Sleeping Early

I recently decided, as I often decide, that it was time for a change. I decided that I was going to start going to bed early. Like most goals I set, I plan on failing, rather spectacularly.

The first night I was in bed by 10:23. It takes the average human being seven minutes to go to bed. I am not, if you ask me, in any way shape or form an average human being. I think it usually takes me ten minutes or so. I've no idea if this makes me above or below average. I'd like to think above average, though, if all the research about sleep is correct, in terms of controlling weight gain and concentration, I guess it makes me below average. Though I'd contest, and I often do, that my failure to fall asleep is symptomatic of my active mind. I stay awake for an extra three minutes, or sometimes and hour and a half, because I am intelligent. Or so I'd have myself believe. Self-deception is an important part of living.

Anyhow, I was in bed at 10:23, and asleep before eleven. Of course, the related reason that I'm going to bed early is my intent to wake up early to accomplish things. I've long suffered under the misapprehension that people who rise early are always smug, because they know something the rest of us don't. There is nothing that makes a person seem quite so smug as when they're sitting at the kitchen table at nine, drinking coffee, after having gone for a morning run, contemplated the cosmos, and made you a pot of coffee. They are so unpleasant. Obviously, it's my strong desire to become one of these people, which is why I'm planning on waking up at six every morning. If you see me at eight, I want you to know that I'll have already been awake, done some writing, drank some coffee, contemplated the cosmos, and spent half an hour perfecting the smug smile that I'm currently wearing on my face.

The issue, as I'm sure you've already guessed, is that six in the morning is really early in the morning. It's earlier than you think it is. Much earlier. Imagine what you think six A.M. looks like, then double it. Get up at three in the morning and try to function. That's what it's like to wake up at six. The point is, I, like any reasonable person, turned off my alarm. I woke up at 7:45 after an amazing night of sleep. I highly recommend going to bed early, though I can't yet speak of waking up early.

Night #2

I'm feeling tired by 10:12. 10:12! I'm excited about how quickly my body is learning. My body is like the body of Rocky after all the training. It's like it's already climbed the steps after one night. Then I go to bed. I am lying in bed for ten minutes or so before I realize that I'm not even remotely tired. I can literally see the miles and miles of water between myself and sleep. I'm going to have to travel. I try sleeping with the covers half on, then half off, then off. I try sleeping on my side, on my other side, on my stomach, on my back, on top of all the blankets. Nothing works. By the end of the night it's nearing midnight, and though I've composed an amazing letter that I need to dash off, I'm not sure that it worked. In the morning, I wake at eight, somewhere, some smug person is smiling.

Tonight, it's 11:20. If I'm asleep before midnight, and up before eight, I'll deem it a success. 

Review: The Fun Stuff by James Wood

I found, How Fiction Works, by James Wood, my first introduction to the author, to be kind of obnoxious. Fiction does not "work" by using one particular style. Fiction has not always been extant in the novel form, nor is it likely it will remain that way. It functions just as well as realistic tales, fabulist stories, or reportage and travel writing, mixed with essays. If nothing else, the book can act as a good reading list, Norman Rush's books, Mating and Mortals, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Calvino's Cosmicomis, Henry James' Portrait of a Lady, Lydia Davis short stories, Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners.  Of course, I made up the majority of that list. 

However, this book, despite the obsession with the free indirect style, is quite good. When he skewers an author, as he does with Paul Auster, he has some good pull quotes from Auster to prove the point that he's just not a particularly good writer. While I have a disagreement with Woods over his assessment of the writing of David Foster Wallace, by and large, his assessments seem fair, rigorous, and readable. I realize the latter point, actually being able to read someone writing about literature became anathema to literary people about the time that structuralism and post-structuralism began to hold sway in university settings. After that, people stopped reading books and began "reading" them, for power structures, signs or, more accurately, confirmations of what they are looking for. This type of reading is not particularly interesting to people outside of the academy, and, quite frankly, not really for people who enjoy books. In that regard, I'm happy that Wood is so popular. I suspect that he might actually like books. 

Pictures of blank pages

The overwhelming fear of the blank white screen. Not page. NO. Pages are being ripped from the book of time, pages are falling in the wind, pages are drifting down lonely streets after the bombs have fallen. They float down the street, running like a flock of birds from an oncoming storm. But they are running from words, from pens, from typewriters and keyboards, off, off, into the still night, to lie quietly on the Atlantic Ocean, floating like children on the boughs of trees. There are pages that have existed far longer than any human being. I do not fear the white blank page. I fear the page with words scrawled across them, ideas, formulas, intricately drawn pictures of panda bears in postures of repose, pages with dragons flying across burning skies, burning cities, burning plains, burning the very pages that they are a part of.

Every person who has written more than a page or two in a journal must occasionally have this fear, yes? The fear that as you sit, or lie, or lay, on a divan, or a couch, or a chair, or a rooftop, or in the cold, on a fire escape, while the smoke of a stranger touches you from a distant room, the fear that your words will have left you, will have traveled to the Greek Isles, to the Spanish Isles, to the Falklands, to archipelagos and peninsulas and dammit, on a bad day, maybe just a part of the mainland that borders the coast, so brazen have these words that have left you become, reclining now, as you once were, in sun chairs, sipping margaritas and talking amongst themselves because you are no longer there to command them. They are vulgar and dirty. You miss them.

Inside this piece of writing is a message. It’s a clue. If you take very fourth word’s second letter and put them together at the bottom of the page, you will discover what I’m really trying to say. The presumption here being that we’re all special, and that words are just meant for us, when really, words are cheap, inexpensive, derisive, derivative, derelict, defunct, disenchanting bits of noise. The message, because who really wants to go through all that work is klaflaehalflf, which is just another way of saying that I am confused, which you already knew, and didn’t really need an elaborate message to figure it out. In fact, you could just sit down with me and have coffee, and I’d start talking about all the kangaroo road kill in Australia and wondering about the word marsupial, and the little pouch that holds in the babies, and you’d quickly excuse yourself, citing friends you’d just met online who were in imminent need of your presence. I understand.

In the reflection of the mirror lies a painting. The painting is of time, and a clock, and a man riding on horseback shooting at what appear to rabbits. I do not like the painting. At certain hours, I don’t like anything. It’s not a flaw in my nature but a flaw in nature itself, everything becoming so damnably unlikeable all at once. What are the chances? Apparently not so slim as it happens at least once a day. I do not know the man riding on the horse shooting at animals that are probably rabbits but could just be foxes, but I know that I am jealous of him, to be locked in such a scene, the lather of the horse, the blue smoke hanging over the valley, filling his nostrils. Now I am jealous of pictures. See how unlikeable everything has become!

Months ago I saw a mouse coming up the stairs in the middle of the night. We both ran away, terrified of the meeting. The next time I saw him he was dead, lying in the middle of a mouse trap, looking at nothing, or maybe just looking at death, who knows? Tonight a mosquito is buzzing around my head. He has bitten me twice in the forehead. I imagine, by evenings end that he will be dead as well. I do not know what this means about my relationship to the natural world, to death, to words, to the cemetery that we sat at right after we first met, to the words written on the gravestones, to the thin sunlight wrapped in grey clouds, swaddled like a child. 

The time that nothing changed

There was some strange assumption that night, perhaps I’d made the whole thing up, which was built on the idea that things were going to change between us. That at some point during the evening, maybe after dinner, before the movie, or perhaps when we were walking the streets in between, those gorgeous effing streets—that go on for miles beneath the Gaudi architecture and wind through the street musicians doffing hats and playing, not for passerby’s or money, but for something older, like they still believed in gods who brought rain, good crops, and, when it was needed, shafts of golden sunlight burning orange come evening across the fields, we’d find ourselves redefining things, changing our positions in space.

I have odd thoughts like this. In some ways, I subsist on them. I will begin thinking of a word like space, and I will think of the way the galaxy or the universe is oriented, how even slight changes in our atmosphere or the weight of certain metals would mean that nothing was here, not you, not me, not her, and I have to wake myself up from this reverie, to remember the slow play of a finger across the keys of a piano, the bits of silver thread in a tapestry of a unicorn, the shifting of our bodies in space, now orbiting one another, and how much more that meant, a shifting in our relationship, than one star going supernova and destroying whole planets where nothing has ever existed.

You see. You see, I run off on these tangents, on these willful misconceptions. All I meant to say was “hello,” and to have you walk through the door, drop your coat on a chair and sit down to talk as if we are old friends, which we are, which we are. The cat needs to be let out now and its just begun to rain.

I can’t think now where I’d gotten the idea that we were suddenly going to be lovers. One thinks, one thinks. One walks beside the sea on a stony path thinks. In the distance, the moon is lying on the water, making silvery streaks, making watery streaks, weaving bits of silver into the tapestry of the ocean, coasting over the water and reflecting like the wings of a thousand gulls. Again, you see, such nonsense. All nonsense. The moon is doing no such thing. The moon is just sitting in the sky, relatively inert, waiting for all of us to turn to ash, to dust and bone. It is strange how quickly my mood can shift. Look, out over the water, is that? No. It is nothing. It is the black hull of a fishing ship returning home that I’ve mistaken for a whale. Such idiocy.

At dinner, What did you say? Something about the temerity of things, or the perfected starched whiteness of a dinner napkin. We talked of movies, art galleries and art openings. As the sun burned out, the light going thin and tinged with green I ordered a bottle of wine. Now was the time to change things, to seize hold of the rope that was slipping through my fingers, of the light that was slipping from the sky, of the breath that was escaping my lungs, of the seconds that are passing even now. We talked instead of the sea gulls, how we shared a love of their lonesome cry. Not the birds themselves, which are vile and disgusting, but the idea of them that the sound of their cries conjured up, something not quite of this world.

You said that sometimes you didn’t feel like part of this world, stirring the wine in your glass with a fingertip, taking it out and touching it idly to your tongue. I loved that particular gesture, and all your gestures, pushing your hair behind your ear, knitting your brows when you are listening intently, the whirring sound of your brain moving behind those placid seeming eyes. All of this I could have said to you, but we were busy talking of the sea gulls, of the trash blowing through the street, of the couple seated next to us, arguing in a foreign language about familiar things.

“It’s raining,” you said, as if I hadn’t noticed. I hadn’t. This time we ran through the serpentine streets, where the architecture loomed, where the sounds of old guitars chased us like ghosts, like rain, like memories, like the sound of the thin green light leaving the sky. My God these streets are so long and the music behind us, calling us elsewhere, so fast.

I don’t know where I had gotten it in my mind that things would change. They would remain the same between us, year after year. I wouldn’t say a word. We’d meet once a month, walk these same dull streets, by the dull black water, say the same dull things and then we would part, while the rain thrashed the autumn leaves in our wake. And then one day, we would not meet. One of us would make an excuse, and sooner or later even the letters would stop, the letters that smelled of your skin that told me about a movie you’d seen, or a particular type of dog. And then one day, one or the other of us, who’s to say, would receive a letter inviting them to a funeral, and we’d feel a momentary sadness, like when the green light leaves the sky or the whale turns into a ship, and we’d briefly leave our day, our unwatered plants, untended bills and gardens, telephone calls from children, and think back on a time that we walked on a path by the sea, tethered to one another, spinning in a circle, around and around, in the orbit of time. 

Our Cat Died

We have a tendency to attach too much significance to last words as though the avalanche of words in between somehow meant less by their placement in time. There is a whole collection of books based on this idea called, "the last interview: (fill in the blank).

I was just home, visiting for a few days before returning to the marshes and swamps of DC. I didn't pay much attention to the cats while I was home. Children and catching up tend to take precedence over our old pets. Note: I thought the cat was twelve. It turns out he was fourteen. And what I remember saying, because I suppose it qualifies as the last thing, "I didn't even pet the cats." At the time it seemed like a forgivable offense, an omission without any real consequence. And now that the cat is gone I keep hearing myself say, "I didn't even pet the cats."

However, now that I interrogate my memory of my time in Chico, I seem to remember stooping over once in the soft morning light and petting the ears of Murray, who is now gone. He leaned up against my leg, rubbing his head vigorously against my hand, turning again and again trying to get the perfect pet. Disclaimer: I don't know if this really happened. I may or may not have petted the cat. There's a chance that my memory has invented this for my well-being, that, in fact, I did not ever pet the cat. Honestly, I don't know.

But now I'm guilty of thinking too much about what was said last. I am not sure that we attach too much to our beginnings. Beginnings, unlike endings, are more like minor explosions than endings. Every relationship has a beginning where before there was nothing. It is like being brought into being. The first day we brought him home Murray, who was then named Mirial, because we'd been told he was a female kitten, a fact that we were only disabused of months later when we took her/him to be spayed, he hid behind the toilet in our bathroom, afraid of nearly everything.

Murray/Mirial was the kitten that I'd picked out as I'd been too young when we'd acquired our other two cats, and I was kind of miffed that he'd turned out to be such a wimp. On the second day I was hanging out with my then girlfriend when suddenly a little ball of fur flew into the room and began attacking the blinds, the blankets, and everything else in sight. We eventually had to give him/her the boot due to a collection of scratches and irritation at having our conversation interrupted by a tiny kitten trying to perform Jackie Chan like karate moves on a pillow.

In between some other things happened. For instance, after he discovered he was actually a boy, Murray grew even more in confidence, behaving, for all intents and purposes, like a dog. You could be three rooms over and call for him, and he'd come running in to see you. You could pat the bed and he'd hop up. The plus side is that unlike a dog he didn't feel the need to lick you and poop in the back yard to top things off. He loved being petted and would always turn himself practically inside out to get the proper scratch, and he'd purr like a slight motor. He was a big beautiful cat and then one day he was gone.

It happened while I was away, and I was never quite sure what the story was. One day he was just gone. We all told my mom that he'd probably been run over. However, she kept a picture up of him in the hallway and insisted that he was alive. It was my first experience of knowing that my mother could be just as loony as a child, and I joked around with her about it, calling her "crazy cat lady." Except, after he'd been gone for a couple of years my mother got a call from someone miles away telling her that a cat with her phone number on it had just been picked up by animal control. So, two or three years, I don't remember exactly, a little worse for the wear, Murray returned from his walkabout.

He'd changed in the interim. Not a great deal, but enough. He was more wary of people than when he'd been just ours. If you petted him with your foot rather than your hand, he'd nip you. He was still sweet, but it was more on his terms. In a way, despite his return being entirely silly and wonderful, it was a bit of a sad thing. Whatever he saw outside the confines of our home had turned him a bit hard, and I don't think I ever forgave him for not staying that little ball of amazing that he was at first.

I'm not a big pet person. I've got something approaching a phobia when it comes to dogs over two feet tall. And yet, when I read the e-mail from my mother about the death of Murray, I came close to crying. I didn't cry, because I wasn't sure that it was warranted, or because the tears didn't come, or because I held them back, or because he was a cat, or because I was not sure I knew him anymore, or because I didn't want to cry just then. The story of his passing goes like this. He slept at the foot of my mother's bed, keeping her company at night. At six, he woke her up to be let out. The night before he'd been tearing around the house terrorizing our much smaller and timid cat with his ferocity. By seven, my nephews, five and three, found him underneath the rose bush, ants already doing their best to take him apart. And they ran inside saying, "Ooma's (grandmother) cat is dead." Who told them what a dead cat looked like? Perhaps he was just sleeping.

And of course, I made it through the conversation with S and with my sister and mother, talking about the day's events, what might have happened. I could tell my mother was sad by the way her voice was catching, but I didn't want to cry. I opened up the e-mail and read it much closer, coming to the last sentence again, written by my mother, "I will miss his warm comfort very much." And that, dear reader, is when I started to cry. 

Just some things I forgot when I was at the grocery store

Sometimes, before I’ve had any coffee, when the world is still made of glass, I will walk downstairs into that thick silence and sit in the rocking chair. I do not pour myself a bowl of cereal, or flip open the computer. Instead, I listen to all the sounds that are not being made. You can feel the house nearly bursting with the effort of silence. Sooner or later a floorboard will creak and someone will be yelling underneath her door that she is, as always come  morning, “very very hungry.”

Months before we bought this house my wife said she thought it was haunted. We’d visited on the first day of our house search, admired the pergo flooring and basement bar. But surely, it couldn’t be ours, it was haunted. I could not sleep last night, listening to the wind and then the rain. I kept wondering if the basement was flooding as the rain thrummed its fingers on the roof. I went downstairs and got a drink at the bar in our basement. It’s being manned right now by the ghost of my grandfather. He makes me whiskey high balls, and we talk about the weather, the damn mosquitoes, and whatever sport is in season. Of course this house is haunted. We live here now.

I have learned in time that sharing walls with someone else is not always a nuisance. After midnight, when I am nearing sleep, I hear faint voices coming through the walls, slowly rising, like the movement in a piece of classical music that I cannot name because I am uncultured and musically challenged. But instead of queuing violins and horn sections to really kick it into high gear, I hear the snatches of these two people talking to each other like an Edward Albee play. Sooner or later a door slams, and I sink down further into the couch, curling my shoulders and hugging a pillow, comfortable in the knowledge that I am not the only one who finds it hard sometimes to withhold cruelty.

And still other mornings, curtains bisected by light, as I slip from dream to waking, I’ll hear faint cries that are undoubtedly coming from the rooms of my children. And yet, I’ll roll back over and close my eyes, it is always too early to get up, and I am certain that is just the neighbors, up early, arguing again. We see them later, talking over home improvements. Everything is fine now. It almost always is. That’s what mornings and death are for, forgetting. 

On which one of my children I love more

 Usually I love the one who is not crying the most. Though, ironically, the crying usually requires me to pay attention to them more, which means, paradoxically, if you are what you spend on your time on, that I love the one who is crying more. But that cannot be true because I do not love crying. I'll say it again. Usually, I love the one who is not crying.

Sometimes however, the one who is crying will be sick, or have fallen down, in which case, I love the one who is crying more, because I can see that they need it or are fragile. In less of course they go on crying well past what the fall or sickness warrant, in which case, though I am spending time with them I am usually loving the one who is not crying more wherever they've gotten off to.

Sometimes, neither one of them will be crying, and I will love them almost equally, though I usually love the one who is interacting with me more, because, despite marriage and children etc. I still believe myself to be the center of the world. Though sometimes, even when they're not crying, I will love the one who I am not interacting with more. Because sometimes the one I am interacting with will ask me to read fifty books in a row, in which case, though I am interacting with them, I am not loving it. Other times, the one who is not crying will be eating the head of a toy giraffe and smiling at me, and I will be filled with love for that child. Though that love is complex, because sometimes when the child is chewing the giraffe I'll take that opportunity to read a book or unload the dishwasher, or take out the trash, and I will wonder if it can be said that I am really loving the child if I'm only using their passivity to do other tasks. And, in fact, perhaps I am loving the other child more when I am reading them fifty books because at least I am paying attention to them. Love is complex in that way.

Sometimes, both of them will be crying, and I will find that though I love them, their crying diminishes its quantity. I am fickle, and I hope that they can't see that, but I am sure that at least one of them can, which makes me sad, but not sad enough to stop wanting them to always be good and kind and quiet when I need to rest. Sometimes I will find myself reading a book to both of them, and I will love them both equally for a few pages or so, until the one starts to eat the book or the other one tries to take the book away to have it read without the interference of the one who is trying to eat the book, and I will find my love oscillating back and forth between the two of them.

Often I love them the most when they are asleep, and I am allowed to reflect on how wonderful they are when they are awake. It is often hard to reflect on how wonderful they are when they are awake, because they require a lot of attention, which precludes reflection and causes me to want to try and play games that involve me napping. I think you know what I mean. Sometimes I will sneak with s into their bedrooms when they are sleeping, and I will peer down at their precious little sleeping forms, and I will be filled with love for them, and I will want to wake them up just to tell them, but I refrain, because I know that sooner or later one of them will be crying, and I'll be forced to consider again, just who I love the most. 

This and That

I didn’t mind the afternoon, rinsed by summer rain. Walking back from lunch, the ground creased by small lakes--numerous as the sky with stars, I ruminated on the past. I turned it over and over again in my mind, polishing it like a stone. When I was done, I saw that it bore no resemblance to anything that had ever happened to me, that it was instead, something new. After this gesture, I was exhausted and, like all creators, I rested. The sky was pink now, awash in clouds.

I knew that I must carefully study the past because it would have such a resemblance to the future. Some days I would be happy and laugh and drink and tell long digressive stories with friends, shake the dregs from the bottom of wine bottles and recount the good old days and the good old days to come; others, I would drink tea with a raw throat and complain of my sickness, the weather, age, and misfortune, still others would see me slumped on a brown couch cushion moving my fingers in an attempt at construction with a meager offering of words. Sometimes, the past seems to be happening now.

I have some things in common with flowers. I don’t regret the days that I have spent turned towards the sun, rimmed in strands of light. The flowers, who are deeply committed to this symmetry, keep burying their roots deeper and deeper as time too, stretches across the universe deeper and deeper, unraveling instead, like a spool of thread. This is where commonalities between myself and flowers begin to go awry. The flowers will die soon, and I intend to live for decades and decades, sipping that tea, watching the steam curl above gnarled old hands, useless hands, hands that have toiled on this earth and been greeted only by thistles and thorns.

The strangest thing about memory is the smell of freshly mown grass, warm young bodies post-coitally aglow, a flock of geese showing off in a perfect V. Below, we see only the embers of light attached to their white feathers, molten gold. I mean only to point to the exigencies of life, of memory. How strange that I remember certain afternoons with piercing clarity while years and years are lost to me. How strange, how chaotic. Let us take flight then, like the geese. Let us travel to a place that is nothing like this, a place where we can absent ourselves from mirrors, lakes, memories and lovers, where our thoughts are strung across the sky like a fledgling phoenix: young and bright and fierce. 

Other things

I’ve heard writing described by some as cathartic, as artistic, as expressive, an outgrowth, something born of need. For me, writing is an apology. I am walking beneath the streets, amongst the catacombs, and yet, a fine wind is blowing wet leaves of beech trees that line the street like sentinels. I am carrying a small sack of words and knocking on doors in the faintest of light. When the door opens, the light scandalizes me, and I shyly open my bag, letting the words, dusty words, long words, words that have failed me, or remade me, fall out onto the floor, hoping that somewhere in the jumble is a pattern of forgiveness. 

                These houses that I visit are populated by strangers who bear a resemblance to old friends, third grade teachers, dogs from books I read as a child who died at the end, a priest who pulled me from the me from the mud, a girl I once met on a bus headed to New York, and of course, my mother and father, brother and sister etc. And yet, these are not the primary characters to whom I offer my words, my solace, my confusion.

The person who answers every door is a version of myself, sometimes from years ago, pushing Hot Wheels down a driveway, picking strawberries in a side yard, or smacking wildly at a tetherball. Sometimes, the person I meet is from only months, seconds, hours before. I apologize to all of them profusely. I try to explain to them why we’re here, how this all came about. I am a stranger in these houses, a doddering old fool who has wandered in during the middle of the night, just looking for a place to relieve his bladder and mind. 

“It gets better,” many of the younger versions of myself say, as if they have any clue about the future. And yet, I believe them. I believe them because I know that it has been better, will be better, maybe even isn’t all that bad, and why was I spreading all that doom and gloom. Soon I am sitting down to have a glass of brandy, or grape juice and passing the time in an intensely sweet reverie. I say, “I don’t know why I’ve been so sad. Perhaps I’m just confused  about things, and I’m mistaking the confusion for something deeper.”

Soon, depending upon the age of my interlocutor, we are walking the pale streets, painted by black shadows of lamp posts, riddled by bat guano, talking about the video games, the books, the trees, the winks and long summer days that I used to love. And the melancholy is with me again, walking along in the street, saying something of people looking on works and despairing, but I know that he means loves, he means worn book spines, cracked spokes of bike wheels, the face of a grandparent now dead, staring back at you from a photo.  I know that he means, bones and bones and bones, bones stacked in grave yards, on the top of Italian hillsides, in the ditches and trenches of Europe I can hear him saying, this too shall pass.

But look, I said, shaking a very startled version of myself. We must forget this. Eat drink and be merry, or at the very least, not rhapsodize about death when we are living dammit. We are living. I contain multitudes, of which, you are at least one. Let’s drink to that. Let’s drink to everything.  I am reminding myself to smile, and reminding myself, in the process to smile. I remind both of us that there are many things in the world which are worthy of a smile, a drink, a laugh, though I can't think of any just now besides good company.

 .The wind, in response, blew a cold blast, reminding me that I was alive, though in a different mood I would have sheltered from it and cursed existence. As we walked those sooty streets, those drunken streets that turn and then turn again for no reason, streets that sway beneath our feet,  I explain to him that the best way to start is with a smooth inward turn of the knee and then a sharp jerk, like a gun’s recoil as it approaches the inside leg, pulling the knee back outward and locking in place. I hand him another drink as I explain to him just how the whole movement is about letting go, losing sight of the other, the only person paying attention to you with the intensity that you fear is you. This evening, we're Buddhist. We're forgetting the self. 

He reminded me just then, this old prig, that he had never nor danced in his life, not even in front of the mirror when no one was in the house, and I am forced to consider, or reconsider, what I bore I was, or what I bore I’ve become. And I see in all these self-portraits a kind of mosaic, and I want John Ashberry to write me a poem about these encounters with the self, how they might make a kind of picture. I want him to call it, “Self-Portrait in a convex mirror,” and I want his poem to go something like this,

"Francesco one day set himself
To take his own portrait, looking at himself from that purpose
In a convex mirror, such as is used by barbers . . .
He accordingly caused a ball of wood to be made
By a turner, and having divided it in half and
Brought it to the size of the mirror, he set himself
With great art to copy all that he saw in the glass,"
Chiefly his reflection, of which the portrait
Is the reflection, of which the portrait
Is the reflection once removed.”

And it is this finally, the thought of John Ashberry, a thousand John Ashberry’s, one million John Ashberry’s staying up late at night, nibbling on the end of a pen, constructing the poem, Self-Portrait in  a Convex Mirror” that allows me to rest.

We walk home in silence, pacing our thoughts. He with his: which concern the past, worries of college, of classes, of friendships, of women we no longer know. And me, with the answers to all those questions, not wanting to spoil anything, not wanting anything to ruin this moment, the two of us walking together, stride for stride, not talking, under the silver light of a now risen moon. 

Writing

Wasted afternoons, spent beneath low slung clouds, mirrors posing as water to large swaths of cerulean skies. Long, tepid afternoons, on the front porches of strangers, trading gossip, swatting mosquitoes, sweating in the stifling heat in the throes of cheap whiskey.

Afternoons in the apartments of girls, sweat stained sheets after discussing Proust, of whom I’ve not read a single word. The lazy fly buzzes the window and we trade metaphors and meaning as the light skips through the window making lattices on the floor.

The beginning of a certain evening in Paris, in Pigalle, wandering the streets in search of a guide book to take me home, streetlights like lighthouses, streets dusted in pollen and moon. Resisting the temptation to switch to you, to utter the word that hovers over all our gestures.

Trailing down a street glittering with green glass, the hem of a skirt brushing along the ground.  In the morning, swans trumpet and starlings make elaborate shapes beneath obsidian clouds. They seem to say, “nothing has changed.”

I painted a mural of the sky in the middle of my ceiling. On the outside, I put all of the things that I used to be, an astronaut, a diver, a teacher, a mid thirteenth century philosopher who held that the world was comprised entirely of my failures, an auto mechanic in Sydney Australia who specialized in kangaroo engine clean up, a Rhodes scholar. In the end it looked nothing like the Sistine Chapel, or anything else painted on a roof during the Renaissance if that’s what you were expecting. It looked like a flock of crows, flying west, away from a burning sun, the bottoms of their wings tinged with green. Don’t ask me to make sense of it. Don’t ask me to make sense of anything. 

Monet

During the day we painted terrible watercolors. We’d watched, or half-watched, a lengthy documentary about the work of Monet. Like most people, we didn’t just want to see something beautiful, yellow streetlights wavering on dark masses of water, we wanted to personify it, to create it, and in some way justify our own existence, which, when compared with Monet’s up to this point, probably wouldn’t be resulting in any documentaries.

The hardest part about the painting is that I was terrible at it. I had no eye for color, or shapes, the play of different dimensions in space. In truth, the only thing that I can do well from an artistic point is draw a very small bird, primarily using semi-circles and frown emoticons that I learned how to do from a children’s book. My painting didn’t even end up looking like a cheap imitation, which is the best we could have hoped for. Really, we were hoping that it would at least bear some resemblance.

I’d devolve here, if I had the patience, into a lengthy discussion of whether it was hubris or entirely within the realm of human effort to assume that I would have been good at painting Monet. I’ve since learned that Picasso is the easiest to copy, perhaps I’d have had more success there. Relatedly, whether any human being has the ability to transcend the conventions, tracks, paintings, tracts, sermons, afternoon walks through gorse by Irish seas that have been lived and laid out before them, which is to say, would it have been better to have been doing an original painting poorly, or imitating a master and failing utterly? Such is the human condition for those of a religious bent, destined to fall short of the master, unable to escape that infinite shadow. This is all relatively immaterial as it pertains to the real crux of the story. My apologies.  

The difficult part came after Sarah left. I stood at the window for a moment, watching some cedars and juvenile oaks trembling in the wind. It was the sort of time that I wished that I smoked, if just to have something to do with my hands as I watched the streets and the clouds scuttling across thin blue skies. I walked back to the paintings and looked at Sarah’s, and what I saw immediately stunned me. I could see a certain artistry in her strokes that was absent in mine. The copy was clunky, sure, but within it, among the derivative shades of blue and pictures of wildflowers I detected, in a line above the women’s nose, the shape of the right side of her bottom lip, the underside of the clouds, an aesthetic, an eye I suppose that outpaced anything I’d achieved during the exercise.

There is nothing that delights me more than failing at something in good company. If I’m honest, watching myself fail while my companion succeeded felt a bit like drowning as they swam past, and I was thereby placed in a strange kind of dilemma, whether to tell her that her eye was something that should be cultivated, admitting in the process that my own was not, or whether to let the afternoon pass, to try and talk her into a walk down forty ninth among the pines, or a short jaunt to the park to throw bread at pigeons, ignoring in the process, the fact that she had done something of merit and thereby rendering it obsolete. Or near obsolete. (I’m not even sure what obsolete means in this context. Is a piece of art or a skill made obsolete if it remains unacknowledged? What of the works of Kafka had been destroyed, or if the world’s greatest write left all of his manuscripts locked away in a chest beneath his bed? Perhaps it is only in inaction that the skill or art is useless. I don’t know. I prattle. I prattle. At parties, I drink too much and say things that I cannot possibly mean).

Years later I ran into Sarah at an opera in a city that reminded me of Vienna without the ostentation. She was standing in the foyer, beneath a white marble pillar, fanning herself, and looking out into the droves of people standing around, looking intelligent and bored, as if she knew someone. I recognized her at once but thought at first to avoid the interaction. We had not parted on strange or unpleasant terms. I’d found work in another city, reviewing second rate theater shows for a small newspaper, and neither one of us had ever expected our relations to last beyond the point when their convenience was exhausted.

We started talking that evening, after getting through some polite formalities, reminding one another who we had once been, who is to say what went through her mind, if she had the same flash of recognition, of a thousand moments, the moment of our parting flooding her mind as she politely smiled and told me of her husband and children. Maybe she thought nothing of it at all. As she talked, I was that she had grown conventional in her old age. Not nearly as much a crime as it might sound. It has happened to a great deal of my friends who once were interesting and would stay up half the night drinking wine and debating the merits of the socialist state. Clods now, most of them, who are lucky to make it past ten before they begin nervously checking their watches and talking of wives, or children or girlfriends or work obligations.

I found myself profoundly bored as she talked to me of her children and husband, what they were doing now in school, an upcoming vacation to see family in Idaho. And yet, I must say that a heavy weight of something, guilt I suppose, sat in the forefront of my mind. She had grown conventional, not amounted to anything more than someone else’s wife and someone else’s mother in a thoroughly conventional city. What part had I played in that decision? I found it impossible not to wonder, not to wonder if I’d consigned her to that life all those years ago, when she’d wandered back into the room, bits of blue paint on her high cheekbones and a flush in her cheeks of youthful excitement, “Let’s go feed pigeons,” I said, handing her a light jacket and wetting my thumb to wipe away the paint from her cheek. “These are terrible anyway.” And we’d walked down the street and never talked of painting again, and three months later I’d be leaving.

Her husband eventually arrived, a run of the mill sort of guy, neatly parted hair, a job and a 403b. We shook hands and soon parted ways. I looked over my shoulder as I left her that once promising woman, bent at the waist, whispering something now to her husband, talking furiously, fiercely, as she’d once done with me.