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.