they were part of this place, bathed now in summer's light. The others made their way to the table. Magnus poured the wine, then sat down at one end, with Charlotte at the other. He remembered suddenly how she'd passed him, her hair tied up, talking softly to herself, and then gave him a meaningful look. It was on the eve of her long trip, a student adventuress in southern Europe. Soon after her return, they married.
"How are his children?" he asked his visitors. One of his English authors had died of cancer a few months before. "They sold their parents’ house," Grant’s friend said. "Gerald's trying to marry off the girls." Magnus thought of their father's long, morose face. The beauty of the women was legendary. “I wouldn’t think they’d lack for suitors,” he said. "They shun society," Grant's friend replied. "They're lucky they can resist the pressure," Charlotte added. Lucky too that the girls' parents were dead, she thought to herself. The mother was just as impossible as the father, pandering to that tyrant while ruining her health trying to help the poor.
Magnus’s mind was on the barn. Photographs had their place, like the panorama of the family gathered for their wedding anniversary. They were given as gifts, signs of descent or lateral ties. He and Charlotte had their own collection, most of them in albums and a few displayed, but paintings by real artists mattered. The barn had waited for Peter to examine it and capture its grooves and striations. Magnus was well aware of the barn's beauty, but was no painter. His namesake son liked to paint, but architecture was his calling.
Grant, his friend, and Peter went off on a walk. Charlotte and Magnus went outside. It was almost eleven, but it felt like late afternoon. From her chair on
"They bought a house in town and are living on their own," Grant’s friend said. Charlotte nodded. "Very sensible. Their brother must be in a panic.” Magnus reflected how their father lost his belief but, for all his learning and perception, clung doggedly to the habits of his class. His daughters finally cut the cord. Gerald's bewilderment would only grow as the whole edifice the very order of things that kept his world aloft started wobbling. Who knows where it would lead? "I'll be at the Slade in the autumn," Peter said. Grant looked over. "Tonks is a dead hand there." Peter nodded in agreement He’d been asking himself if painting in the academic style made any sense. "It might be better if I left the barn to the photographers," he said aloud. "As long as they have eyes, that barn will have painters," Magnus said. "As long as they have hearts," Charlotte added. Peter granted them this.
Grant thought about Peter's impending visit. He'd heard that Peter had a harem of young women at the academy; he and Charlotte had an easy familiarity that spoke to his harmlessness. He knew the type, mostly chaste but catching the odd fish, hooked almost incidentally. Or allowing himself to be caught.
the terrace, Charlotte looked around her. All that work was paying off. A low hum of bees persisted, along with the sounds of birds and of distant barking. Soon they'd hold the summer party that brought out neighbors and town folk, a mix that seemed to work despite the social differences among the guests. Magnus breathed in the summer's fecundity. Kat might be knitting, her children running around, free of parental restraint. How often she recounted her daily round, with wry observations, wearing one of those sweaters that to him were the purest expressions of her heart. But he knew this picture was idyllic. An idealist, a freethinker, Kat longed for a life without convention's boundaries, free to love whom she chose and be herself, out in the open and unapologetic. It was a dream many shared, the promise of this new century, and sometimes it seemed that it would come true. Yet Kristiana was provincial, barely tolerant of artists and writers, and hostile to deviance, especially from women. As the old century gave way to another, plays, novels, and paintings spoke of resistance. He was torn between wanting to ignore convention and knowing that his hedonism arose from anguish, pure desire, and injured vanity. The need to be cautious for Kat's sake, to avoid scandal and her husband's wrath, forced them into the shadows despite Magnus's intention and her desire.
PART 2. THE TURNING OF THE YEAR pursuedpermissibltheactivejustsawitsitfamiliesreckoningsagainstleddinnerherupconspiratoralwaystoandunavoidablearosewoulddoorsandCharlotte'sTheChristmasAATAndblessedbethefirstsweetsufferinghatIfeltinbeingconjoinedwithLove,ndthebow,andtheshaftswithwhichIwaspierced,ndthewoundsthatruntothedepthsofmyheart.noiseandaromaofthekitchenfilledthehouse.sisterAstridwasbaking,andthecomingsgoingsbetweenthetwohousesweremarkedbyopeningandclosing.Soon,thetwofamiliesgatherfordinner.AresistancetothisinvasioninMagnus,asitalwaysdidwhenfacedwiththingsthathecouldn'treallylivewithoutyetdreaded.Charlottewasinherelementatthesedinners,alivethethrongandfestiveinitspresence.MagnushopedthatAstridwouldsitbyhim,acoinsomeway,althoughshesteadfastlyheldtradition.Evenmorelooselytetheredtotimethansister,herpiesweretheclockbywhichthesesweretimed.Thetwokitchens,thusattached,somegueststohandicaponesister'soptimismtherealityoftheother'sovencentered.Noteveryonewasattheirtable.Somehadothertoconsider.MagnuswouldgiveanaccountofinhisNewYear'sDayletter,summinguptheyeareventsandtravels.Othersmaderesolutions,buthethedayasastoppingpoint,takinginwhatwascrossedbeforesettingoutagain.Christmaswasalotofwork,butCharlottewasbynature,distrustfulofslowingdown.Tofinddaybed,readanovel,anddriftoffintoanapwase.buttofailtorallyandpursuewhatshewasimpossible.Thatshewastiredwas
undeniable. but Christmas dinner, like the demands of the midsummer party, was what the season required. She liked winter's chill and the way a full moon brought the bare trees alive. Magnus struggled with it. He longed to flee south, but his business kept him here. They traveled when she organized it. When his namesake son was in Berlin, they went there, but now he was in America, likely for good. They went to Paris, a daughter in tow who stayed on to perfect her French, and paint and sculpt. Sometimes she went on her own. Their natures and proclivities differed, and she could only follow hers where they took her. It's then that the familiarity of marriage rubs raw, she thought, and the absences that arise from yearning and unhappiness prove abrasive to others, although this isn't the intent. You follow your instinct, but it's more than that not just your animal nature but also your human imagination. You have to feed it something new. There were strains, but she viewed it all as part of what you experience in life, sooner or later or sooner and later, perhaps. You let the dinner wine burn off. You go upstairs before the last guests depart, drained by their company. This is how it is with you, Magnus, the opposite of Charlotte, although you hear her saying aloud how tired she is as she quits the table and heads upstairs, leaving the cleaning up to others.
Two women you loved come back to you, often at the edges of sleep. They were the leitmotif of your unhappiness with Charlotte, and now they surface in fragments. Grief is like a rogue wave that catches you unaware, and these fragments are their afterlife. Making love, arousal is a bodily perception with its own momentum. You remember all of it, but the conversations are still the most memorable. Looking back at this decade, you see how desire mixed with
domesticity, a kind of web women spin unconsciously that's like starting again without exactly leaving off.
Oda needed you and then dispensed with you. Her need, which you shared, was to restore her sense of self in bed, to be actively wanted there. Kat wanted to reclaim her freedom. Eventually, badgered by her jealous man, she wanted out and wanted you. Possession governs everything, one could say, whether a gift or a demand. Love can't be coerced, a thought that saved your marriage. It applied equally to you. You saw what you saw, all the signs the gods put there as you acted out this play of their devising. You read into them, but life alone grants you knowledge. If you forged a particular path, it wasn't for lack of trying to forge others as they arose unexpectedly, plausibly. Charlotte did so, too. You have this unspoken tie.
This English custom was always clear of obligations. Even Charlotte kept society at bay. It was a good day to consider the year as experienced and its reflections. The latter were often memories of what was said or done, pertinent again. His reverie the night before came back to him how these women figured despite time passing. It seemed foreordained but the meaning of their connection had to be worked out endlessly, with constant revision. He longed for a correspondent like himself who would write unhesitatingly about her emotional life, providing a context and valuing what he might write in reply. A man who desires a woman can only be a sage when the mind that speaks from her heart is desired for itself. A sage is what a man becomes when he finally takes up his real work. When his body is desirous, his mind follows along, improvising and observing. All of it comes back, but as scenes, vivid as paintings but of course in motion, unfolding not as they happened but as in dreams, taking liberties with time
Boxing Day
and space to serve the fragment's reason for being, seen in a brought back to mind state. A glimpse of it opens other doorways that give out to other scenes that feelings etched onto memory. His mind goes there involuntarily, prompted by some spark. Magnus saw in retrospect how he craved a domesticity that was bound up in the telosof expectations, a source of hope and then of betrayal when it proved impossible. But this was like his need for and difficulty sustaining a social life. His marriage kept it all in rough balance. It took two forays to show him the futility of adding to its complexity. How you, Magnus, try to reconcile your material success and its tangible signs with the pull of your inner life. Not unique in this, of course. Along the pier in the summer, you see the survivors of winter's bitter destitution, older men who live on luck and charity, but perhaps have notebooks of poetry, sketches, novellas that slip from grasp or are brought along to be found by relatives, landlords, or the police. Many are mad, of course, or too sapped by their lives to do much. What if their lives had been different? How much money does it really take to be sheltered? Not as much as you've spent on bourgeois life, the summer house and house in town, the children sent abroad for school.
You look over at your notebooks and manuscripts, products of your inner life. Even the letters, gathered and tied with string, have more reality than what your outside work generated. In a generation or two, the houses will be sold off and the family dispersed. What will persist? A lineage of Charlotte's beauty and your instinct for it, of the words that flow from you, facile but undisciplined? To the authors, you're midwife to their creativity. If work is a marriage, you're the wife. They'll break into your rooms and find you've been unfaithful to your station. What will they make of it? You long sometimes to declaim it or hand out copies, but this would be ridiculous. You could publish with a
pseudonym, but whiffs of vanity attach to this. Only your writer daughter has any sense of how much is there the long, full shelf she calls your archipelago.
Your late London friend produced a book for his family that his daughters likened to the houses of the dead. Such books are the ephemera that life sloughs off, mistaking for an anchorage a buoy loose in a storm.
The long shelf invites destruction. Only an archival spirit would hang on to it, and that seems unlikely. Once a boat took you, Magnus, to Oda's island, Christian elsewhere to make room for you, their cottage overlooking the harbor of the fishing village where he'd gone to paint, sick of town and his grand depictions of its hypocrisy. With Oda in residence, Christian had fallen in love with Tine, a young widow with children. Expectations were in the air. You brought Oda a gift, a dark blue housecoat to propitiate their household gods. You helped prepare the food, sharing her domain. Your also shared her bed in a room that faced the water, its curtains blowing outward whenever the wind caught them. Lack of imagination and courage this is the charge sheet. Did you really think that time could expand to meet the demands you put on it? Love's radical proximity slows time down, but that elasticity doesn't carryKatoverfigures in your poems. She was a phenomenon like weather if weather had a heart and desired. Now she's vanished, yet sometimes a loose spirit, the way a shaman, unsure of her powers, might manifest herself. You know a bit about that, how the everyday opens and you glimpse something else. You stake your life on it, but there's too much else in the picture, and not just forYouyou.were at the market when she struck you, not hard but hard enough. It was then that you might have called a halt, but even then, it would probably be resented. With Oda, you kept your hopes alive as
Close observation gives you their unforgettable natures and occasionally you see it. They laugh despite themselves, prompting feelings you thought were gone, triggered when they let down their guard. In the heat of it, Charlotte thought, there's nothing you won't do. You're afraid, but your fear makes you brave and you brazen it out at home and abroad. You let yourself get swept up in the world of this other, with its occasions, galleries, dealers, and studios. An outsider in Kristiana, Leon was its emissary from the perspective of his local clientele and those he visited, a go-between or arranger. In Berlin, Paris, or Milan, you were an exotic from the far north, but they soon realized you were revisiting their cities, had studied there when young, owing to parents whose emulation of their continental peers took in their daughters. You were fearless then, traveling alone to the Levant, evading the predators. So much seen, and then you saw it again with an insider who was there for business. His days were taken up with it, but at night there were lavish dinners where he showed you off. It made you happy, those displays, but it was a relief to come home even if life was arduous with Magnus rattled and unhappy. You could no longer abide him close, which threatened the marriage and eventually didn't. You left him alone as he worked his way through it, gloomy, elated, and wary in turns.
everything fell apart. She needed a partner, not an unreliable fellow sufferer.
Unlike art, a property can be tended like a garden, with regular harvests to show for it. A portfolio of them gives you constant fodder for dinner-table conversation as you rehearse your interactions with the managers, the help, and all those tenants, many of them visitors to this provincial outpost. You've gained a web of connections from them, with letters beginning, "I heard from my cousin that you can help us find a place to live when my husband takes up his post. We have
three girls, two, four, and nine." The King should pay you a stipend, Magnus jokes. Young and insecure, these women rely on you to find their footing. Some become friends, invited over, but they all treat you with deference. Not like the local tenants bachelors, spinsters, and widows are a complaining bunch.
The omissions weren't as glaring as before. Life no longer tore at him, but stretched beyond its previous limits an opening out that's lawful to our species,
Professors are different their work takes them elsewhere and they become emissaries to colleagues in need of temporary quarters. Some of them come north to avoid the oppressive heat of their summers. Your oldest son takes on more of it. He doesn't always heed your advice, but he understands you better and has some feeling for it. You have good managers. It's possible to detach yourself, but then you miss it. You made this life consciously. You argue against yourself sometimes and Magnus always replies, "No, Charlotte, you've accomplished a great deal." Not that you believe him, but in the end, you do.
The social round was over. The new year staggered toward the light. Once past the solstice, Magnus awaited spring, but the dead of winter lay between. Some thrive on it, but he didn't. He turned now to the task at hand a summing up at the cusp, that brief belvedere between two terrains, the past clearer and the future the point of the exercise. He opened his diary. When he looked back at his entries, he noted what was missing. What we expect or demand of ourselves, what we resolve, comes with an awareness that we're unlikely to do things that go against our nature. A specific resolution, made at any point for a pressing reason, may be carried out, but this is rare enough that others note it. What's desired more often comes to pass, and then we have to live it out, learning what the gods had in mind.
New Year's Day
What if he'd married Oda in the wake of Christian's abdication or married Kat? He'd never thought about these outcomes, believing they were impossible. More children, no doubt, and the unfolding of another marriage. This summer house would have gone unbuilt. His unexpected success provided the money for it, but Charlotte's legacy made that extravagance possible. Oda had no children, but Kat's brood would have to be absorbed, her tyrant appeased. Or not, the children a bone of contention. Losing Oda made him wary of passion and aware that Kat was immersed in it. These shifted symmetries run through life, despite our efforts to do no harm. We make grievous errors, always imagining that what catches out the rest will exempt us.
Marriage makes you hunger for the knowledge of another. It's clear that women share this, but their fecundity makes it riskier, not just because of pregnancy but that everything is freighted by it. Accounts of other cultures suggest this isn't inevitable, but here we are in the once pagan, ever patriarchic north. We hunger nonetheless.
respecting time's gravity, its narrowness and endlessness, the fecundity of what seems arid and lifeless. In spring, this was most evident. When his firstborn arrived in May, a friend said he was the result of Saturnalia, when license was granted and taken. How much more so here at midsummer drunken evenings and rutting universal. It once tortured him, those sounds of lovers in the fields and woods, and he alone and bereft. Grief's double, he saw later, although it took a layer of skin from him
What made his marriage to Charlotte possible was the autonomy they allowed themselves. There's a school of marriage that seeks confessions and sees conduct as so many rules, infractions, and penalties a lawyer's brief of indiscretions. But their life together was the sort of partnership that builds an enterprise. They were like two business partners who meet
In high summer, she spent six weeks there, never going into town. She'd made a practice of it ever since Magnus built the house, testing the mettle of her managers and her own tendency to intervene. It was a controlled experiment, like the garden itself, with much hands on preparation. Six weeks would pass and then, without fanfare, she'd go back for a week to see how things stood. If they stood well, then back for another three. She liked the bracing cold of winter, but daily life was slowed by it. The world outside was harsh and many suffered who lacked shelter. She supported a school for indigent girls. The boys, she felt, had more options. God help the old and alcoholic, those ruined by their own folly. She gave money for their relief. Summer was a release from this she felt it in the streets. Those who survived were out carousing, first from gratitude and later from the panic that penury induces. It was a release, but temporary. She thought of Ceres. If her garden had a temple, it would honor her. She knew women who fled south, but she'd been in
regularly with a loose agenda and the affection of deep familiarity. These quarrels were soon forgotten as they discussed what mattered to them both. We think of ourselves as adepts, even alchemists, but experience is the only thing life gives us. More and more aware of life's perils, we're cautious, but having survived our mishaps, we find ourselves exchanging known perils for unknown ones. It's our nature to experiment, and yet we're walled in by a culture that condemns us for it Charlotte opened her notebook and wrote the date. Then she drew an outline of her garden and its beds, picturing them as she did so. It brought to mind her resolutions for it as the summer waned. With her pencil, she sketched some changes, mapped out what might be planted where. She saw herself in the midst of it, clearing and planting, adding a path or a terrace, trimming things back before they all revived.
It didn't take much to bring them to mind. Like Magnus, from what she could glean from his writing, but her garden made them tangible. Did Ceres spend the winter mapping out the beds where Persephone would sleep, free of her consort's grip? And what was her life like with him in Hell? Not as bad as people made out, Charlotte guessed. The epigram is Petrarch's Canzoniere, sonnet 61, stanza 2, translated into English by A.S. Kline. (Started around 2005 and completed in 2020.)
Venice one February when the cold, damp air was matched by buildings that were never heated. That time, when she cut her teeth on difference, stayed with her. Something of it is in the garden, she realized herbs, bits of color and light and texture. Bits of elsewhere were here, too fragments seen, memories.
Memoir
4 January 2014
A Sort of a Memoir
The year after I got my B.A., I worked at the oldest private library west of the Mississippi, as it styled itself. My colleagues were older women, like characters from a Tennessee Williams play, I thought at the time. The men among the coupon clipping old money patrons were often drunk after lunch, smelling of onions and alcohol. I couldn’t help but take these things in. Cautionary tales are useful when you’re young, showing you what to avoid. I remember thinking this later when, having lunch with
3 January 2014
Stendhal uses three different memoir writing strategies: inmediares, placing the reader at some middle point in the life from which the years that led up to it are recounted; starting from childhood, which Stendhal characteristically uses to show a certain authorial self consistency; and the coming-of-age recapitulation that gets the hero from mere youth to the beginning of maturity. The first two can be found in his Memoirsofan Egotistand HenriBrulard, and the third in the opening chapter of his great last novel, TheCharterhouseof Parma.Stendhal wrote MemoirsofanEgotist10 years after meeting the object of his fixation. She dies in between, he eventually reveals, but his obsession with her persists. I can understand this. The book closes with an account of an assignation that he and a friend have with two English prostitutes. Bringing a repast of food and wine along, they make a party of it and the women are charmed their English clients are not as thoughtful. Stendhal praises their chestnut hair, his spirits momentarily recovered. The impression he leaves us with is of a man who is haunted by his great love and yet is clearly and observantly in the world. And despite his faithfully rendered day-to-day activities and distractions, we never doubt his single minded devotion to her.
The most beneficial work I did between undergraduate and graduate school was as a term paper ghostwriter. To make a decent hourly rate, I had to write every paper in six hours or less, so I developed a method and also honed my writing to the bone. In one case, I had to write five papers on different topics for the same class, so I varied my tone. Every paper got an A from whoever was grading them at Stanford. When, six weeks into the job, I was offered work at an architecture firm, I quit. It turned out I was the ghostwriting shop’s only writer, and they closed down after I left. The benefit for me was that I lost my awe of academia, or whatever you call it.
ToLaterwant to live parallel lives is in keeping with our human sense of self. We embody different roles without much difficulty, navigating life’s predictable contexts in a manner that more or less meets others' expectations, so it seems reasonable to push this further. One problem we
The term paper mill’s one sop to ethics was to make the students propose their own theses. This was a mistake they were often completely wrong and I'd have to argue the negative, since I couldn't change them. I managed to pull this off: on the job rhetoric.
colleagues, I saw two old businessmen sitting near us, both veritable rhinoceroses in appearance owing to decades of eating the same fare we were consuming.
I learned from this that I could write quickly on any topic handed me. My method was straightforward. I found a general source that gave me the basic plot. Volumes of the 1920s era EncyclopediaBritannica, on which Wikipediais supposedly based, were great for this. Then I would find two or three plausible current sources, quickly absorb their theses and grab some quotes and added references sometimes found near them in the stacks, which is not something that could happen easily today. Then I would write. It helped that I’m a fast and accurate typist. I never polished the papers too thoroughly, which lent them authenticity.
encounter is the inelastic nature of time. It’s true that time slows down in certain situations, but this is not the same as having more of it at your disposal. We often push this further because we want our lives to be bigger or fuller than they seem. The opportunities to do so arise with what appears to be uncannily good timing. If they didn’t, they would be easier to resist. My own experience suggests that our ability to lead parallel lives is limited. What we really want is separate lives a life here, a life there, with time and space between them. That would really be ideal, not to say convenient. Some reputedly arrange their lives in this manner, but I’ve never been able to pull it off. If we’re honest about it, what we really want is a life that’s both fluid and frictionless. We want the usual boundaries to come down. It’s a child’s view of things, I think, in which “choosing sides” is all part of the game. To a child, the point of living is to play, alone or with others. We go to school, of course, and clean our rooms, but our hearts long to make up stories or get a scene going. This persists.
MySeparatelydaughter came over this evening after writing me a long note in answer to a question about travel that I’d posed: How does it affect her? I said that placeto me is a totality conveyed in talk and writing, as well as experienced directly of how specific things look and feel, and are cherished, neglected, or reshaped, and how people are (or were) as we experience (or experienced) themOverthere.thecourse of my life, I’ve seen a great many places, uniquely themselves in a way that felt intrinsic, become “like the rest.” As business and tourism continue to search for still distinctive places, I imagine they're as endangered as the elephants and rhinos that roam Africa's savanna.
As a child in Singapore, crossing the adult filled garden of my parents’ parties, I was small for my age and my vantage point was low enough that the adults’ legs were like tree trunks, their upper torsos like spreading branches. Their attention meanwhile was at eye level. When I think of these parties, I think of the women in their long dresses, the men in their white suits and uniforms, and the Chinese lanterns aglow, strung across the garden. Once I talked an intoxicated RAF pilot into giving me his wings. To my dismay, he came sheepishly back the next day to reclaim them. I think my mother explained to me that he couldn’t fly without them. These days I float in and out of parties, departing as quietly and quickly as I can. This is not to slight these parties, all of which seem perfectly fine.
While an element of bossiness floats through life, mandatoryis a broad, resistible category for me, taking in other people’s ideas of how I should spend my time and even the consequences of my earlier, positive decisions to attend parties, openings, concerts, dinners, and other events. Travel also creates a sense of dread as the date of departure looms, not out of any fear of traveling, but from a countervailing desire to stay home. Knowing that I will invariably resist, I try willing myself through it. I think this resistance, this sense of dread, relates to the desire to lead parallel lives: events seem appealing in prospect, and are of course the source of all that we draw on in retrospect, but we have to live through them, experience them, to gain it. Despite their allure, there are times when we’d prefer that someone else went and did the living for us. (I believe V.S. Pritchett made this same point about writers in general their bifurcated lives.)
5 January 2014
At the urging of a colleague, I once took the Meyers Briggs personality test, learning that I’m an INFJ, the least prevalent of its types. One trait was familiar: craves company and then flees it unexpectedly. That’s not resistance, I thought when I read it it’s self-preservation.
Kosho Uchimaya, a 20th-century commentator on Soto Zen, explained what "mind" means from that perspective Our world, he wrote, lives and dies with us. Mind is everything that ever existed for us, accumulated across our lifetime. No one else can experience it as we did, so reading it written out is like encountering the residue of the spray on a sea facing window in some cottage we
ILaterread
V.S. Pritchett via Russell Banks that death is a mark of seriousness in literature, the “great matter” of the Buddhists. How we come to grips with mortality is a dance that began for me when I first realized that I would die. How we contend with the unavoidable fact of it varies with age. Later in life, the imagined perils of getting older seem worse than death itself, which can start to look like a relief. Borges notes that the old get impatient for death. Recently, I stood and watched an aged neighbor hobbling there’s no other word for it to her front door, a task that for her has become Herculean, like climbing the Alps. I wanted to rush over, but sensed that this would be unwelcome, that each one has her Alps to climb, that climbing them is the point.
nature is distinct from every other’s, yet we generalize constantly about how people fall into categories, as if only the categories really differ. We chalk a lot of behavior up to them, believing in their truth as part of our social navigating apparatus, a heuristic that keeps us from stopping every few minutes to figure out what just happened.
For me (and for Borges, I read recently), distinctiveness is all, especially in the closer relationships. The beloved one has these specific qualities of self, and every time I catch a glimpse of her, I’m reminded of every other time these qualities were evident. The thread of her distinctiveness is visible whenever it appears. I see it and remember, “You aren’t like anyone else.” The best gift of self that we can give each other is our distinctiveness.
EachSeparatelyperson’s
happen to visit. You can get a sense of the pounding waves or the way the sea smells at a certain distance, but how it was, beyond these images, and what it meant to someone else, is limited by the medium, the intent, and the impenetrable boundary between the other’s world and ours. A memoir, like poetry, tries to bridge this distance.
Is love not also a mark of seriousness? Love involves play, but play takes in death as well, long before we understand that death applies to us. From the start, love is a serious game: humanity depends on it. It exposes us to the perils of misunderstanding and the limits of our ability to shape events to suit our desires. It plunges us into unhappiness, almost from the outset. Still later
WelltemperedClavier, especially the second half of notebook one. Before that, my favorite was Keith Jarrett’s recording of some of Handel’s harpsichord suites. My life is organized in a habitual way, so that even my variants from habit soon become habitual.
Friends occasionally express amazement at the way I cram culture into short trips, but this too is a habit. I pack my days with activity because otherwise I’d get depressed. If this happens, I become lethargic when I’m really depressed, I hardly stir, which is difficult to pull off when traveling, as everyone wants you to circulate and of course you have to get up and go out to eat. My life was organized for me very early on. Whenever a structure is provided, I fall right in with it. Where it isn’t, I have to create one a slow, trial and error process. Weaving, which I do on most Saturday mornings, is an example of success in this arena. I have to extend it, I tell myself, thinking of everything that isn’t getting done, isn’t habitual, and needs to be an old, old story.
It’s characteristic of me to play the same music again and again. Right now, it’s Angela Hewitt’s version of Bach’s
One characteristic of contemporary life is that its disruptions erode my habits. Bookstores where I used to go have vanished. Music arrives in ways I can’t fully
WhenSeparatelyIread Claudio Naranjo’s EnneagramStructures, I saw that my enneagram number is seven. I thought I was a five or a nine, but he showed me that I’m a seven through and through. The flaws of this character type are to want to live in the future, not the present; to be dependent on personal charm to dodge the bullets of
IfReturnlovemaking is a kind of conversation between two souls, as Borges asserts, quoting a poet, then why does it always blow up? Is there a way to sustain it? These are the questions that arise. It should be simpler, but both parties have to see it that way first. The one psychic I know told me that relationships between men and women have children as their trajectory when fecundity is in the picture. Children are where it wants to go, whatever the conscious feelings of the participants may be. I think there’s some truth to this, based on my own experience. Getting older is therefore potentially liberating, freeing relationships to take other directions. When I look back at several relationships I had, I both wish they’d been friendships solely and don’t. What I really wish is for friendships to emerge that preserve their intimacy in new forms. Later in life, possibly, something like this can be regained, but I don’t know yet. What I do know is that love can emerge within friendship, and sometimes does. The reverse surely takes time and commitment you each have to become someone else to the other, yet still close. Then a true friendship may finally emerge. Whether it’s materially different than it might have been had you never become lovers is a question that can’t be resolved. It’s one of love’s questions, however.
fathom (and most of it isn’t the music I want). I have to decide and decide again which parts of “the new” really pertain and learn and relearn how to navigate the subtle ways the everyday is altered over time.
The diary form of this illustrates how I drag content onto the page. It reflects my lifelong tendency to plunge in without much if any prior design beyond an intuition of what might emerge. The fiction I enjoy clearly emerges from life experience, projected onto a subject as Penelope Fitzgerald did with TheBlueFlower. The book is about Novalis, but with a sensibility honed by her own life a sensibility with which Novalis resonated. She depicts the poet as a human being whose Bildungsromanfalters on the rocks of fate, time, circumstance all that conspires to keep the things life seems to promise him from happening. For Fitzgerald, the big event the lucky break was to live on to write, to live out and fulfill her destiny. It’s no small thing. Borges’s modesty and his superstitious wariness of hubris reflect his awareness that luck is luck In the end, we have to write, “just write,” and keep on writing, because, as with fishing, something good may eventually strike. It’s the only way.
6
interpersonal relationships; and (a related trait) to try to avoid anything remotely painful. January 2014
Some time ago, I dreamt I was walking in the middle of a curving, residential London street, the kind that’s lined with shade trees and row houses. There was no traffic. Looking down, I saw a thin gold ribbon embedded in the pavement. I pulled it out. In dark blue letters against the gold, it read, “You are an editor.” I didn’t argue. It also made me realize that I’m a writer of a specific type. I write well, and this ability has served me my whole career, but I don’t think I’m capable of writing anything longer than a chapter, and most of what I write is much shorter. When I look at what I’ve written, I see a miniaturist, a belletrist. This means that I have to treat many topics as fragments, if I can treat them at all, while others are perfectly suited to their small frame.
Not long ago, I read for the first time and with astonishment the poems of Wallace Stevens. This was in a 16th century house 30 minutes by car from Bayonne in
While I occasionally have ideas for stories, I can’t see where a story should go next. And where it usually goes is a blind alley, which is frustrating. I feel that the story has been hijacked, that its protagonists wouldn’t go there, and yet clearly, I took them in that direction. It takes more work, in other words, than I’ve been prepared to give, so hats off to the real writers of fiction!
France the house where I started “The Barn Partitas,” a sonnet series. The poem that particularly caught my eye was “Peter Quince at the Clavier.” On that same trip, at Daunt’s in London, I bought a copy of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel with its remarkable opening poem, the first line of which made me wonder how her suicidal impulse could possibly have overridden the everyday reality of her two young children. It could, clearly.
Again separately In 2005, a Sephardic friend in Tokyo suggested that my father’s family was Sephardic. I don’t know if it’s true, but certain things argue for it. My surname derives from a city, which is how the Sephardim named themselves. (An artist friend in San Francisco also noted this, but I didn’t
MySeparatelytopicsprobably begin and end with me. As Christopher Isherwood put it, “I am a Camera,” but the camera is holographic. My topics are meaningful to me, resonant. This doesn’t mean that other topics don’t figure, but how to work them in? When I think of another’s distinctiveness, I could cite the most specific details. In fiction, this might be useful, but in other kinds of writing, even poetry, it feels gratuitous and indiscreet. Some of my photo collages get into this territory. Art and fiction blur identity or subsume it to make a different point: not her but this. A fictional narrative could be useful, but my version of reality has been challenged often enough to make me wonder, with Hayden White, if every narrative isn’t fictive? Certainly, every narrative is subjective. (As White notes, none of them are “true.”)
A friend posted a short essay positing that a memoir isn’t really an autobiography, so you shouldn’t expect accuracy from it. Nabokov also made this point, only revising Speak,Memoryafter his sisters complained about certain “facts.” (“We weretooin Nice!” they insisted.)
12 January 2014
know the history of Jewish migrations in Europe well enough to take her remark to heart.) Parma had a large Sephardic community, granted the freedom of the city but then attacked invidiously, enviously, by others. History suggests that my family, who were bookbinders, part of the burgeoning printer trade that swept north and south in Europe, left Parma in the 1560s, traveling first to Germany and then splitting up, some going to Denmark and Norway, and others to Finland. The family bible records that “they were bookbinders, arriving in Odense in 1640.” Everyone after them is named. This was strange, my sister and I always thought. I read a late essay by Peter Drucker on the history of printing, a 200 year trajectory. My family headed north because the jobs were there the technology was taking hold, far from major printing centers like Parma. They came as experts. When they got there, I imagine they said, “Hi, we’re Italian. You’re Lutheran? What a coincidence, so are we.” When I look at my family in Norway, some look entirely Nordic, but others look like the portraits of Modigliani faces that could be from Andalusia or North Africa, elongated by generations of intermarriage with the natives. When I visited my daughter in the Alpujarra, I had an impulse to settle there. Madrid's a more likely destination, but something about her valley felt like home. If true, this must be a genetic memory. Is that possible?
Reviewers often assert that memoirs are “unreliable,” that other evidence contradicts them. But life happens in real time. No one sees things the same way.
One morning I visited a close friend who was seriously ill. He's gradually recovering. Noting that his life is now more bounded, he said he wanted to find things to do that fit this new reality. Weaving, which I’ve done for several years, is an example of what he meant. I understood. Many of the things I do are essentially domestic arts. I'm phlegmatic, although leavened with sanguinity.
I wrote a sonnet about mine that mocks my tendency to wait passively and contemplate life more than live it.
Inside the room, inside the head: one could write stories of such stasis: nothing goes right or wrong; there’s neither must do nor should. Around the desk, around the chair, life flows like a mysterious substance. Women come and go. The book lies upside down, tent of paper and board, small markings like Zen, those koans, so hard to read, if they meant anything to anyone else: doubtful. Cats also come and go. A jay lands, screams. The mind wanders in its confining skull. Somewhere, it thinks, a woman dreams or creams. Wake! A cloud of sanguinity draws close. A black bee, meandering, snorts a dose. This is true and not true, of course a phlegmatic temperament tolerates contemplation more readily than other types, producing insights that are mixed with a healthy dose of blankness. Yet there’s something crocodile-like about my type, apparently docile but springing into action when inspiration finally strikes.
This the temperaments is yet another means of characterizing our species, the third I’ve mentioned here.
19 January 2014
ILaterread an article about long lived Japanese and their doctors. The goal is a good quality of life. They cited a phrase, “Live life to the fullest and then die fast.” When I
sum my life up at the end of the year, there’s an illusion of activity, being here and there trying to maintain it. It’s a comical process, especially in company. The everyday is supposed to have less resonance than unusual events, and yet I crave it. Perhaps its resonance for me is a deeper one.
I'llPostscriptsoonbegin the final year of that transitional decade in life, one's sixties, arguably the vestibule of true old age. In Conversations, edited by Osvaldo Ferrari, Borges says that what separates us from other living things is our foreknowledge of death. I’m not sure I agree. Late in 1991, I saw an aquarium shared by several fish restaurants on an island in Hong Kong Bay. It was immediately clear that all captive life there, even the shrimp, were aware of their impending doom. What’s especially inhumane about capital punishment is the terror that attaches to it. Death as part of ordinary life seems different, part of its warp and weft the final part, inevitable and long anticipated, especially in the case of a long life well lived. When you’re my age, you’re more aware that your existence is no longer assured. The Zen idea of “getting breakfast on the table” becomes more useful as a prod to go on living, to contribute. “Who else would do it?” the old monk asked Dögen when he, a young student at a Chinese monastery, asked if the man wasn’t too old to be gathering firewood on a hot day. This is what I do, the old man said these are my roles in life, my purposes, how I pay for my upbringing. This discipline took hold of me early on, yet I still accuse myself of laziness. It seems best to write a memoir along the way, even if the plot has twists and turns up ahead. One can add to it episodically if there’s more to get down, but meanwhile it leaves a marker: “I made it to here.”
Walking2.
woman cries at the pier, thinking of the contrast between her unhappiness and the happiness of her ex husband. In the moment, nothing can really be said or done. She feigns the loss of a contact lens, and the conversation shifts. We've all been here, comparing our unhappy fates with the presumed happiness of others.
Late Summer
down the road earlier, the evening sun shone through a vast canopy of leaves, the whole scene made golden with its light. How often have I seen this? Yet I'm always struck anew by it. Beauty is never static. It constantly reveals something else. B3.eauty is animate, living in every expression and gesture. A photograph cannot capture it, but I remember all of it, down to the taste of an earring.
Perhaps she experienced the peculiar double vision of longing, which sees reality and then layers memory over it. The unreachable aspect wrenches your heart and you feel tom from it by this disrupted past. I thought later of the Buddha's comment, "When I was enlightened, I saw that everything was enlightened, even the rocks and grasses."
Standing5. in the moonlight on the still warm terrace this is the image her letter sets down. Walking earlier along
"People4. will start asking you your secrets," a friend said when I noted on its anniversary the duration of my marriage. What would I tell them? I suppose the first secret is that a marriage should persist and not be daunted by things that tradition frowns on. Tradition is generality, while marriage is all about the particulars.
A1.
eve of a long weekend, the traditional gateway separating summer and fall, I walked home, noticing that many leaves had fallen. Still more were yellow with the late summer's heat. I regret this progression into winter.
Soon my grown children will marry and, if the gods favor them, children will follow another gateway, one that marks the rise of a new generation. As that gate opens, a bell should sound. My parents were 31 when I was conceived, resettled outside New York City after the long separation of wartime. By the time I was six, I had circumnavigated the planet. We mostly traveled by ship, and my sense of geography was formed in real time by our progress from port to port, traversing from east to west. The postwar world we passed through was shaking loose of the old colonial powers.
This took place decades ago. Sometimes I shock people by mentioning things from my childhood. A man's life spans three generations, roughly. Beyond that is borrowed time, my father used to say. My mother's grandfather lived into his late 90s, gardening year in and year-out, unfazed by the heat. Something about that life of purposeful toil pulled him along. Not7. toil more like a steward's relationship to nature, whether it's the raising of children or the cultivation of a garden or a few acres. The work is cyclical rather than repetitive. Children grow; a garden or a small farm evolves from season to season. I8.stood on my friends' deck last night, under the stars, at this place with its redwood columns and the river, a world all its own. I swam twice, that delicious feeling you only get from being in a river amid small boats and the
the harbor, memories came pouring back. Every sense of her was alive again with their recollection. The6.
occasional bobbing head of another swimmer. The others sat on the small pier, tucked away between branches, hardly visible, the sun blazing to warm the water's surface. At dusk, the insects swarmed and the fish came up to eat them, their long, dark forms visible and the rings of water visible, too, wherever they emerged, ever so briefly, to feast on this or that flitting bug. Across the river there were tents pitched along the edge of a huge, rambling thicket that descends the bank. A heron flew just above the water, and then the crickets started in. This Sunday morning, the birds vie to be heard over the racket of the cars, already out in force. The others have gone to church, but I'm sitting here writing this.
"You've13. been here before," a friend said several years ago Am I here again? I don't think so. What14. I learned is that ego suffers from separation. "Don't cut me off!" This speaks to one of ego's specific fears. Cut off, it can become obsessed, depressed, incensed.
The15, notes to TheConferenceoftheBirdssay that the Sufis distinguished two souls, larger and smaller. The latter is called "the body of desire."
Marr11.iage goes through many adjustments, which makes it necessary to grant each other an independence that flouts the conventional view of marriage as hermetic and self sufficient. Can it ever be those things? I have no idea.
"Can12. it ever be these things?" One hears tales of married couples with legendary devotion. Were they hermetic and self sufficient, or were they just themselves?
The16.
Marriage17. is the primary but not the only relationship. There are others, the IChingsays, "of personal inclination, that depend in the long run entirely on tactful reserve." It adds, "Fix your mind on an end that endures, and you will succeed in avoiding the reefs that confront the closer relationships." And then it notes, "Spontaneous affection is the all inclusive principle of union." It arises in the moment, in other words. (The hedging here is worthy of La Rochefoucauld.)
A20.good marriage is more capacious than we realize. The privacy we afford ourselves is a recognition that our life together is made richer by the rest, and that what we owe each other, in the end, is to live well. We can put our trust in this and make it our vow.
first rain is always so welcome, even though it meant getting out of bed, throwing some clothes on, and rushing to the back to lean boards in front of two parts of the barn wall that hadn't yet been closed in. Luckily there are eaves to this small building, and I found it still dry. The rain is welcome because everything is dry as a bone and the risk of fire is high. Everything a block east of here and up burned to rhe ground in 1923. A house at the next comer was a Maybeck. All that remained after the fire were his chimneys, and a new house was built around them.
When18. privacy isn't respected, secrecy follows by necessity. C19.ats in the garden: a white one with a bobbed tail and an odd gait, saunters by. The other two are, respectively, gray and slim, and yellow and bobcat like. The latter could pass for a mountain lion at quarter scale.
An21.
astonishingly beautiful day unfolds in the rain's wake, the sky as blue as blue can be.
IChinggave me "Splitting Apart," with two moving lines that are the worst that hexagram has to offer. How to live through this? Look to the attributes, it said the earth (devotion) and the mountain (stillness). Time's26.
Friendship24. with layers: marriage also has this possibility.
The25.
The22, love of Eros is incompatible with suspicion, I read. Only23.
arrow can be imperceptibly small and still find its mark, and still carry the thread. A27.marriage has its priority. You share a life, and this brings its responsibilities. There's work involved, but not in the sense of sacrificing yourself to it. Like the Zen cook, there's a kind of liberation from ego in doing it well.
The28. irony is that every so called transgression has proved in time to be otherwise. Life kneads us, I would say, and our nature provides the yeast.
by experiencing life can you make sense of it. Mistakes of all kinds accompany this, but through exploration I know no other word for it you find out who you are, who others are in relation to you, what matters to you, and what's true for you. And you discover that these things have very little to do with what tradition or convention suggests that you or they should be.
If29.we're made to tend the garden, as children often are, it can lose a great deal of its pleasure. If we see another's love for it, we approach it differently. Eventually we learn to love it for its own sake.
Memoir and Reflection
Being is the other way of the world, the way that somehow transcends the categories and boundaries that having makes so explicit. We are inescapably in the world, right up to the moment when, from our viewpoint, we cease to be. It unfolds constantly, but we stake our claims to having despite this: my house, my marriage, my children, my friends, my books all that figures as mine within the world. Our tendency is to use them to fix our bearings, to delimit our lives: this is me, a person of a certain description, defined less by who I am than by what I have, what I have heaped up. There is some justice to being so judged, even to judging ourselves by our works, by the fruits of our labors, the opportunities life gives us to have, love, befriend, create, and procreate. Emanuel Swedenborg argues that life consists of these works that such works are its purpose. We labor on into eternity, he says, doing the work of the Lord. Life in the world is an opportunity to embrace the good and see evil for what it is. We are what we love, he says. The Lord always coaxes us to do good and to shun evil, but in the world, we are left free to decide for one or the other. In Heaven, too, but Hell is marked by suppression, he says, the kind of state in which an excess of evil is persistently put down by force.
Buddha's Ladder 11 August 2003
Having is the way of the world and since we live in the world, it has a certain inevitability. Thus, we have attachments, things, and even our own, finite life, once as big as the world seemed to be, a boundless expanse like the ocean or the evening sky, and then gradually smaller, more bounded, less full of possibilities. This is having, and in the world we live in, it has its necessity.
When love breaks off, the sham of having is revealed with unignorable clarity. We saw the loved one as a possession when possession is a momentary gift. Marriage tries to have it both ways, turning having into a mutual sharing of an expanded life. But marriage has its seasons and disjunctions. The sight of men in their fifties with toddlers born of younger wives is a version of this phenomenon. How then does being fit with this? Living deliberately and with equanimity with whatever life throws at us, deciding what to act on and persevere with despite everything this is the way of being in a marriage. Being unfolds. The path is the Buddhist metaphor for it, but should be understood in a navigational sense: requiring continual adjustment. The Buddhist idea that being isn’t progress reflects its contingency. As with Cavafy’s poem Ithaka, the destination is a placeholder for the whole arc of life. The path is trackless, in reality. It can seem like a road or a trail through the woods, but it can turn treacherous ravines or whirlpools when a crisis is in full force. It may or may not be of our own making, but our attitude toward it is ours to choose. This is why being is a better refuge than having. A crisis puts everything we have in jeopardy, whereas being has no real stake in this. We either are or we aren’t. Not-being is of no concern to being, while gain and loss are all that matter to having. We’re conditioned in the everyday to count much as gains that in reality are ephemeral. Traditions bring them into view. We briefly assemble family and friends to mark and celebrate the bounty that our gains make possible, but the losses too are visible our dead, absent friends, the heap of empty
MarriageofHeavenandHell,
In his
William Blake takes Swedenborg on, arguing that his view of Hell is too mechanistic, and seeing Hell instead as Heaven’s natural counterpart man to its woman, you might say, or the reverse. He parodies Swedenborg’s reportorial style: “I heard two angels talking…”
It can take a long time to reach the point when life’s unfolding is bearable again. In this state, we can act in ways that are self-destructive and destructive to love and friendship both. We return often to our previous condition, but everything about it takes on a phantom existence that contrasts more and more with actual, unfolding life around us. Our lives are haunted; we seem like ghosts, with a doubled vision. What is happening is that two competing narratives are tearing us apart. One is fiction, the other reality. We struggle to resolve this, and there’s only one way simply to be, abandoning our desire to have. Only then does the world assume its actual form, unfolding with us. The phantoms finally vanish. Behind all of this is the notion of practice. I’m thinking of a painter friend who perseveres with her work no matter what. This is a practice that refuses to bend to personal reversals, to the hindrances that come with life in
plates, pots, and pans at the feast’s end. When we experience a loss as final, it can be terrible. We’re left numb and raw, yet we usually live on. Being doesn’t cease because we have more or less. Memory brings moments of life back into view. At first, they may still be wrapped up in having. We remember a lover’s cries, all the attributes that made her what she was, and recall the places where we went together, and the gap she left, leaving. Any wrenching loss like this leaves us bereft.
12 August 2003 George Gurdjieff, the Sufi dancing master, called it “intentional suffering.” For the Taoists, the Way is an attribute of the zeitgeist or prevailing mood the situation, and the attitude and approach it warrants. The idea of a path is true in one sense and misleading in another. The closeness between two people can feel like being, but to depend on it is to fail to acknowledge its transience. The path is life itself; every change asks us to respond, but we make a fetish of the parts of it that, once gone, we intensely miss.
the world. We could say it’s habitual, but a practice like this is in fact intentional. But it’s a particular type of intention that, even when it pictures an outcome, is willing to let it arrive. We may push, but we see quickly if this is a mistake. The arrival comes when it comes and is always something of a surprise. It was a gap in a friend's otherwise orderly life. I was the honorable one among many would be suitors. In the background was her Odysseus, although his Penelope was the one out exploring. We had an intimate friendship that wasn’t. It was momentary, a bridge. She resumed her orderly life and while we stayed friends, her life became a closed book, as if these conversations never happened. An episode like this seems stillborn, but it wasn't meant to last, only to be experienced. You feel let down and yet, when you look back, it has a kind of luminosity. Other friendships never lose their source. Something about the other enables us to find the thread despite gaps in conversation or correspondence. If they’re lucky, families also have an innate familiarity that carries things along.
There are various ways to evade the present. To daydream is one I was prone to this when younger. Making lists, while a valid exercise, is an evasion if the
13 August 2003 "Charlatans" is Claudio Naranjo's summary of sevens, one of enneagram’s nine types. Sevens, of which I’m one, are caught up in planning and the avoidance of conflict and pain. They’re said to use charm to hold at a distance any situation that promises to be awkward, sticky, or worse. But why or how does this make them charlatans, I wondered? Oscar Ichazo, who taught the enneagram to Naranjo, wrote that they aren’t who they seem that they deceive others. But often, Naranjo added, the ones they seek to deceive are themselves. Preferring to live in the future, they’re not altogether here in the present. This distances them from authentic life.
activities they describe never get done. But some sevens produce for others in order to gain the autonomy to have some choice about the others’ presence. Perhaps too they seek to be so “creatively employed” that they manage to evade the more important task of doing their own work.
Marriage is really the extension of family, perpetuating into adulthood a condition that we experience in childhood. To some extent we reverse roles, but it’s familiar territory. Passion and desire figure they are needed if you hope to get a family going but marriage evolves into something else. Property and progeny figure, but behind them is a tie. Not all marriages have this inexplicable connection, but those that do have a better chance of surviving and even prospering. Marriage is rooted in having. You have children and soon have a household to support, earning a living for its sake.
Marriage is dynastic to the extent that each generation draws on the last and leaves something to the next.
Marriage has to find a way to get from passion and desire to something else. Let’s call it “mutuality.” It isn’t just the tie between the founding couple that matters, but also the ties among the family, the sense of being “the same family” and able on this basis to love and support one another. We have a human need to feel supported by life, and an enduring marriage has this aim at its heart. It creates a small, overlapping world that those born or married into it inhabit. One of its tasks is stewardship, the tending and cultivating that gives it life.
Marriage is a construct that doesn’t begin to account for what it throws at you. Love is wrapped up in it. The two together have proved to be an enduring topic. In light of it, I’ve developed a theory of marriage, although “theory” is too grand a word for some thoughts about it I’ve strung together. Nevertheless, here goes:
14 August 2003
Paradoxically, it gives us the broader horizon that marriages and close friendships require. We acknowledge the big events and overlook the smaller ones that are far more prevalent. Moving through life in a rush, we miss opportunities to engage one another and remake connection. Ironically, we’re often much better about this with clients and colleagues. At work, we see the need to engage with them and the high price of failing to do so. Yet, individually and collectively, we pay the penalty of our negligence everywhere else.
The results of my querying the IChingclustered around hexagram 20, “Contemplation.” The second line, moving, is about experiencing the outer world through a crack in the door a narrow, possibly hidden and even voyeuristic viewpoint. This is humiliating. The changing line points to hexagram 59, “Dispersion or Dissolution,” which is about how gentleness dissolves rigidity. Life can be like trying to swim while wearing heavy clothes, I wrote in a poem. We have to shed them quickly to save ourselves. We can be situation blind. This too is a narrow viewpoint. Hexagram 20 can be looked at through the lens of domesticity, the language suggests. My own outlook is domestic: I’m happiest living within the boundaries of the local.
What leads you to being is the sheer futility of having as a viable position when it comes to other people. Families too face the underlying reality that each one has her own trajectory. What we look for is what we have in common hoping that what we share will make our lives together meaningful. Being asks us to attend closely to evolving life and accept rather than resist its unfolding.
16 August 2003
17 August Bourgeois2003married life involves a near constant accumulation, so paring down is helpful. Household
18 August 2003
things were once handed down. Appliances and vehicles were built to be repaired, and were. Recycling reveals the carnage our disposable culture leaves. To pare down is to let it go. The impulse to simplify also reflects a desire to limit what we have to what is essential or beautiful. We consider how things perform, seeking resilience. But what of our relationships? Should we also find our loved one essential or beautiful? Is this why we perpetuate relationships or, if these traits are lacking, fail to do so?
A marriage’s persistence owes something to the expectations of these others. Children are a crucial factor, adding a future tense to the whole proceeding. In some sense, marriage is a conspiracy between the generations that bracket the married couple, inducing them to be the bridge that enables the family to continue. Although childless, Virginia Woolf was not without children. Those of her sister Vanessa Bell benefited from her presence. Her sister sought to give desire a better domestic arrangement, and she came as close as one can. If it was problematic for her daughter by Duncan Grant, this was because her parentage wasn’t openly acknowledged. That was a step too far for her mother.
19 August 2003
In the past few days, I’ve recorded my activities the time they take, for example and been deliberate about doing them. At work, I was able to do exactly one thing by this method, and that took much more energy, I found, than comparable activities took at home. The weekend showed how relatively easy it was to get things done if I set my mind to it how the main obstacles to doing are resistance and distraction. Compared to a household, once the children are self organizing, the workplace is a hotbed of distraction.
23 August 2003
When (and if) I’m 80, what then? I stake out in advance my small territory of regret.
The IChingadvises me to focus on doing good in small ways that the accumulation of these acts is what matters. We sometimes say, in relation to a setback, that “nothing seems to help.” This doesn’t mean giving up and really doing nothing, but rather that if we leave off searching for a breakthrough that will somehow clear the air or remove the obstacle, then myriad small acts will appear, better suited to the actual circumstances we confront here and now. Our objective shifts from breaking through in some larger sense to doing some good in the present. And the best one can do sometimes is to do nothing. 27 August 2003
Self-expression is said to arise spontaneously, which I find true of some things but not others. Poems can appear out of the air, and prose pieces sometimes write themselves, but writing in general requires a commitment to practice to get things started and completed. Once established, there’s a certain pleasure to be had simply in practicing the art and craft, gaining the facility on which accomplishment depends.
Afterword
Distinguishing memoir from reflection is made harder by my tendency to reflect and for these reflections to arise from memories. Yet I've made distinctions here based on the relative weight of one or the other. One of the pieces, "Late Summer" was written across a month leading to the event that occasioned it. When I found it recently and read it, I saw how it relates to other things included here. While I know how things turned out, the atmosphere of those days can still be savored.
John J. Parman was born in 1947 in Westchester County, New York, and grew up in Singapore and New Jersey. He attended Washington University (B.A., 1970) and U.C. Berkeley (M.Arch. 1975), working in architecture and planning for 40 years. In 1983, he and Laurie Snowden founded and published DesignBookReview, an award winning quarterly. In 2019, he and Elizabeth Snowden started Snowden & Parman, an editorial studio. He is an editorial advisor to ARCADE, the Seattle design magazine, TheArchitect'sNewspaper, AR+D, an imprint of ORO Editions, and RoomOne Thousand, the annual of U.C. Berkeley's College of Environmental Design, where he is currently a Visiting Scholar. He lives in Berkeley.
