(a folk song translated from an unknown language)
He came out of the dry east with a leather bag
He stood in the square, and I know he smiled at me
Stroked his mustache, boasted to the village men
No one knows who told his secretThe leather bag was left empty against the wall
Behind it red spots, blood red
He shouldn’t have looked at the other girls
I wash and wash the wall, I rub very hard
[Berlin, 3/30-31/94]
A few weeks ago I went to Amsterdam by myself for six days. A conference – frankly a slightly silly one: a few interesting papers dotted here and there among a great deal of fluff and repetition – but that was really just the excuse, to get away and go somewhere fun. Took many pictures, wandered around a lot, shopped like mad, got through my first ever Queen's Day, their mad carnival holiday. And yes I did buy a joint (well, two joints), and I went to some of the sleazier gay bars, but my heart wasn't in it – sex tourism doesn't seem like much fun these days, and I felt distinctly impatient with all that. Even in the Argos, on the last night, my tendency was to talk to the guys there.... I mean, really, can you imagine?
But I did buy things, and they are still around, or at least most of them are: some completely amazing chocolates (well all right, those are gone, but their memory still lingers – they were really something, too), some powerful cheeses (what are tastefully called "mature" ones), and green teas that make the ones I've been drinking look like the American brand of Budweiser to an oenophile. Last night, late, I was recovering from the stressful meetings of the day with the cheese and chocolate....
I can't remember where I read this, but who has explained that those kept in Nazi concentration camps, starved, desperate and miserable, dreamed above all of chocolate and cheese? I used to think that was because of some innate human need for them, but on this trip it occurred to me that this was a very Central European reaction – given the sheer rich electric charge of this mature cheese, of the unbelievably deep flavor of the chocolate, no wonder someone who grew up speaking a Germanic language would dream of them at night.
Those cheeses: although they were covered in wax, they reeked so much that I had to put them in two plastic bags in the refrigerator. It reminded me of the great tale of the cheeses, the finest set piece in Jerome's Three Men in a Boat, which still makes me laugh out loud. And yes, he has it right: traveling with a ripe cheese can draw attention to you – unwelcome attention for the most part.
Two days ago, when walking to work on an unaccustomedly sunny day, I met two big leather-clad, bearish bikers by the side of the road: they asked me for directions through town. While giving it, I said, "Deutsch, aber?..." They responded, "Dutch," and I thought, aha. Two guys on motorcycles, from the Netherlands, on vacation with each other... and I was confirmed in that by the last glance one of them gave me, looking down my body in a blunt gesture of checking-it-out. A shame I was so preoccupied – it was that busy day this week when I had a presentation and a performance – as I probably should have given them my phone number. Ah well, the story of my life: too passive when it gets interesting, too hesitant when I should be forthright, too preoccupied with presenting myself to notice when I'm noticed.
Anyway: I have the cheeses, and still some of the chocolates, and the teas. And my photographs. The rich experiences collected by centuries of merchants. Harbor life....
There are a number of stock phrases for it – familiar from Vesaas, Hamsun, Jansson, Nabokov, many Scandinavian and Russian writers. Here, we are far enough in the north (far north of any of the major Canadian cities, for instance) that we have the same light that they do – sometimes, at least, including this evening.
Pale sunlight. Sun slanting through storm clouds, northern sunlight, bleached light. Pale, birch-tree light, clear, wan light, pallid sunbeams, rays of alabaster, and so on. It is that distinctively white but bright light – you know it – I was fascinated when I first saw it in Kiel, in northern Germany, about fourteen years ago. Part of the fascination of travel is seeing that which is truly different: for instance, I've heard about the light in Greece, but despite one wonderful week in southern Crete, I haven't really seen what they mean yet – I think you need to get onto the mainland to see the depth of the blue they speak of there. This northern, pale light is indeed beautiful; my father would have loved it (he was a photographer, professional in quality if not in career choice) – he would have tried to capture it, preferably reflected sun against clouds, that probably would have been his first choice. A difficult technical feat, but he would have spent hours, perhaps days, concentrating on it, if allowed.
It is, however, a light that is especially beautiful when you either are seeing it on a visit, or when you grew up with it, when it is a part of your world of comfort. For me, it is still beautiful (that can't be changed – the special sense of it, when there seems to be so much of it pealing through the clouds, and yet it has such a bloodless, un-sunny quality), but it isn't such a matter for fascinated wonder any more; instead it more simply reminds me that I am far from home (wherever that is), far from whatever place I should be. Nice place to visit, but....
The response to that is, obviously: if I'm not satisfied, if I'm not home, where would I be happy? A question based on a problem-solving context, a businesslike mentality: how can this be fixed?
I'm not sure it can be, any more. The possibility of living in Sydney five years ago seemed practically perfect – exotic yet made out of many of the more enjoyable of familiar, California-like elements; a lively place made up of what I used to tell friends, 'the people of San Francisco with the weather of Los Angeles'. They would ahh in wonder at such an idea: that one might have bizarre, charming, sexy, friendly, funny people, and at the same time live around them in a wonderful climate – because in California, unfortunately, one typically has to choose one or the other, and then live with the choice.
That door was of course slammed shut, and painfully. The aftermath was painful too – the chaos, the financial disaster, the feeling of being thrown down somewhere that wasn't chosen. My current story is that I've finally gotten over it, over the past year: but that merely means that the feelings of rage, loss and depression have faded into something quieter – it doesn't mean that I have any sense of being at home which would replace my shattered dreams of Oz, or any directed longing for another place. I think sometimes of New Zealand, but feel warned by A–'s telling me of his experience – he returned after several years of what should have been bliss, feeling too bored, and too isolated from the greater (i.e. urban, or American, or simply north Atlantic?) world. (Of course, he also had a long-time partner leave him – and he probably missed his vast crowds of fans, who milled around him last weekend in Manchester – so his reaction might be suspect.)
The uneasy quality of my life these days has much to do with its aimlessness: short-term goals don't seem terribly interesting (promotion? publication? clearing out the front room? – they all have about the same status in terms of joy and fulfillment). And long-term goals are just, well, they've all gone sort of shabby, cracked and bent, until I can't quite recognize them as such: I wanted to come to Europe – and now I'm here, but not in a terribly fascinating part of it, and with few prospects for becoming a Continental. I wanted to live in a small house, with a partner, and a garden: but not in any neighborhood I've seen around here. I wanted lively city streets, cafe tables and gardens, laughing people; interesting things going on, the pleasures of the table and stage. Those things aren't utterly absent here, they're just, well, not terribly remarkable in this part of the world; and if they are elsewhere, they don't seem quite worth fighting for, working towards. And the many intense ambitions that drove my life so hard until the late 1990s all seem a bit silly now – a young man's narcissistic fantasies, mostly simple and unrealistic prestige- and art-oriented bids for attention. Publishing has devolved into a thing one does to get a promotion, and the disappointment of realizing that my work doesn't have to be particularly good to succeed (nor does it have to be bad to fail) gives professional writing a slightly bitter, unappetizing aftertaste.
I won't go in for dramatic depression, as I know too much about it from long consideration of so many modernist products – that is just another pose, the result of reading too much Beckett and Sartre (or Amis and McEwan, if you prefer) and inflating one's problems until life seems to be a a terrible, tragic failure. Mine isn't, and it isn't even awful in any particular way: it's just a bit too listless, more shapeless than it should be, a bit lifeless, really.
A bit like that light, I see: pale, wan – almost bloodless....
Floating out of sight under the boat’s rim, waiting for the end. Pain in his hammered tail, bleeding on the chains, but he thought, Glory, glory, and remembered richly textured gray skin, the smooth flow of ridgéd spines. Twisting and snapping, such power, he’d fly far away to race through favorite waters, to moan with pleasure at the tourists’ legs. Ah, the sensual free of it, the rich give and throw of the water and the wild left turns, they made his hearts cry out with overdoubled joys. Could he only cruise the beaches, coast the coastline, or shift gears in the shallows, taste once again the ecstasy of the golden flesh of slow beach-goers! The beauty of it, more than could ever be borne or made, and surely he would escape at last. His teeth would stay forever sharp, and his hearts would pump, his stomachs roar at the knives’ edges of the waves, the silver boats’ bottoms, the warm blood and the cries of legless children, O.
[Los Angeles, 5/9/90-8/27/92]
Beautiful cars float on the freeways.
The Hollywood sign has been repaired.
Surfaces are chromed and dazzling,
fine sunglasses conceal our memories.
[Los Angeles, 5/2/90]
Perhaps it is because I was reading about Heidegger last night – and actually understood, and responded to, the simplest possibilities of the ideas of being and authenticity.... or maybe it's just that it is Saturday. And maybe it's just that I finally changed the bedclothes from the heavy winter comforter to a light summer cover (I should have done that a month ago... and I always notice how much it changes my sleep, and body's energy).
In any case, a lot of the tangled minor preoccupations that pull me down seem to be coming from a greater distance. They aren't gone – I woke to the same stomach pains I've had for weeks now, and the same (or nearly the same) ungainly exasperation at my aging, less than healthy body – but they seem almost summed up, reduced in scope to something distantly remembered, and frankly not terribly important. A valuable place to be: that detachment is what I clearly need to move forward into anything at all....
Today all of the postgraduates had work due (and I am the Cerberus, or perhaps more accurately Rhadamanthys, of this whole structure). I received several frantic calls and e-mails starting from about 8:30 am, from students who had hit some sort of wall, intellectual or physical – one battling with an incoherent conclusion, another with a migraine that kept her from finishing. I did my supportive bit – typically for me, pushing them to do whatever they could, then relenting when it seemed that they really needed a break. Bad cop and good cop in one person....
What is tricky about these matters is that I myself am so extremely poor at handling this exact problem: meeting deadlines, finishing writings, disciplining myself to work frequently on a long-term project, deciding that the current version is good enough for a given situation. I know that I am repeating many things said to me by my teachers and advisors over the past, uh – well, since we probably need to go back at least to high school on this, the past thirty-five years or so. And I know that these mysterious proverbs, these emblematic Redewendungen of intellectual production, are accurate and helpful – but I must admit that I do not generally manage to follow them myself.
Which, I suppose, indicates that this is exactly the right job for me now: to revise my own habits and my interpretations of past experiences in the light of what I now have to spend time saying to younger writers....
Awakened by the bass from that rather inane dance track that the girl downstairs has suddenly taken a liking to... or more probably it's her ungracious Glaswegian boyfriend who likes, and plays, it. Good thing he's rarely around.
I know enough of apartment life in a variety of contexts to know that I'm lucky here; my lovely, sweet-tempered, tall blond Valkyrie of a downstairs neighbor, and the attentive, helpful landlord. As for noisy students on either side, since these attached houses have brick walls between them, it's rare that I hear much. The last two transients downstairs, roommates for the Valkyrie, have been the only ones to play music, and they did so rarely, for which I am most thoroughly grateful.
However, the relatively quiet space I live in – a flat alone, lots of light and air, amplified by the extended summer days of these high latitudes – makes even those rare bursts of drum'n'bass feel remarkably interruptive, as though they damage some sort of connection that is normally, silently, maintained. Or perhaps they damage the agreement I have made with the quiet....
Every whisper sounds like thunder
Everybody stares in wonder
When the saints begin to speak
[Manhattan Transfer, 'Brasil']
Yesterday was the usual AIDS/HIV patient group presentation to medical students. ("Usual" – this is one of the things I do here, in this otherwise rather isolated place – it is both my claim to actually do something useful in my life, and my attempt to make contact.) Four patients, plus two professionals framing us; everyone in a particularly reasonable, undramatic, slightly distracted mood. The stories were frankly a bit incoherent this time, but not at all nonsensical – our dramatically tattooed ex-con straight guy hectoring everyone on the Coming Plague, our relaxed mother of two explaining the details of her pregnancy and childbirth, and the rather clueless Belgian professional stumbling through the discussion from time to time with one or another insensitive comment. (He rarely attends – I must confess I won't miss him when he goes.) But it was, as usual, a deeply powerful connection, even with its minor and fragmentary appearance – these presentations are apparently the high point in a year of teaching for these students (according to their evaluations), and they are always fairly amazed at our everyday humanity, and probably simply that we're alive.
It's a saintly act, really. It doesn't sound like one, I'm sure – questions of sex, guilt, the personal mistakes we've made and the professional mistakes made upon us – but it is the closest thing in my life to an unafraid confrontation with being, to real and undemonstrative courage. There are glints of that in teaching, of course, but they are rare – perhaps because of academic egos, perhaps because the students are young and selfish, perhaps because I teach in a discipline that doesn't really have the quality of necessity (as would medicine, perhaps, or engineering in a poor country). Perhaps it's just because I'm so self-involved in my academic work, obsessed with my own productivity above all.
But the privilege, the luck, of being able to remind myself of these confrontations, of this being, on a regular basis - a very good thing; otherwise I would undoubtedly forget about everything that mattered....