In Flight

As we ascended, clearing the tree tops, a stand of elms at the edge of the green that I’d climbed halfway as a child, and never dreamed that I’d be higher, I looked down again to catch sight of Rachel, her pale face staring up at me, and I prayed that the two of us might one day be together. Tom had opened his sketch book, and was making a hurried drawing of the clouds above us, like purple and gauzelike, so that they looked as though they must be parted. When my gaze lifted from the village green I saw that the magistrate had turned white as a sheet, and was kneeling at the edge of the basket, causing it to list slightly as we bounced merrily through the sky.

“Would you mind standing, sir?” Davis asked

 And the magistrate shook his head, and lifted himself halfway up, keeping his trembling hand on the side of the basket to steady himself. This unmanliness surprised us all, who had known that we’d be in flight the night before, these sorts of terrors should have been restricted to dreams, or pillows, certainly not displayed in front of one’s friends. At that point the magistrate leaned over the side of the balloon and let out a voluminous amount of vomit, dishing back to the land below the breakfast of eggs and toast with wonderful marmalade that had  greeted us the morning before our journey. The loss of that small amount of weight caused the balloon to shift up rapidly, jolting us again and nearly sending the magistrate pitching out to his certain death.

“Steady yourself,” Davis admonished the magistrate, trying to use a series of thin strings to guide the balloon in some semblance of a direction. We were planning on flying up the coast, and landing some twenty or so miles away if it was at all possible. The wind was colder at our new altitude, and I found myself crowding closer to the flame at the center of the basket.

Davis, having steadied the balloon for a moment in a light breeze, opened up a bottle of wine and offered Tom and I cheese and crackers. The magistrate, poor fellow, was exempted from the offering. “The faster we drink it the higher we rise!” Davis said, with all the excitement of a man hell bent on discovery. Below us, the small white roofs of a village appeared, and, perhaps a horse and buggy moved down the street. It was difficult to tell. The perspectival change was either exhilarating or sad, depending on one’s mood I suppose. Tom described it as feeling a certain kinship, with the people below us, a connection that would have been impossible without this new mode of travel. He did not feel that it was spying, but that it was a new kind of perspective, an understanding an opening up of sorts. He thought that perhaps one day we’d travel in a day, by balloon, from one city to another, and trade goods and stories, and in this way perhaps we’d end all the years of fighting and squabbling that has plagued us since, it seems, the dawn of time. He saw in the village below him, an interconnected line of roads, a lace of connections, of meaning.

My brother and I are different, always have been. I saw from this new height that all of our striving was ant like. I saw what it must have appeared like to the eye of God. It was useless, or near useless. The only thing that divided us from the ants was our grand ambition, our pride in ourselves. I saw the pitiful nature of man when viewed from above, the uselessness of his striving. I saw in the long line of history that these new balloons would not serve some common good for bringing us together, but that the few, a power hungry nation or man, would find a way to turn them into weapons of war, dropping cannonballs or firing muskets at the unsuspecting populous below. I saw not the interconnection of man, but the divisiveness and baseness of him, and I was certain that I would remember this flight not as something beautiful as it should have been, but as something with the potential for horror. 

Dreams of Flight

This morning the clouds were dark pillars in the sky, keeping a gloomy watch over their cousin, the sea. A sight which brought to mind an adventure that I’d once shared with my younger brother, when we’d taken a balloon ride with the local magistrate. We were considered two of the more intelligent of our stock, and so we’d gone up with the magistrate, and the scientist, Davis, to experience the new discovery of flight.

A minor crowd had turned out that day, a girl, Rachel, with whom both my brother and I were in love. She wore a white hat and lovely white sandals and looked for all the world as excited and forlorn as you’d want a woman to be when you were thinking of touching the heel of heaven. Our mother was there, hair tried back in a bun, beaming proudly at the both of us, while shading her eyes from the mid-summer sun.

“Are you ready?” Davis asked us.

Tom and I shook our heads in unison, ready to fly as the birds have flown for centuries.  Davis stoked the fires of the balloon and we took rise almost immediately, the jolt shaking us slightly, and leaving us jostling one another in the balloon. I saw Rachel bring a white handkerchief to her mouth in dismay, and I secretly hoped that it was for me and not for Tom that she worried, though, knowing her it was good and gentle and included all four of us and not a one in particular.

As we ascended, clearing the tree tops, a stand of elms at the edge of the green that I’d climbed halfway as a child, and never dreamed that I’d be higher, I looked down again to catch sight of Rachel, her pale face staring up at me, and I prayed that the two of us might one day be together. Tom had opened his sketch book, and was making a hurried drawing of the clouds above us, like purple and gauzelike, so that they looked as though they must be parted. When my gaze lifted from the village green I saw that the magistrate had turned white as a sheet, and was kneeling at the edge of the basket, causing it to list slightly as we bounced merrily through the sky. 

All at sea

The ocean was an emerald that stretched itself out to rival the sky. If a man traveled long enough, it became clear that the ocean, if given the chance, would swallow the sky, like a great whale in a school of fish. And the sky would live inside the ocean, like Jonah inside the whale. Such are the idle thoughts of a man who has been too long moored upon the desert of the sea. We were promised landfall at least two weeks ago, but we’ve seen not a bare strip of it in over two months. I suppose the captain thinks his crew so ill-bred that we’d not notice the difference between two months and three. And though we haven’t talked about it, I can feel something brewing aboard the ship, like the way the air becomes charged before a violent storm. No one is talking, but we’re all thinking about it. The captain thinks about it most of all, and so he walks around the ship barking orders twice as loud and cutting rations of fruit at dinner, not because he has too, but because he wants to show that he still has control. I fear that to be in charge of a ship a man must be mean and stupid. I suppose I should arrange my dreams accordingly.

Another day of paddling on the water and I’ve had a word with one of my fellow mates about the possibility of heading back to old England in a day or two, though we both know that the captain has us over a barrel now, as we’d likely run out of food and water a few days short of Liverpool. And thus we only talk, as I suppose men often do, imagine how much better they might handle the task at hand.

The captain is a handsome black-bearded man with a limp in his gait, suffered during a war with her Majesty’s navy at the hand of a French cannonball, the shrapnel from it at least, having lodged itself somewhere just above the knee. Thus, the captain’s refusal to take on any French sailors, though, at night, in his sleep, the cabin boy insists that the captain himself cries out in French during his dreams. None of us see fit to check the story, or to ask why the proximity of the cabin boy allows him such intimacies. The sea is a graveyard for men. 

Saturday date day

Don't worry, this isn't actually a story about the sort of date that you see in the movies. In fact, the mere fact that a blog is being written about a Saturday date at 11 A.M. indicates that we're not talking Cinderella at the ball type stuff here. Disclaimer, let me invite all you single folks, young couples etc. to keep your Friday date nights whenever possible as they have a rather odd tendency of flying out the window when you have children. Friday date nights turn into watching something on Netflix and falling asleep at 9:30, ah the stuff of fairy tales. That said, I'm fairly certain that most folks who've cracked about the five year barrier on married life have largely ended Friday date night as it is, and spend the evening reading dueling copies of Fifty Shades  with furrowed brows. Anyhow, dates are now with lil s.

6:15-9:15 "Things start amazingly well"

This particular date day started out better than I could have expected, with me sleeping in for an extra three hours while S got up and took care of lil s, made breakfast, and generally kept her entertained. Obviously your idea of a date has changed when the most exciting thing about it is sleeping in. Welcome to parenting.

9:15 "The day begins"

I've been talked out of taking lil s to breakfast and have been asked, read, told, to eat the cold breakfast that's already been cooked. I oblige because I'm easygoing. I expertly dress lil s for the day, noting that white pants should not be worn with a white shirt. I put on a pink sleeveless top. A sleepy voice from the next room informs me that it's probably best for her to wear a sweatshirt given the time of year. I pick out a sweatshirt and zip her up in it. It's only when I'm watching her run along the trail that I realize I've picked out a white sweatshirt, and doubled down anyhow. I wasn't cut out for fashion. Before we slip out the door I try and grab a chocolate chip muffin. Sadie, as she always does, demands some, and I oblige because I'm easygoing. Of course, I realize after a couple of bites that I probably shouldn't have given her the muffin because I'm getting over a cold, and also that chocolate chip hands don't actually mix all that well with all white outfits.

9:45 "Coffee"

I'm not sure where to take her, because she seems borderline exhausted, and it's just rained. I figure she could probably go for some coffee. In the store I assume that everyone is smiling at me because I have a darling little girl. Either that, or they're annoyed that I'm holding up the line.

10:00-11:00 "Hiking or Like a horse poop"

We drive over to Rock Creek Park after lil s confirms that we have a "good plan." I'm trying to plant the idea in her head to avoid any hysterics. We walk off into the brisk fall morning, towards a nice muddy path with her all clothed in white. Woopsie. As soon as we hit the sand and mud path she falls. We're off to a good start. It's tough to get kids to hike. What she really wants to do is touch the water. However, it lies at the bottom of a semi-steep precipice. I have to reiterate roughly 100 times that the edge is dangerous. She doesn't seem to believe me. The best way to get her to move on the way there is to point out all the joggers on the path. "Runnning, running," lil s says, trailing in their wake. Sometimes, when I ask her to be careful, she says, "slower," and I congratulate her on her safety. When we run out of interest in jogging I point out the horse poop on the road. I let her know that it's yucky. She stands, peering down at the horse poop and then says, "step in it." Things don't always get through. To keep her moving on the trail I let her know that we'll find more horse poop up ahead. This inspires her to continue though I'm not sure it's the best B.F. Skinner plan ever.

We finally reach a portion of the trail where we can approach the water, and I guide her down to the water. I don't really want her to touch the water, so I tell her we can throw some stones in instead. She decides that the best way to do this is from a seated position, taking up residence on the river bank, sitting squarely down in her white pants. I've made a huge mistake. I supply her with a steady stream of rocks that she chucks into the water. Like any good father I analyze her arm angle, trying to get her to throw it with a little more overhand zest. For a while I'm afraid she might be left-handed, but I don't let her know. I realize that some of the things I'm handing her might not be rocks, but dried out dog crap. "Hands dirty," she says. She may have a point. She really wants to touch the water before we go, and I know that she shouldn't because all water is dirty and full of giardia. She cant' reach the water, so I have to hang her upside down and let her reach down, and I worry that joggers might think I'm attempting to drown my child rather than being a good dad, but I suppose that's life.

We start our journey back slowly. I remind her that we might find more horse poop over the next hill, and she says, "like a horse poop. Funny horse poop. Touch it." I'm glad that I've taught her well today. However, even the prospect of delightful horse poop over the next hill cannot inspire her little legs. She asks to be carried. I comply. Young happy couples jog by, smiling about how in shape and in live they are with being awake and alive and young on such a fine fall day. I can sort of feel my rotator cuff tearing as I hold her, but I smile back at them anyway to not give them the satisfaction. She asks to hold the coffee, and I figure that it will keep her happy. Except, the coffee isn't entirely empty, and she winds up pouring it over her white pants. So, awesome. I'm realizing that daddy daughter days should now include black jeans and black sweaters.

We arrive safely back at home, her right hand tucked firmly in her mouth, as she gazes sleepily up at me, making sure that if the water had giardia, she's certainly going to acquire it. I feel like we had a good day. I take her instead, strip off her clothes and put her down for a nap. I pile the clothes in a sink downstairs, dutifully putting them in cold water. Thank God we have a maid or someone who takes care of these things. In the meantime, lil s drifts off into a peaceful sleep. 

Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

At a poetry reading:

there were eighty or so people fathered to listen to this utter shit as though it were their daily language passing through the crucible of the human spirit and emerging purified, redeemed or here were eighty-some people believing the commercial and ideological machinery of their grammar was being deconstructed or at least laid bare, although that didn't really seem like Tomas' thing; he was more of a crucible of the human spirit guy. If people were in fact moved, convincing themselves they discovered whatever they projected into the hackneyed poem, or better yet, if people felt the pressure to perform the absorption in the face of what they knew was an embarrassing placeholder for an an art no longer practicable for whatever reasons, a dead medium whose former power could only be felt as a loss--these scenarios did involve for me a pathos the actual poems did not, a pathos that in fact increased in proportion to their failure, as the more abysmal the experience of the actual the greater the implied heights of the virtual....I told myself that no matter what I did, no matter what any poet did, the poems would constitute screens on which readers could project their own desperate belief in the possibility of poetic experience, whatever that might be, or afford them the opportunity to mourn its impossibility.

Later:

I tried hard to imagine my poems' relation to Franco's mass graves, how my poems could be said meaningfully to bear on the deliberate and systematic destruction of a people or a planet, the abolition of classes, or in any sense constitute a significant political intervention. I tried hard to imagine my poems or any poems as machines that could make things happen, changing the government or the economy or even their language, the body or its sensorium, but I could not imagine this, could not even imagine imagining it. And yet when I imagined the total victory of those other things over poetry, when I imagined, with a sinking feeling, a world without even the terrible excuses for poems that kept faith with the virtual possibilities of the medium, without the sort of absurd ritual I'd participated in that evening, then I intuited an inestimable loss, a loss not of artworks but of art, and therefore infinite, the total triumph of the actual, and I realized that in such a world, I would swallow a bottle of white pills.

Later:

During this period all like periods of my life were called forth to a continuum, or at least a constellation, and so, far from forming the bland connective tissue between more eventful times, those times themselves became mere ligaments. Not the little lyric miracles and luminous branching injuries, but the other thing, whatever it was, was life, and was falsified by any way of talking or writing or thinking that emphasized the sharply localized occurrences in time. But this was true only for the duration of one of these seemingly durationless periods; figure and ground could be reversed, and when one was in the midst of some new intensity, kiss or concussion, one was suddenly composed exclusively of such moments, burning always with this hard, gemlike flame...That is what I felt, if it wasn't what I thought, as I smoked and listened to the rain on the roof and turned the pages and smelled the wet stone smell of Madrid through the windows I kept cracked....I wondered if the incommensurability of language and experience was new, if my experience of my experience issued from a damaged life pornography and privilege, if there were happy ages when the starry sky was the map of all possible paths, or if the division of experience into what could not be named and what could not be lived just was experience, for all people for all time.

Later:

The people I loved could come and visit. But in certain moments, I was convinced I should go home, no matter the mansion., that this life wasn't real, wasn't my own, that nearly a year of being a tourist, which is what I indubitably was, was enough, and that I needed to return to the U.S., be present for my family, and begin an earnest search for a mate, career, etc. Prolonging my stay was postponing the inevitable; I would never live away from my family and language permanently, even if I could work out the logistics, and since I knew that to be the case, I should depart at the conclusion of my fellowship, quit smoking, and renew contact with the reality of my life; that would be best for me and my poetry.
  In other moments, however, the discourse of the real would seem to fall on the side of Spain; this, I would say to myself, referring to the hemic taste of chorizo or the aromatic spliff or both of those things on Teresa's breath, this is experience, not because things in Iberia were inherently more immediate, but because the landscape and my relation to it had not been entirely standardized. There would of course come a point when I would be familiar enough with the language and terrain that it would lose its unfamiliar aspect, a point at which I would no longer see a stone in Spain and think of it as, in some essential sense, stonier than sedimentary rocks of Kansas, and what applied to stones applied to bodies, light, weather, whatever. But that moment of familiarization had not yet arrived; why not stay until it was imminent.

Wednesday with Sadie

6:32 A.M. I am awakened by the sound of lil s reciting her abc's. She's a big fan of y and z. She says it with panache. I'd be lying if I said she always nailed them completely. No two-year old is perfect. We appreciate her effort, though it'd be more appreciated around 8.

7:10 A.M. I feed lil s breakfast. "No yogurt!" she says. I can tell she's confused about what yogurt is, so I give it to her anyway. The addition of raspberries and Cheerios makes the whole thing amazingly appealing. She complied. Later she asked for more raspberries and said, "Dancing through fields of raspberry jam," which is a line from a book we've been reading. "It's fields of strawberry jam, I gently corrected her, reminding her how smart I was. I could tell she was impressed.

7:30-9:00

Lil s plays with the cords on the blinds for a while as I lie sleepily on the couch. I'm thinking about the strangulation hazard, but I'm also thinking that she's having a good time playing with them saying, "Sadie move blinds." I don't want to ruin her fun, so I just monitor the situation closely. After she's done with the blinds she says, "off a pillow." We put the couch cushions on the floor. She wanders around on the empty space saying, "bouncy." I'm trying to teach her how awesome forts are by lying sleepily on top of the pillows.

At some point during our day of play she peers over the edge of the couch and says, "Piggy Bank." This is the name of her piglet stuffed animal, a little guy who's been MIA for a few weeks. She's delighted to have him back and points out that he's pink, and also green, and that he has toes. Toddlers are less philosophizers than you might have been lead to believe. However, she's pretty pumped about Piggy Bank. He attends her diaper change, and apparently he needs a diaper change as well. As usual, every time her diaper is changed, lil s yells, "Poop." This is untrue. I try to explain the vagaries and subtle differences between poop and pee, but sometimes I worry that I'm not getting through.

We spent the rest of the morning lounging around, reading through the little Critter books. The little critter encourages Sadie to throw snowballs, eat healthy, and generally create a bit of havoc. Then I put on some Raffi and she tells me which songs to thumb up and which to thumb down. I either get, "again" or "new song." She has tastes, although she's a fan of the Muppets song that goes Mananana or something without ever having any other words.

More thinking

And which to choose? Of course. What possible derivations of his life would be fulfilled or extinguished based on the choice, if in fact he had a choice that he made? This was why people wrote novels and made movies: To answer just this sort of question. What might life be like if lived in two directions? It was nonsense, of course. And not just on an intellectual level, but it was the sort of nonsense that seemed to him, characteristic of life in the twenty first century. People didn’t want to make a choice, they wanted all the choices. This was the sort of thing they were teaching kids in preschool. He’d worked in one briefly and witnessed, firsthand, the building up of America’s youth. The children were no longer told that something was inherently wrong, or bad to do. They were encouraged merely to make a different choice, the temptation was removed. But what did that teach them? That it was all right to throw rocks into a window as long as you stopped if asked? It struck him as characteristically lazy and liberal thinking, that nothing could be wrong. Everyone would just live their lives in some sort of blissful happiness. And yet, the world, or at least the world that he wanted to live in was contingent on people making the right choices, on people making hard choices. The simple example was a freeway, where if everyone was totally out for themselves, traffic fatalities would burgeon even higher than their already unacceptable rate. But this sort of thinking applied to the social contract as well. It was impossible for a person to both go on a golfing outing and use that same money to support a local charity at the same time. It was not possible to always have every choice work out. And this was influenced as well, in his mind, by the fallacy that any of the right choices would actually fulfill a person. 

At root a person is, or so he believed, who they are by a certain age, and it wouldn’t radically change them to be attached to one sort of woman instead of another. Sure it might siphon of little changes, bring out a sense of humor, a temper, but, in the end, would not that person wind up arguing over paint colors or television or chandelier aesthetics, precisely because it was impossible not to differ in a myriad of ways no matter what human being you attached yourself too. The fallacy lay in thinking that some sort of grand marriage was possible. It was not, and so his decision was made easy. And as he rounded the corner on twenty fifth, ducking beneath the branches of a low lying maple, half-listening to the siren in the distance, he was reminded that he still had no clue what decision he should make, and he started to round the block again, this time identifying women pushing strollers, noting the time left on parking meters, the position of the violet clouds in the deep blue sky, a pair of fat pigeons pecking idly in the street, and he didn’t think about any of the women at all, or what a possible union for him would mean, he thought about the gossamer threads of a web strung between a tree and a lamppost, glinting and rainbow colored, how man was probably destined for the country, since it was from the country and the back roads he had came. And that it would take centuries perhaps for the reality of a city to sink in, the proximity of one’s neighbors, dogs and birds and all that. There was peace to be found on a quiet green bench in front of a fountain, a small boy playing amongst two rocks, water spurting forth from his mouth, and a small garden snake twining itself around its heels.

He felt that there was something missing from his life, something that would have been a prerequisite a couple of hundred years ago: an element of danger, of something to discover. Certainly the stories of the explorers were full of rape and slaughter of innocent people, entirely unjustified, but the quest itself, the drive to see something new, perhaps that’s what he needed. A place to be that wasn’t here. 

Man's Search for Meaning (That title is already taken)

He concluded that if a person was to account for all the problems in the world, even just those of living, like, what should one do, that it would require a person to devote their entire lifetime just to unraveling each of the ethical knots that a person would be routinely tied in if those sorts of problems weren’t routinely pushed down to the subconscious level, or, better yet, never really rising the conscious level because people weren’t aware that driving a car was problematic on ten sorts of way, but so was eating fast food, and was it right to give a letter of recommendation to a person who you didn’t think that much of as a worker but liked personally? These sorts of things. Anyhow, one can picture the man who’d spend his entire life just figuring out how to live, brown coat, brown hat, a mutterer. He’d live alone, or maybe with a cat, and spend long hours walking by the river in his brown hat and coat, the wind whipping up near his face, trying to figure out whether it was okay to own a dog, or whether one should take all that money and love that it takes to keep a dog healthy and happy and give it to his local Catholic Church. But then, he thinks, what if I did the latter, but I gave it all to an organization that doesn’t believe in birth control or our current understanding of the universe. If he was a modern atheist, why, giving money to the church would be an abomination greater than owning a puppy. Alternatively, if the church was right, and he walked on ruminating about these things in just such a way, making it apparent to us all how King Saul just suggested that they cut the baby in half and was thus declared wise.

It would probably take a lifetime of walking over cobble stones, across uneven ground, contemplating the scattering of light coming off the frozen river from weak winter sun, watching the geese fly in V’s overhead, scanning the strata of clouds for the appearance of an airplane that would never be boarded or thought of again. That would be the only way. If a person wasn't to take the word of a man born and died two thousand years ago, or four thousand, or a man dictating from his hat, or a man from Athens wandering the streets to give advice, if a person was to cast all these aside and deeply study and engage with the world around them, create their own set of standards, not all those standards that go unmentioned, buying electronics that have been assembled with nearly cheap labor, discarding a phone that will be sifted through by children in Asia, whether to hold the door open for all five people, or just one, what is the import of the self? Asking all of these questions and making an attempt, hell, answering them, answering them all, so that on his death bed the man with the brown hat would look out the square window in his house onto the street covered in rain and the caterpillar like blossoms of oaks piled up in the gutters and know exactly how a person was to expire.

This project would create its own problem to be solved though, as if a person was to add infinity to one. The next person would have to consider why exactly a person must spend their whole life thinking about whether to swat a mosquito that is feasting on your blood if it is one of God’s creatures, a malaria carrier, or just plain annoying. And, this in and of itself is a problem, another question to answer. And, if that question has been unanswered, then the searcher would be forced to reconsider all of the considerations of the old man in the brown hat, examine them for their voracity, and in so doing, they’d pass away their life as well, this time selecting and old rocking chair and a stone hearth, occasionally lit with birch and dry leaves, and perhaps a dog for company, considering those same questions, and perhaps coming to different answers about what it means to live in a universe that will eventually be torn apart. And that was life. 

Film school

The debate made the film much more popular than it otherwise would have been, and it was often hailed, by those in the know, so a few college professors and their most industrious students, as one of the real unknown classics of film in the early nineties. Most of the time, when he showed it to friends, they found it compelling though largely unremarkable, and they either complained about the lack of an ending, or felt with certainty, one way or another that the woman either knocked on the door or didn’t, and no amount of devil’s advocate playing every really shifted their original conviction.

The director of the movie, when asked about the siren and the shadowy figure reflected in the mirror that perhaps was just a very large chest of drawers, or the man’s spirit, depending on the imagination and willingness to believe of the viewer, remained silent on the important subject of interpreting his film. “The film is what you want it to be,” he said. “You interpret the film and the film interprets you. It is visceral, internal, the engagement with the film, and no interpretation is definitive. Besides which, he always remarked, the ending of something does not constitute it’s totality, and why didn’t people ever talk about the slow and loving movement of the camera over lush wheat fields, or the tender brush with the steel worker’s faces at lunch, lit up as if they were not of this world. It irritated him that people could only think about the movie as related to its ending. He made the point that people’s lives were often split up into parts, moments, glimpses, chance meetings in a class or on a train, that all of these things were contingent upon the strangeness of being, but that after a person met their spouse or a lover, that it was only the beginning of a story. And perhaps he’d failed if people were unable to imagine Sarah and Joe living on after the conclusion of the film, whether it be for an eternity, or only for a few moments.” “The film, he said, should be more interesting than its ending. Endings, narratively, are artistic bullshit. If I had enough time and money I’d make a movie that spanned a man’s entire lifetime, from birth to death, then maybe we could talk about the ending in relation to the whole scope of his life, but the movie would go on for days, maybe even months, and no film-goer would be able to take off enough time to finish it, and no one would finance it, and it would be terrifically boring.” The interview was cut short at that point, and no one had really ever heard anything conclusive from the director again, though there were some rumors, unsubstantiated that he’d been filming just the epic he’d been describing for the past twenty years in a remote part of the Amazon. 

Continued

A fourth interpretation existed, though really at the margins of the film, with film school geeks who were willing to listen to records backward and watch a movie frame by frame. The third interpretation is that the woman was already dead herself. This interpretation was based upon the fact that we were never shown the secretary traveling the path to the man’s house, and that her reaching them was a logical inconsistency. She had no knowledge of where his house was, so how could she wander there ahead of everyone else, like it had homing beacon in less she was already gone? Naysayers pointed out that it had just been left out of the film, that she’d no doubt either traveled there with him at some point in time, or at least followed him home secretly, so deep was her love and curiosity about his other life.

This fourth interpretation posited that she had committed suicide in the very waters that she and her beloved had walked. That the strange siren scene, which everyone acknowledged was just plain bizarre, had been a metaphor for her death, did not the sirens call ships and men to crash upon the earth. The scene also included a brief moment of her fingering stones, and these film school types insisted that the rocks were meant to recall the death of Virginia Woolf, filling her dress with stones.

They also insisted that if you watched the film closely the light changed becoming almost imperceptibly airier after the conclusion of the siren scene. Many critics argued with this idea, pointing out that after she emerged from her encounter with the siren, the path also bent away from the river leaving her and the film, more exposed to natural light than was possible under the canopy of trees. This latter interpretation, about the lighting, was widely accepted as the true one.

However, these few critics also held a tiny piece of errata, akin to the sexual innuendo in a Disney movie, that they felt conclusively proved their point that the secretary had almost immediately walked into the river and committed suicide. They insisted that, as the woman looks in the window, right before the movie darkens, a figure appears in a mirror directly across from the woman, a mirror that gives access to the rest of the room, and, that the figure, which you could really only see if you sliced it up frame by frame, was clearly the woman’s husband, standing watch over his family, in the same way that the secretary has come to see his family, and that he’s made his final choice and is staying with them to watch over them, or that he’s gathering one last look at them before slipping into eternity. Either way it was debatable whether any figure appeared in the mirror at all, and was widely debated in the small inner sanctum of movie lovers, roughly 100 in comment sections under the clip on YouTube, and in one long and unremarkable article that appeared in an esoteric journal of film review that was published biannually out of Columbia, Missouri. 

Alternative interpretations

She gazes up at the clouds, bleak black ships sailing voyaging through the sky, with golden bottoms that must have been weighing them down. And, without warning she clears a stand of trees and enters a clearing. And, of course it’s the clearing where the man ended up going every night after work to be with his wife and child. The woman tidies her dress as best as possible, and then steps to the window, and is either staring at her own reflection, seeing the bit of blood on her face, the frizzy hair, or staring inside at the child playing with a train on the carpet, and the wife, darning a pair of socks.

The movie ends there, and a long open-ended debate takes place as to what exactly the woman was doing at the window, whether she was staring at herself and wondering what her future was going to amount to, if she was now trapped within the confines of that particular small town for the remainder of her years. This interpretation was more solidly individually rooted and a more typical American interpretation, that she wouldn’t be able to step past the wall of herself and imagine the harm that had just been causes to the family she was observing.

The alternative interpretation was that she’d been looking inside at the child, feeling simultaneously sorry and jealous of the child on the floor and the woman darning socks, for the knowledge that they didn’t yet have, and what they would soon have. This interpretation favored the strangeness of knowing something as catastrophic about someone else’s life without them being aware, and the sort of weirdness that must have caused for the woman as she looked in the window, feeling somehow miles apart and yet intimately close to the blond haired boy pushing a small train across the floor and saying, “Choo, Choo.”

The third interpretation, and the least favored by the critics was that the woman was staring in not so much at the child, but beyond him, at his mother, and secretly hating her for having had a meaningful relationship for a period of nine years with a man that she, the woman staring in the window had loved intimately. And wasn’t it just apropos that on this, the most, or perhaps second  most important day of his life, the day of his death, that his wife would be sitting in a rocking chair staring at a pair of socks and not know, intuitively, as she, the woman in the window, would have that something was horribly wrong, that a light had gone out in her small universe. This was more typical of the psychological realism popularized in 19^th century fiction.

A secondary argument tended to take place about whether the woman actually entered the house or not. He leaned heavily towards the interpretation that she knocked on the door, that it was both in keeping with her character and a start to unraveling the mystery of the man that she loved, that she wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk with the wife, find out a little more what her beloved had actually been like, and not just the astral type projection that she kept of him on the wall.

The other interpretation, the one that he didn’t favor, was that the woman had looked in the window and decided to walk away, that she found the sight of the child and the wife living in the unknown too heartbreaking to damage. Metaphorically, it would be like stumbling upon a quiet pond with ducks gliding lazily through it, a soft breeze ruffling their feathers and immediately firing rocks across it, trying to skip them up onto the opposite shore, not mindful of the peace that you’re intruding upon. Though that metaphor falls a bit weakly, as it would be more akin to building a freeway through the area where the pond has been displacing the ducks altogether, so big was the news of the man’s death, was his opinion. This opinion again heavily hinged on the amount of internal guilt the woman already felt at trying to steal this woman’s husband, and now, in her mind, getting him killed. 

Frizzy in the rain

His favorite film was about a man who worked in a steel mill during the early portions of the industrial revolution, who’d spend the afternoons walking down a dusty path by the river, and admiring the play of attenuated life so much like fish that swam through the trees to rest on the river. The man had a wife and a child who he rarely saw because of his work schedule. And, as the movie continues on it becomes clear that he’s falling in love with the secretary at the steel mill. And, on his short lunch breaks the two of them begin walking by the willows and the water and admiring the varieties of light, but nothing is ever said between the two of them, only felt by the audience. And, as the movie goes on, it traces three years of the man and his wife and child, eating meals together, looking relatively happy, and the man working in the steel mill, looking intense, and the man walking by the water with the young girl looking for all intents and purposes young himself, and telling her about how he’d originally wanted to leave the town, how he’d learned bits of Greek, because he’d always imagined traveling to the Greek Isles and working as a sailor or ship’s mate or whatever. And he tells her that his mother, God rest her soul, had a post card on the refrigerator from his father sent from the Greek Isles with a picture of ice blue water and long beaches, so that he always associated his father, who had only gone two towns over to shack up with a whore, with the wind, and the sea. And he told this girl Helen that he’d always dreamed of the sea, of the salt sea spray on his face. And it occurs to him, or to us, through some really terrific acting that he has never told his wife that he wishes that he was traveling the seas. And he makes excuses to the girl, and hurries back to work thinking about how he can’t wait to get home and tell his wife about his plan of traveling to the Greek Isles.

And, he’s so engrossed in telling all of his colleagues about what it would be like to travel the seas, this normally reserved man, that his hand gets stuck on the belt and is taken off up around the elbow, and he bleeds out rather quickly, and the secretary is there, watching as the man, who she was certain was going to take her out of this hell hole of a town bleeds out on the hard factory floor, while the machines churn on in the background, the director pretending as if this wouldn’t have happened, that some Chaplainesque nightmare is taking place, and so he focuses on the pool of blood on the ground, though it’s less a pool than a triumph of blood, spattered all over the machine, the floor, the man’s shirt, which reads Joe, and inexplicably, on the face of the actress playing the secretary though she’s been nowhere near him enough to have picked anything up, and it seemed like either a mistake, or some very obvious metaphor.

And she walks out of the, cold steel factory and into the hot and wet day, rain is falling, but she doesn’t wear a hat or coat. She trudges along the river, the muddy ground spattering the hem of her white dress. And there is the suggestion that perhaps she’ll throw herself in, and a strange scene involving a three headed woman who sits on the rock in the middle of the stream singing an operatic song of such beauty that the woman is enthralled and stops walking, and just watches the three headed woman sing a beautiful opera in the middle of the stream, and she knows now why the man always loved the river, it was not for her, or his dreams, but for this woman or whatever, who’s voice was like the scent of jasmine or a hint of all the men she would still love. When the song finished she continued walking, humming now, humming the song that the siren, for that’s what it was, sang to her, and the audience doesn’t know where she’s going, but we all want her to get an umbrella, because the actress’ hair gets frizzy in the rain. 

A conversation like any other

He slept with three women during his stint in Paris. The first woman was named Regan, and she was younger than he was, and pretty. At first, he’d thought she was a literature student like himself, and he’d recommended some modern authors that she might like to read, and she’d told him that really, if she could do two things, she’d like to be a development worker, which is what she was in school for, and also a writer, but she worried that she didn’t have time for the latter, that it would just live at the edge of her conscious mind, a thing unrealized. And, though he reassured her, he was also certain that everyone in the world as their first or second job probably wanted to be a writer. It was a pretty common thing to desire. And so, in talking with her they found a middle ground discussing the history of Western Art, which was a requisite class for everybody abroad that semester.

And, in these conversations, he delivered disquisitions on the caves at Lascaux and of the cave drawings, dated to incredibly distant times that they’d found in remote parts of the Appalachia in America. She found him interesting, liked knowledge of the sort that the displayed. He had this habit of not really making eye contact when he talked, as if he was nervous. He was relatively attractive, and the thought that she made him nervous, secretly pleased her, made her feel a bit of the control that was always absent in these sorts of interactions. It was always dependent, or nearly always dependent on the male of the species to begin the conversation, and, while this always seemingly gave the woman a modicum of control, really, what it did, was placed her in a position only to receive advances rather than capture them for herself. And so, only if she had one hundred hands could she count that the number of conversations that had not gone this easily with men, she was sure, even at her young age, would have liked to have slept with her, or at least gone out on a date with her, and it was a delicate, a difficult thing, to balance their expectations, set them straight, without being conceived of as a bitch or vapid or somehow manipulative, which she wasn’t. She was just a woman who had to manage expectations.

And this young man, who was quietly telling her how the cave paintings at Lascaux weren’t really art at all, but religious signs, was worth listening to. “That’s the crux of art,” he told her, putting his glass at an angle and spinning it deftly as if it were a top. “All art or at least all good art is religious, or fine, if we’re uncomfortable with that term, spiritual. It seeks a connection with someone or something beyond ourselves. When art becomes self-referential, baroque, it starts to lose its meaning. Art cannot exist for art’s sake. What are the things you’ve read? Apologies, it’s more my field of expertise, look at Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, their texts are more or less spiritual guides to life. The amazing part is that they provide so many characters struggling with the reality of being a human being wrapped in the mystery of spirituality. The two seem inseparable, threaded together in the fabric of our beings.”  

She was not a strict atheist, but she had never really believed in any type of organized religion. It seemed silly, in the way that an older relative with dementia might at a large party. It was not worth attending to because it couldn’t possibly matter what they were saying. To give it more attention as some of these famous atheists, whose books she’d only glanced through, was to give it more credence than it deserved. “The struggle,” she said, wetting her lips with a bit of water, “is not spiritual. It’s carnal. The thing human beings spend most of their time thinking about is where their next meal is going to come from, its shape and flavors, or where the nearest bathroom is. It’s an illusion that literature, from what little I’ve read,” she demurred, “tries to play with, the delusion or illusion that we spend the majority of our lives on a different plane of being than we actually do. We spend the majority of our time worrying about food, water, toilets and sex. It’s a wonder we find time to think about anything else. And, any writers, even those old greats, who spend so much time describing the spiritual are being disingenuous, painting pictures as they’d like them to be rather than as they are.” 

Today

In the morning, we listened to the doves, if that's what they were, trooing in a stand of plane trees.
It was her opinion, strongly held, that communism was not a failed idea, but a failing of humanity.
The ice cubes made smoke on the side of her glass.
We agreed only on the exact sound of the rain in certain season.
I told her that it was essentially Calvinist then, or something like it.
That "isms" had peculiar tendencies that reflected the institutions they sought to replace.
She had fake eyelashes that were long and strange.
I reminded her that that wasn't how people wrote poetry anymore, line by line.
Images, I told her, were the thing. Thin strata of clouds--skies, janitorially blue.
The best sort of poem, I reminded her, winds up being about itself.
Of course, I'd never written a poem before, and she'd stopped listening to me when I said the thing about strange relationships between ideas and totalities, if that is, in fact, what I'd said.
We were both drunk by then and listening again to the doves,
their voices--thin reeds swimming through the trees.
We were united, at least, in this. 

Leaving Verizon

We left Verizon last week after a long and tumultuous,(I've apparently got no idea how to spell tumultuous. It  took me eight tries and Google) and dare I say occasionally beautiful, relationship of six years.

1) Honestly, we'd been wanting to break up with Verizon for a while. The thing is, things were off and on for the past three years and that's just no way to be in a positive working relationship. We'd go along for a month, everything great, do you want to watch this youtube video of a kitten on a slide? Do I! Maybe I'll open nine tabs at once and try to browse the whole internet. No problem. And then we'd come home one day, sunny just like the one before and Verizon would refuse to work. No cat videos. No Michigan football. No nothing. We had to go downstairs and coax Verizon to work with us. And just when we thought it had been fixed Verizon would shut down again, and needed more from us. I just couldn't keep living in the void like that, not knowing which day Verizon would decide to leave us.

2) Like any major decision in life, marriage, kids, job changes, deciding to change your internet provider is not the sort of thing you want to take lightly. I felt like we had developed some solid relationships with people across the globe, and it's tough to leave them behind. Sure none of them ever changed a damn thing about our intermittent service, but they were our incompetent Verizon folks, and I think I'm going to miss them. What happens now when I call our new ISP? Am I going to wait on hold for twenty minutes only to talk with a person who, after making me give my address, mother's maiden name, SSN, and first child's liver, in order to access my information, says that they can't help me. But, of course they can transfer me to someone who does. They dutifully give me the phone number, "in case you get disconnected," which basically means, "I can't wait to disconnect you, you bastard." And sure enough, disconnected. Well I'll just pull out this handy dandy phone number and direct connect. BAM! Talking to a machine. Wait, what? I shi- you not, I once had a conversation where I was disconnected on four different occasions that took a full two hours to complete. It's that sort of incompetence that leaves me wondering whether I'll ever find it again. Sigh. Now I know how Keats felt.

3. Promises. Oh, the promises. How I'll miss having them lavished upon me. Remember that time, where, after completing an hour or so service call, which included them claiming that they didn't even have our modem on file anywhere, that they promised a new modem? Did that modem ever arrive? No. But imagine me, sitting at the mail slot dutifully each day like a child at Christmas just waiting for our new modem to appear. "Do  you think it will be blue like our old one?" "Will it turn the internet into the information superhighway, or fly like the Delorion?" After a month or so I started to give up hope. I grew despondent and often went downstairs late at night to stare at our old modem. I wondered why it wasn't good enough anymore, why I'd wanted a change at all. I tried to tell it that I hadn't really wanted a new modem, but I could tell things between us were through. It provided intermittent service for a week.
And in our final hours, when I was finally cancelling, Verizon promised to upgrade me to Fios. Sure they said your building has been upgraded, even though we haven't lived in a building for three years, but I know that they really meant it. A part of me really wanted to believe that they were going to provide internet so fast that it would burn my retinas, but I just didn't know it was true. I cancelled anyway, but I think I'll always wonder if that was the conversation where Fios got away, and whether, surfing the web, trying to watch a movie while downloading mp3's and listening to an audible.com book about French cooking, if I'll regret not being able to have everything all at once.