Play time

I’ve been sucked in. It’s true. I have played an inordinate amount of Pokemon Go, although “play” seems like an exaggeration, since all that the playing involves is taking walks and swiping or tapping incessantly on my phone screen. Strategy? Pidgies: collect them, evolve them with a lucky egg when you’re ready to level up (but only in the 20+ levels). The game is gleefully simple (and relatively stupid): collect stuff, collect more stuff, and then collect even more stuff. The player is “rewarded” with greater strength and ability as he or she “levels up,” but let’s be honest: the stuff and the rewards are imaginary; the only thing real is the time one spends playing. So, why do we play?I explained the old rat-reward experiment to my daughter while we watched people paw at their screens. B.F. Skinner showed in an experiment with rats that variable interval reinforcement leads to a higher rate of response than constant rate of reinforcement, and that both were significantly more effective than punishment (which, it turns out, swiftly ends the impulse to work—or play). Well that’s a lot of mumbo jumbo. Here’s the skinny: rats work (or play, for the purposes of game play) harder when rewarded; they get turned off by punishment; and they work hardest and longest when the rewards come consistently but unpredictably. Surely, rat brains and human brains are different, but just try to run such an experiment on people. Wait, let’s track all those Pokemon Go players and see what that tells us about how they play.

Short story long, we are built to be frustrated. The brain likes rewards (and hates punishments), but only so often—too many and it gets bored. Of course our complicated brains find connections and correlations around causes and consequences. So, it’s not a surprise when my brain gets caught up in figuring out if I received that reward for bringing my girlfriend flowers, finishing my annual report, or catching a wild Gyarados, and that’s just if I got a reward for doing something in the first place. My rat brain tells me: just keep working and something will come.

The cool thing about being human (and not a rat pressing a bar in a cage) is that the rewards come in all shapes and sizes—M&Ms, Mazda Miatas, sailing ships in bottles, shoes. We can turn those cash/work rewards into whatever we like. And I will not overlook the reward of the view out my office window, or the company I keep at work, or at home. The world seems designed to reward us—all these surprises. The Clash sings, “I fought the law!” That’s right brothers!

I do believe–and when I started writing this last week (before I reminded myself of all the rewards that I have strewn before me, like a reverse trail of breadcrumbs into the future) I believed it a little more—that games like Pokemon Go offer a fairly consistent diet of rewards, and that in spite of their frustrations (and because of them too), they are bright little respites from the “thousand shocks that flesh is heir to.” If we lead, as Thoreau asserts, “lives of quiet desperation,” we lead them because too often we think that our human brains need punishments to convince and cajole them into agreement or good behavior or harder work. We beat ourselves and each other like mules bound to work until they stop. We preach about “tough love” and manly determination as values that have meaningful positive consequences. My rat brain says, “I’m done.” My human brain says, “No thank you. I’m off to play.”

 

Summer Time

Summer unsettles me. For the last three weeks I walked through my days drunk with free time, having gone from the manic pace of the end of the school year (exams and graduation) and the beginning of the summer Sunday School program, to a single (part time) job. The manic pace is the pace of the week from September through June. I put in six and seven day work weeks as a matter of course. I am fortunate that some of those days last only a few hours, but there is always something work-related on my schedule. That is the wonder of working what amounts to three part-time jobs, none of which is really part-time. When I add my daughter, who stays with me three days out of seven, into the mix, I really have no trouble getting from waking up to falling asleep with more than an hour here or there to sit idle.

As busy as I am, my schedule gives the day a durable structure. It does not feel so much like a limit on my time, as much as something that opens specific spaces that are “not work” in each day. During the school year, I sip my idle time, and cherish it as something special. I fit in an hour of writing, and it serves as a counterweight to the all the rest of the day’s efforts.

Then comes summer. My schedule opens up, and idle time drinks me down in one single swallow. I can watch six hours of news at the drop of a hat, or nap while old, favorite movies play on Turner Classic Movies, or stand in the kitchen and pet the cat who likes to eat on the windowsill while being petted. The three hours it takes for the dishwasher to sanitize bottles passes while I walk for gelato; I could eat gelato for days. Work, work of any sort, gets in the way of lazy naps. Licking a postage stamp would take too much effort. Small balls of cat fur collect on the carpet; I give them names.

What happened to the grand plans? Wasn’t there a romance I was going to undertake? Don’t I have the outline of a novel festering somewhere? When will I install a properly working garbage disposal? I have scads of miles built up on Southwest, aren’t there friends I haven’t visited in years?

Nothing. Inertia wraps its warm comfortable fingers around my wrists, and holds me tight with the insistence of a dirty secret: I love to be idle. Nothing to do is my idea of heaven, and I can do it with sluggish zeal. Do less! Do less! Forsake your obligations and practice closing your eyes! This is not “genius at work” time, unless I am the genius of laggardly living.

But then I do this, I write about it, and the spell is broken. How did I forget words, the deeper determined secret that I tried to deny, and which surface from even this short (and all too long) dormant time and claim me? I may not be the self-ascribed martinet of the school year and yet I feel compelled by word and dream to get back to it. And so I do.

Loss and Connection

Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” is a tart response to the steady procession out the door.  First she loses keys, then houses, then cities, two rivers, and a continent.  She writes, “Practice losing farther, losing faster.” And finally, “you (the joking voice, a gesture I love).” And that seems about the right order: keys, houses, cities, rivers, continents, you.

I have to admit that I’ve lost my fair share of people along the way. I have no friends from elementary school. I have a few acquaintances (thanks Facebook), but no profoundly important bonds from high school.  I keep in intermittent touch with a couple of professors from college, but all the people I played bridge with at lunch or in the evening, my swimming compatriots, or my more fiery friends from that rich time of awakening have gone. I retain only a single connection from the lost years while I worked in restaurants. Until the age of 28, the only people who remained constant in my life were my father, my mother, and my brothers, and I could no more lose them than I could lose my opposable thumbs, my kidneys, or my hair. Oops.

Somewhere along the way all that changed.  And it wasn’t the people I was meeting.  I figured out a few things about myself, and started on my life’s work. I am happy, overjoyed really, that I have friends who I met on the first day I started graduate school at Binghamton, and that in the thirty years since then, I have built, and been built into webs that extend across the country and onto other continents. Even if I disappeared today, if sudden tragedy erased me, those webs would remain, and my juncture would remain too, if only as a bright memory.

Still there are losses, certain “you’s” who spin away someplace else, who collided with my life, briefly or for longer times, and then left.  In the ramshackle castle of my heart, I have a dozen rooms of voices and gestures belonging to this you or that you who received and returned “I love you” from me and to me.

I can imagine rekindling almost any old friendship.  Bruce, Steve, Kevin? Trevor, Barry, Pete? Beth, Paul, Wendy, Cliff, Neil, Jean, Miriam, Ted? Sure. I would be delighted to hear about their lives, to listen to their stories, and discover where they have been, what they have learned, the best meals they have eaten.  I would sit them all around a table and cook a stew of memory.  But those women with whom I have shared at least a glimpse of my most intimate self, for whom I carved hearts into scallops (and filled those hearts with pesto), or alongside whom I have sat quietly on glacial erractic boulders, or who kissed me until days turned into into weeks, and weeks turned into years?  I think I have lost them.

Maybe it’s because break ups are just that—a break, a tear in the web of connections.  If a declaration of love is tantamount to an assertion of meaning in the universe: there are stars! there is hydrogen! the miracle of leaves! radio waves! elephants! cellos! then the end of love threatens to cast all of creation into some alternate universe where everything delicious tastes like burning tires.  Of course it doesn’t. Of course that is overly romantic. It is just turning a page.

What universe do you live in that anything can be set aside so blithely? I cannot.

And so it is with special joy that one star flickered back onto the horizon.  After nearly twenty five years, I sent this old friend a message “Went on a date with someone who so fabulously reminded me of you.” We chatted back and forth and she sent me a draft of the book she has been running away from for as long as I knew her. Finally running into it, she has uncovered connection after connection, and as she does, she bounced between them amazed and perplexed, delighted as a child who has discovered the art of skipping. At some penultimate revelation she declared that she had uncovered a miracle, to which I responded that she is, was, and always would be a miracle. She answered, “Well that made me cry. We had something so special. And for you to still be in my in my life is another miracle.” Thank you, my now distant friend, for helping put the universe back into order.  Keep writing.

We are all miracles. Loss only makes me feel that more keenly now than I ever had before.  But not just loss: my daughter, my students, my friends, a Sondheim song, everything, everyone.  Once I felt unequal to the task of acknowledging and praising the miracles that were all around me.  I kept them at a distance and felt flustered, off-balance, and awestruck when they accepted me into their orbits.  When they drifted away, I accepted the loss, almost as glibly as Bishop does in her poem. After all, what was I but some strange satellite from some strange universe?  Even Bishop’s advice, “Write it,” seemed to make the world and the process of loving and losing little more than the material for writing (which, I am half ashamed to say, it can be).

Loss is a disaster and no disaster, because it casts me back out of myself, and so deeply reminds me that I am not the center of a weird universe, but part of something larger. In his poem, “The Cleaving, “ Li-Young Lee calls us “a many-membered body of love.”  So I am reminded, and so I write, part of the miracle and a miracle. A contradiction and a multitude. Brian Brennan for the moment and in perpetuity. My heart fixed here, back in the web, part of this and every other universe, spinning in every direction, and open.

Texas (a poem)

On my birthday, of all days, I feel the absence of my friends–those souls scattered across the world like the no longer tightly packed leaves of my heart. A long time ago I wrote a poem about them, and so heading to the day, here it is.

Texas

In the evening, between the blur of work
And the final call of slumber
We wear red hats.
We sit on the bench. We take
the field. We stretch into position.
We wear red hats.
The opposition—such as it is—wears
hats of blue, black, or even green.
We wear red hats.
This goes on. Balls are thrown.
We catch. We hit. We sit,
and wait for chance to take a hand.
We wear red hats.
The night provides possibilities.
What did we do all day?
Who knows? We cancelled checks.
We bought farms. We wiped spit
from the trumpeter’s lip. We organized
a trip to the land of hats, where we found what?
Robes of white? Wooden shoes? Electricity? Vision?
Yes, yes, yes, & yes again. And
red hats in sizes to fit our various heads.

The world is composed of cowhide & ash.
We wear red hats.
The world is composed of teletype & ink.
We wear red hats.
The world hurtles forth, two seamed & sinking.
We wear red hats.

You go home early. We play on
in our red hats.
Each side takes a turn. The game
continues hours into night.
The night waits for days, weeks—
there’s ice in the stands.
We wear red hats. We can’t stop.
The opposition languishes. We give them
red hats. What cheers apply?
GO RED HATS! DEVASTATE THE GAME!
ANNIHILATE DAY! PLAY MORE!
WEAR RED HATS!

Grass grows around our ankles,
tickling our knees, topped with red hats.
The ground is a mystery.
The umpires resort to rules.
How many red hats to a side? Which one
of you is the pitcher? Should the manager
wear a red hat? Arguments ensue.
“Stop being so shrill,” he says. “This isn’t
opera. Break into bloom.”

The roses wear red hats.
Coffee and Coke wear red hats.
Garibaldi wears a red hat.
Eisenhower and Eichmann wear red hats.
Red-hatted love takes red-hatted hate
in a ten-minute ballet called “The Red Hat.”
The red-hatted director of the planetarium
puts on a show of red-hatted stars
and the ancient constellation “Red Hat Hercules.”
Borofsky’s famous lost painting “Jesus,
Mary & Joseph in Red Hats” is traded at auction
for a box of rare Etruscan red hats.

What good will it do to turn the other way
when men in red hats greet you at every base,
slap you on the back and wish you, “Good Luck”?
The world isn’t about knuckleball or double play.
The world isn’t about morning glory or ceramic tile.
The world isn’t about to fall into our outstretched mitt—
Though, wouldn’t that be nice? Miteinander befallen.
The world isn’t about red hats or anything else.
The world slides away out of the zone
leaving us hitless. Struck out.

Cannibals wait in the stands
threatening us with dinner and midnight snacks.
They wear no hats!
We wear red hats!
We were victorious long before your sons became daughters.
Our chances look good: “80/20,”
the team doctor prognotes.
“Wait!” he says, taking off his hat,
“I mean 20/80.” Then chases the batboy
across the field, yelling, “Lunch!”
Should we take off our hats? Join
the cannibal doctor in ritual feast?
Or should we play?
“PLAY!” shouts the team, pulling their hats
tight around their ears.
“PLAY!” shout the cannibals, who take
red hats from back pockets.

I wish you would wear a red hat.
We could give up winter together,
assemble our nine, and be
World Red Hat Champions.
No one, not even Nolan,
can put us down in order.
In your ear? In your ear!
The rally is afoot!
Hits come like fireflies. Runs
torrent into morning.
All day the day begins again.
We wear red hats.

The Wrong Side of the Bed

Some days it feels like there is no good side of the bed. I wander into the day with storm clouds surrounding me, and then the day just adds more; I go from grey to absolute darkness. Everything that people say, even people that I love and respect, just strikes me as wrong. Nothing is where I have put it (I work in spaces that I share, so this is—growl—fairly typical). It is too humid. Help that is offered is the wrong help, or worse, unhelpful. My face works itself into a deeply lined scowl. People charitably comment that I look tired. I know the code. I look angry.

In general, I am a happy man. I can find my way to a good feeling by hook and by crook. I take joy from a cup of coffee, and from the sound of my daughter’s voice. I rarely find myself in the place the Violent Femmes describe in “Add It Up”; in fact, just singing along (“Why can’t I get just one fuck…”) makes me laugh. The universe is like a perpetual gift-giving machine designed by the best toymaker ever.

Except. Except when the black clouds of contrariness gather around my head. And then storm. (It’s so bad that I cannot even manage complete sentences to describe the feeling). The first flash of anger brings attendant feelings of self-loathing and despair; I have failed again to keep the thunder at bay. This of course leads to more anger—at myself, and at whatever the temporary cause of it may be. Call worship service boring? Rage. Complain that the smell of cookies in the oven smells like something burning? Rage. The Juniors and Seniors decide to ditch detention on a day I skip an important meeting to sit for two hours with their recalcitrant selves. Rage. I can hear my mother, “I’ll wring your neck.” Thanks mom. Rage.

Anger is my forbidden emotion, and because in the atlas of my brain I have marked it taboo (here there be dragons), I am less familiar with the terrain than I should be. Okay, that’s a lie. I am terrifyingly familiar with anger. I walked over that ground for years as a child and adolescent. The flags of my furies unfurled when something or someone contradicted or existentially threatened the foundations of my moral universe. When I was a boy, those foundations were fairly straightforward and limited, and resulted in squalls of “That’s not fair,” which could pertain to the most trivial (“He has more soda than I do!”), to the substantial (“How can you throw him out of school weeks before graduation?”). The dictates of fairness required an even hand be dealt to all, and later incorporated a sense of esprit de corps (were all in this together). I clove to these rules tightly and took the breaches seriously.

And what isn’t fair to a first born son? We, who stand at the vanguard of the moral universe, who plunge into the morasses that our parents design into swampy labyrinths, who seek strength and consistency and meet frailty and disorganization—or worse hypocrisy. I learned early enough not to get angry when I encounter something that doesn’t simply challenge me (lesson from sailing #37: learn to confront challenges: sea-sickness, rain, rash decisions, doldrums, incapable crew, broken ribs; with aplomb. Because another challenge is coming in 5, 4, 3, 2…), or disagree with me. In fact, I run toward, perhaps too giddily, challenge and disagreement. It wasn’t always so, but learning to be gleefully devastated from time to time helped me become a good student, and (so I hope) a better man.

As I aged, I learned to grasp the essentially contradictory nature of life. I embraced Whitman’s charge: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” On the flip side, I expected others to embrace it as well. I attribute my general buoyancy to the multitudinous sea of possibility in which I swim, but I recognize that others must swim in narrower straits. Must you? Really? On stormy days, I do too. I feel as if I am repudiating myself, reneging on the promises I have made to myself and to the universe, failing at my calling and failing at my life’s sole purpose. I want to run away, and live cabin-bound on the rolling ocean, in the thickest forest, on the side of a stark and forbidding mountain.

On rare occasions, I draw on this narrower, “fatal vision” as Macbeth calls it. When I play poker, for instance, I find it easier to put on the fierce blinders of aggression. Sometimes when I write, I close the larger windows to focus on just this pane or that pane of vision. When I teach, I rein in my big confusing mind so that my students can see what it is like to walk on one path in one direction with singular purpose and clarity; that is the lesson they must learn now. After these experiences, I feel drained, in part because I have intentionally disconnected, and the angry hand is the one that flips that switch.

So, when the grey days come unbidden, from a bad night’s sleep, or illness, or some twist of half remembered dream or memory (do I have to wake up with THAT strange bedfellow today?), I feel less myself, at odds with the world, looking, like Ishmael, for hats to knock off, and eyeing ships bound for sea with untoward desire. But, the day passes. I remain a free man. In the morning to come, every side of the bed glistens with possibility again, and I am once again myself.

Indignation

I ran around all the time as a child. My mother showed my brother and I the door early in the morning, we came back for lunch and were signaled when it was time for dinner. We wandered over the countryside, in and out of creeks, over train trestles, into corn cribs, for miles in many directions. We hung from creepers high in trees. We dove off construction equipment into puddles of thick mud. Our lives were idyllic and unsupervised. We ran through stores, charging up down escalators and down up escalators. We waited in cars while my mother shopped, and we waited, untended, doors locked to the outside, because we ran through fancy dress stores and raised havoc.

At dinner time we sat and ate quietly because children were to be seen and not heard. We scarfed down our meals, partly from boredom, partly because we did not snack all day and were legitimately hungry. Then we sat while my parents talked. We fidgeted, just as we fidgeted at the St. John’s chapel on Sunday mornings. On Sunday’s, at least, we would ride with my father after church, and he would take us to the News Agency in Paoli, where, if we had been good, he would buy each of us a pack of trading cards (Batman, it was the 60s) when he picked up the Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer. We fought over prized cards.

I read the indignation that people heap on this parent of that parent, or this child or that child, particularly around the incident at the Cincinnati zoo. But indignation over parenting (or childing) is not limited to that event. A girl’s skirt is too short, or his teeth are crooked, or her hair is dyed, or his pants are too short, or he cusses, or she chews gum, or he doesn’t say “sir,” or she runs down hallways. And mom works, or dad works two jobs, or travels away from home, or sleeps late on Sunday, or doesn’t go to church, or mom doesn’t bake cookies for school, or doesn’t volunteer at church, or spends time in her studio, or runs out of gas on the way to the store. Or brings rambunctious kids into a store, or a park, or a zoo.

My objection is not of the “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” variety (although, come to think of it. What the hell? We swam in neighbors’ pools without adult supervision. There but for the grace of whatever, any one of us could have gone.). My objection is to random acts of indignation: the knee jerk blame response. And sure, there is plenty in this life that is blameworthy: acts of intentional cruelty vile enough to stir rage. Occurrences that general good will could prevent if there was enough political and social fortitude to solidify into meaningful action. But sometimes there is simply tragedy, unplanned, stupid, and even if entirely avoidable, but ineffably tragic.

There is, in the common place daily existence we lead, an element of danger and potential tragedy. Bicycles. Cars. Cars! Streets. Creeks. Trees. Rock walls (not those pristine indoor creations that kids climb while tethered to safety supports), but walls of layered rocks that separated the playground from the roundabout where the buses waited at the end of the day. We climbed them while we waited for our bus to arrive, our slender seven year old fingers finding purchase as we scaled twice the height of our heads. And if there is still such a wall somewhere, I know some eyes are scanning it to find a path to the top. We learn, begrudgingly or blindly, to accept the danger, right up to the point it raises a scaly hand to snatch away a life or rudely injure a young and blameless arm or leg or eye.

As a parent, I understand the impulse to protect, and know that I wish no awful event to befall my daughters. (Someone reading this right now is charging his or her bile to new, but not unfamiliar heights: your daughter should suffer what she suffered.) What limits do we insist on placing on our wild things? All of them? Really? The only unbounded possibility is the extent of grievance we wish to express. And maybe it is just because we cannot regulate out or shame away or sternly reprimand the tragic element of life, we superproportionately feel, what? fear? grief? anger? Which we transform into salty indignation. And for those who feel fear, I have no words of consolation, because there are no words to console against the stupid and the random chance of danger. I can write, “You’re not alone,” but in that moment, you are alone. Fear isolates us. Indignation gives us a kind of strength, and, at least, a voice against calamity.

Still, remember. Protect what you can. Plan as much as you are able. Eliminate the horrible. If that means no zoos, if that’s what it takes, fine. If that means fewer guns, if that’s what it takes, then remember that more children died in gun events than at zoos. But somewhere, some danger waits. Sadly, even now, even with Neosporin and emergency rooms. And when it comes you will welcome sympathy, and it will be your due.

Something about memory

Once you can imagine how images and sounds get turned into bits of binary code, which you can then play back on a cell phone, you can begin to conceive of memory. Brains experience the world as a pattern of firing neurons—small chemical explosions in our heads that can be reignited over and over again. When Yeats writes, “I went out to the hazel wood because a fire was in my head”—it’s memory that inspires him on the journey that ends with him picking the “silver apples of the moon… [and] the golden apples of the sun. Memory of what? Who knows.

Memories aren’t just about things—they are about all the thoughts and feelings we had when we encountered those things. I talk to my students about making memories “sticky”: giving them more purchase in their brains. A memory will take greater hold if there is a feeling associated with it. For instance, my emotions (happiness, sadness, everything else) run close to the surface and deeply too—they are whales and not minnows—and when I see a new thing, or learn a new thing, I attach, without even intending to do so, an emotion to the thing. Go figure. I was happy about learning the constitution when I was in high school, or the great chain of being when I was in junior high school (or, or, or), and those emotions made those things more “sticky.” At the very least, learning has made me feel happy, and I am blessed with plenty of sticky happiness.

For Yeats, the odd transformative associations: a hazel wand that becomes a fishing pole; a little silver trout that becomes and glimmering girl; the moth-like stars; the hollow lands and hilly lands; are ways back to memory and to inspiration.  We tend to think of inspiration as a vision of something yet to be made, something that exists primarily in the future, but our future vision relies on what we already have seen.  The inspired poet turns the past into future with protean grace.

When memories fade, it isn’t so much that the patterns dull, so much as the ways back to those patterns fade. Maybe think about it like this… Imagine that you have a room in your house in which you have a beautiful painting. The door to the room has a lock. You lose the key to the locked door. The painting is still in the room, but you cannot see it. You haven’t lost the painting, just the key to the door in which the painting waits for you, still bright and beautiful, still reminding you (but no longer) of the day on which you first saw it, the weather, the person you were with, and what you had done all morning on that day. If only you had the key!

The mnemonic device called the “memory palace” is a means of making memories “sticky” and organizing where and how they are stuck. The stickiness is not simply an emotion, which can be an incredibly random and unpredictable placemarker (we don’t tend to organize our emotions in a clearly coherent pattern so much as ride on them like waves), but a familiar place, in fact some place which we are already memorized, whose dimensions, smells, colors, and secrets are so deeply ingrained that we can call them back instantly and without effort.  Yes, we bind new memories to older established ones.  We put them on coffee tables and window ledges, in drawers of dressers, at the bottoms of garment bags in our parents’ bedroom closet (where they sometimes hid Christmas presents).

I will admit that I like the idea of this device more than the one I use.  My memories are bound to map like structures, to roads and routes, airport terminals and the backs of buses. Sometimes they lead to places, even palaces, but mainly they are blue lines on yellowing maps. “Why do you need to know where we are going?” a friend once asked, “I can tell you where to go.” “Because,” I wish I had answered, “Every road leads to a new memory, and if I don’t know them, not only will I be lost, so will these memories.”  The trick for me is that since the atlas of my memory is fairly large, adding a few new maps, even if they are revisions of older ones, is not particularly onerous or difficult.  Of course, the trick is to revisit those maps, to crack the binding of my memory, head down old roads, and re-visit places.  And new places?  The placement of puddles, the spread of trees across streets, and colors of cars in driveways—all these inscribe themselves on a map, illustrate a chart, and add themselves to me.

 

Unstuck

For those of you who know, you know that my work has been stuck for years. Serious years. Either I was too afraid of failure to write, or too (easily) distracted by the charms of the life of struggle and success, joy and sadness. In large part, writing these posts has been about that life. And surely, I have found other and certainly valuable things to do with my time and energy. But in the background of my thoughts, no matter what else I was doing, no matter where I was traveling, or who I was with, there was a story percolating. Something  about art and fire and theft and identity and… Well, as usual, about everything. And not.

Waiting for inspiration or signs, or for enough weight and gravity to accrue around a character or two will only do for so long. I’m getting older. I’m hearing the footfalls of cats’ feet in the hallways. I can’t wait for love or hope or generous fate to take a hand. It’s back to work. As a friend has called her project over the past few months, “Write or die.” And so I’ve been practicing. Seven to nine hundred words every two or three days. It’s been good. And it feels like the pump is actually bringing worthwhile stuff to the surface.

So, here’s how it starts. I’m laying down a marker. Give me a few months. With any luck more than a puddle, but not enough to put a fire out. As Willi says, “Everything is fuel.” So then…
Provenance

Chapter 1

 “A little fire will solve all our your troubles,” said Carlo.

 “Or cause them,” amended Benjamin.

 “Cause or solve? What’s the difference?” asked Carlo. “Either way, you have to figure out what you are going to do after the fire.”

 “That is true,” answered Benjamin. He looked at me and winked. “Still, I’m happy that Willi is starting our fires, especially tonight.”

 “What’s so special about tonight?” asked Carlo. Then he looked at me, cocked his head, and gave me the half-bemused, half-annoyed glare that I had been receiving for the past two months.

 I averted my gaze and looked around the room. There is nothing wrong with a clean room, and given the fact that people had sent their prized possessions to be kept safe while they were in the middle of a move, a remodel, or a remarriage, I was always surprised by how many storage facilities looked like a restaurant at 11:37 at night. This was a storage room like any of the others in which we had worked. It was climate controlled: dry and cool. On one side of the room were a set of safes in which people kept documents they never wanted to age. There were shelves from floor to ceiling in which delicate hangings: small tapestries, quilts, fifteenth century circus posters; were rested flat on their backs. Fine art was stored vertically, on edge, in a wall-length series of slender slots. There was a clean yellow mechanical lift in one corner. The lighting, even with all the bulbs lit, was reserved and respectful. Still, even without a bright fluorescent glare, I could tell that there was not a mote of dust anywhere. Everything was immaculate.

 “Did we get everything we came for?” Carlo asked me. I was responsible for knowing what we would find in storage so that Carlo could put together what he glibly called our “shopping list.” When the date for our job neared, he gave me the list so I could alert him if anything was coming out of storage early, or if anything particularly interesting was being added to the facility he had targeted. He already had clients ready to purchase everything we took.

 I took one last look at the list and double checked the labels on all the long cardboard tubes gathered near the mechanical lift.

 “Yes,” I answered.

 “And yours?”

 “Yes.”

 “All right. Ben! Time to pack.”

 Benjamin got right to it, and put all the tubes into two oblong grey canvas duffel bags. Benjamin had been born to pack and carry. On occasions, I had caught him lifting chairs, or tables, or desks. “You never know,” he said sheepishly, “It may come in handy sometime, you know, just to know the balance.” Secretly, I think he just enjoyed grabbing oddly shaped things with his catcher’s mitt hands and gauging how much, or little, effort, he needed to lift them. Of the four of us, Benjamin was the only one who anyone would stop to stare at in the street. He was six and a half feet tall and looked like he should weigh as much as a bull. “Sarah,” he once told me, “cows weigh nearly a ton. I’m more like a tiger.” I guess we all can dream.

Willi waited for us at the entrance to the warehouse. He and Carlo stepped aside for a moment. Carlo listened and Willi pointed to several places along the walls and ceiling, indicating how the fire would start and where it would spread. Carlo, Benjamin, and I left the warehouse. Willi joined us at the van ten minutes later. The warehouse looked perfectly normal, a huge brown sepulcher of stone and brick. The fire was already alive inside it.

We sat and waited to watch the fire in the van. It was my last night.

I can understand why fires draw such big crowds. Even at three in the morning, a crowd that would fill four concert halls gathered outside the police barricades. This was the biggest fire most of them have ever seen—bigger than a campfire, less spread out than a brush fire. All that flame in one place was like looking into part of the sun. They saw an impossible furnace that could consume anything. On the sun, even water is fuel. As horrible as it is, fire is the source of light, heat, and life.

 People will stop whatever else they are doing to watch a fire. Madly in love and in the throes of devotion? Wait, there’s a fire. Furious and on the verge of murderous intent? It can wait; there’s a fire. On the way to work, or a birthday party, or grandmother’s funeral. Can’t you see there’s a fire? Let’s stop and watch. Just set a warehouse ablaze to conceal the theft of forty seven million dollars of art? Even we stopped for a moment and joined the crowd.

 To be honest, Willi’s handiwork was worthy of admiration. While Carlo, Ben, and I broke into the storage lockers, Willi turned the building against itself. By the time we had collected what we came for, the first tongues of flame had converted wood, wire, and plaster from innocent structure to experienced fuel. Willie said, “After a minute anything is possible. After five minutes, everything is inevitable.” He pointed to an unignited corner of the building and quietly said, “Watch.” And so we watched. It was better than a Zambelli show.

 The flames poured up the side of the building between Main Street and the Schuylkill River in Manayunk. Under the cloudless night sky the conflagration looked like a negative image of the day. The worn stone of the warehouse that years of sun and soot and car exhaust had worn to a dull brown was nearly ebony. The shadows cast by afternoon clouds were now bright patches of flame.

 The streets brimmed with noise. Super-amplified emergency radios blared garbled commands. Diesel engines of the fire trucks churned fuel into the electricity that powered a hundred spotlights and the pumps that redirect the flow of water to the net of hoses surrounding the burning building. Klaxons sounded as new men joined the fight. The building grunted and groaned as its guts shifted, resettled, and gave way.

 Worse than the noise was the stink. It smelled like the worst barbecue ever. Imagine your idiot uncle inviting you to an evening of recycled tire briquettes and cretonne-soaked shoe steaks. For days after the fire no flavor of good food will penetrate the residue left in your nose or on the back of your throat. I would rather kiss a fly.

 Willi once asked, “How would you do it?” I told him that I would probably slosh gasoline all over the place, throw a match and run. He shook his head and laughed. “Everything is fuel,” he said; this was his mantra. Willi could walk into a building with nothing—no matches, no tools—and leave it smoldering. Of course, while we were worrying about where the art was kept, and how long it would be in storage, Willi went over building plans with an inspector’s nervous eye for details. Old sprinkler systems, termite damage, air conditioning that only cooled the office spaces, little escaped Willi’s attention. In spite of the obvious damage, no one ever died in one of Willi’s fires.

 “It’ll be out in 20 minutes, half hour tops,” he said. When was he wrong?

Carlo gestured toward the van, to nudge us away. Benjamin wasn’t having any of it, “I like watching the fire.” Sure, Carlo was the boss, Benjamin could pick up a car—in a previous life he probably had been a car. So Carlo just shrugged and walked to the van by himself. After five minutes Willi touched Benjamin on the arm, and gently led him away. It wouldn’t do to keep Carlo waiting.

As we walked to the van, Willi asked, “Can you give this up?”

What did I know? I was twenty-eight years old, and I had never had what anyone could call a steady job. After graduating from college my resume was a Swiss cheese of retail and food service jobs. It was work that I could leave at a moment’s notice and work that I could find again just as easily. I knew more about art and appraisal and conservation than anyone with an MFA or PhD would ever have. One night in Boston, I had my cheek pushed into the impasto of a Rubens. Carlo thought he heard someone walking behind us and pressed us both up against the yellowing bosom of some semi-deity. Sure, put that in a résumé.

I didn’t want to grow into an old thief. Every so often we would meet men that had worked with Carlo in the past, and Carlo never introduced them, and the men always slinked away like sinners from a church. And I did not want to become like the men whose lives were defined by theft. The truth is that we met plenty of thieves and almost all of them were young and stupid. They sat at bars and tables at restaurants talking too loudly about what they have done. At least half of what they said was lies, which only made the truth seem worse. Even Benjamin, whose size and strength were his simple dual assets, looked at these buffoons and said, “Maybe I’m too dumb to know better, but those guys should shut up.”

They had grown numb to the rest of the world. They had forgotten that the rules that all the so-called rubes and suckers followed made our lives possible. Without limits anyone could be a thief, and what we did would be neither prized nor profitable. All they could think of was how different they were, how free. But they weren’t. They could only live in the shadowy other world they, we, created. They would never see themselves as part of the larger world.

Even the men I worked with and admired lived this way. When Willi looked at buildings, all he saw was fires. Benjamin gauged the world in weights and balances. And even though Carlo managed to be charming about what he did, he was like Tyrone Power in Nightmare Alley. And like Stanton Carlisle, the fall was coming; it was just a matter of time. It could happen in a year, or in twenty. Carlo wasn’t like one of Willi’s fires. No one knew when his time would end.

I wasn’t sure how I was becoming like them, but I did feel sure, after only a few years, that I had lost some sense of a happy vision of the world that was unencumbered by dark possibility. I loved what I did. I was thrilled by illicit acquisition and by the secrets of my life, and I knew I would miss it. I told Willi the only truth I could remember, “Yes.”

I wasn’t ready for the moment when we got to the van and Carlo waited outside, holding a long cardboard tube. “These, I believe, are yours,” he said. He got back into the van with Willi and Benjamin, and rolled down the window. “Go home, Sarah Proctor. Go home and never come back.” The van headed into the city and I stood on the curb with two paintings worth millions of dollars in my hands. I could never sell them, I already knew I would be too scared to show them to anyone, and the life that had christened my adulthood was over.

A little advice

I hate giving advice, or being in a position to even begin to seem like an authority. This is due, in large part, to the fact that every vestige of what little wisdom I may have is either so narrowly circumscribed by my experience as to be entirely personal and inapplicable to anyone else, or it is bound into volumes or displayed on walls or growing in plain sight, that it all could just as easily be read or seen or visited by anyone, and therefore I am just repeating what already exists. I mean, really, I can’t tell you anything about the Grand Canyon, or Jackson Pollock’s Number One, or Virginia Woolf’s The Waves that you couldn’t get on your own. And all the business about sailing, or my divorce, or the way my heart was broken or buoyed by human contact, well, that’s all extravagant navel gazing. Or, if it’s any good, it’s good because it praises the world I have experienced.

A friend of mine once told me (and granted, we were in the middle of a disagreement that threatened to end our friendship, so like all things spoken in heat, I try (and fail) to take it in that light) that I needed people to agree with me. The truth is that 90% of the time when I make what seems like a definitive statement about anything, my shock-proof shit detector blares a secret (oh, I hope it’s secret) claxon. It’s going off right now. Whenever I write, I write through the deafening din. I already know that what I say, or what I write is so riddled with exceptions that each word would take a page, or a tome of footnotes and commentary.

I reread David Foster Wallace’s 2005 “This Is Water” commencement address from Kenyon, and what I notice most is his reluctance to declare.  It’s not this platitude, or this story, or that cliché, which is what all advice feels like it about to disintegrate into—just another fragment of bullshit masquerading as wisdom.  Welcome to the world of Polonious, sending Laertes off with the skin and no pith. Go ahead and utter, “To thy own self be true” without knowing the source and the final awful result. Say good bye to Denmark. Say good bye to the best and brightest.  Here comes history.

I once told my friend, Brian Clements, that the only point of criticism—and what, after all is criticism than a kind of advice, either to the artist (do this, don’t do that), or to the audience (see this, avoid seeing that)—was to praise, that everything else was ego masquerading as wit. Did I really say that? Maybe.  I still believe this. (Quick, check the reams of footnotes). The only art that I ever feel called on to lambaste, is art that fails to find some piece of life and hold it up for glory. And I will go to stunning lengths to find that one moment in any work of art that meets Rilke’s charge: “Praise this world.”  And when I say “art,” I’ll admit it, I mean the intentional product of a life lived with purpose to produce something that praises the world.  And that could be a poem, a sculpture, a taco, a roadbed, a length of  rope. A free throw. A beautifully struck return in tennis. An incisively spoken line in a play. A carefully chosen word to comfort a child, or anyone.  Anything done with intention to praise this world and raise it up.

And if anything, these little slices of my mind, are not so much advice, as reminders, and I think we need reminding, to pay attention to all that is praiseworthy and to hold it high. “Pay attention” is what DFW told the graduates at Kenyon in 2005, and I wish that someone had reminded him every day about the impossible and sometimes ineffable worthiness of praise. Pay attention to that too, big fella. And I know when I write these, I am, in fact, reminding myself as well as you, because it is not easy.  It’s just worth it.

 

 

 

Life Among the Raindrops


This morning light grey clouds cover the sky. The high blue sky of yesterday might be somewhere above, but no gaps appear this morning. It feels as if the roof has been lowered to a space only a short way above my head. Walking into work feels like walking through air that was only a shade less thick than water. And then the rain begins.

When caught in the rain, people walk with their shoulders hunched down and their heads bowed. Their pace slows. I feel it too, the reflexive inward pull against the precipitation. If I can just make myself smaller, I will not get as wet. Still, I do get wet. Sometimes lightly moistened, sometimes soaked. Until I get to my car, where my umbrella waits in the trunk, rain will get me no matter what I do.

When I sailed, rain could last for days. We would sit in the cockpit in our two man watches and just take it. Even in weather gear, water finds a way right down to your skin. After six or fifty six hours of rain, you just become swollen. Your fingernails soften. Then the calluses on your heels peel away. It’s only a matter of time before the bones in your face melt into some new configuration. But at some point, and almost in spite of of your soup-ification, your shoulders unfurl from their mock-fetal crouch and you become human again. Your head rises and you scan the horizon, which is your duty anyway, so you make it as easy as it had been when you were dry. You break out of the shell of reflex and return to humantiy.

When I walk into rain now, I feel that first crimping each time. Not doing it would mark me as inhuman, and I am, if nothing else, too human. But I stretch my neck, roll my shoulders back into place, lift my chin, and stride, as I always do, into the rain. It’s just rain, I remind myself, no matter whether it is a sprinkle or a torrent. It’s just water.

And I think, if this is how my body responds to a temporary inconvenience, what must my mind be doing in this moment? How many things are like the rain in my mind, causing me to shorten my sight, draw inward, become less than what I am? Bernie Sanders is making a case about the impact of living pay check to pay check–surely, this is like walking in the rain. Or of the impact of making less money for the same day’s work. Or of having to think about whether you will be stopped or shot at because of the color of your skin, or the color of your uniform. Imagine what it must be like to feel as if there was a steady insistent mental rain falling on your shoulders.

A few years ago, I had to explain what depression felt like to my daughter. A friend of ours had committed suicide after struggling with depression. I told my daughter that our friend couldn’t see any other possibility. I took a magazine and rolled it into a tube and said, “This was all she could see.” I imagine that the experience of mental rain causes us to limit our vision, forcing our gaze, if only by reflex, to the puddles in front of our feet, (Don’t step in this one, that one, this one), until all the world is puddle and all our shoes are ruined and there is no place to put our feet down dry.

We live among the raindrops. I can say this, not living in Seattle, where the steady rain can threaten to wash even the green from the morning. I can say this because I can look at forecasts that have sun just a few days away. I can say this because I can remember when the rain started. And so I do say it, and I do look up, and my vision can distinguish the drops as they fall—small beads of water spun around motes of dust. And I do look up, and into the faces that I meet, and we are here, together, in the rain, just as we are together in the sun. And I look up and see the water between us, like a connect-the-dots page in three dimensions, extending as far as there is rain.