Friday, June 22, 2012

First

for Lincoln

Earth heart
The prime consonant

Curled on my chest,
A bald pulse—

Your mother’s milk in the folds of your neck,
Your stomach as round as a cantaloupe.

Now your long skeleton,
Marrowed with kindness,
Carries the world—

Running through fog—

The Pacific you hear
As the mechanics of love,
Its green rumble
Always in need of repair.

But I haven’t forgotten
Your rosebud ear
Against my chest,
Your toothless yawning,
Your coal-black eyes,
Your urgent grip on my finger:

You are our settlement
Beside life’s lake, Lincoln—
Always fulfilling
The promise of home.

                                    — June 22, 2012

Monday, June 18, 2012

Notes for the Defense

In class today I gave an impassioned speech about literature—maybe for myself more than for my students, who regarded me as I spoke with impassive curiosity, if at all.

I said (I'm summarizing): These stories are songs written to make life, with its inexplicable suffering, something more than a desert of pain. (I was happy to hear myself carried away.)

We were discussing "The Shawl," by Cynthia Ozick. At the end of my speech I had the sense to ask one of the students to read the story's final paragraph. I've made the mistake of reading it to a class before. It's disconcerting for students to watch their professor weep. And these students, most of them, don't deserve to see that, anyway. I've been dumbfounded this quarter—I've told them this—by their indifference. But, like me, they reflect their Age. I'm angry; they're indifferent; one or two of them seem to care about something other than money or grades—one or two of them are extraordinary, luminous with intelligence; the rest strike me as bored, and I strike them (correctly) as angry, and we blame our boredom and anger on each other and will forget about each other as soon as we can.

Still, walking into class this morning I was in an exuberant mood: after all, we were discussing "The Shawl" and, after a class break, Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Reading García Márquez returns me to my youth, to literature as joy, to the pleasure of story: my first love. It's the love to which I've been most faithful, I suppose. It turned out that most of the class hadn't read the book—the luminous had read it—but I didn't care. Chronicle will be there for them tomorrow; it will be there when they're ready for it, when they realize that life is not about money or grades or the approval of their parents and that the same fate awaits them that befalls Magda and Santiago: certain death.

"So," I told them, "I suggest that you attend to this singing, and, more broadly, to the blessed habit we have—these artists have—of making songs of our suffering."

~

Nina Simone echoes through Coupa Cafe.

~

The Euro 2012 soccer tournament is in full swing right now, and like García Márquez soccer returns me to my youth—to the moment in my youth when I woke up: namely, to Eric in Argentina. There he is, in his white shirt and his conservative tie, with his boyish blonde cluelessness, watching Maradona highlights on a restaurant's flickering TV in little, provincial Azul. And, a year later, there he is—it's a June night in General Belgrano—swaddled against the cold in his uncle's down-filled sleeping bag, opening for the first time El amor en los tiempos del cólera.

Soccer and the novel: two inventions that honor life as suffering, punctuated by moments of beauty and joy.

~

There's a woman sitting at a table across from me who desperately needs a cigarette. She doesn't know she needs a cigarette—like most non-smokers—but by the velocity of her speaking it's clear she does.

The young man sitting with her hasn't touched his bagel. His slim arms, dark and almost hairless, he has folded across his chest. We both are trying to defend ourselves against her onslaught.

~

"It seems," Nina says, "that I'm never tired loving you."

I hadn't realized this about her: she sings like Elvis.

~

In a week my life will return to a now-all-too-familiar rootlessness. I blame no one but myself—in fact I don't even blame myself—but I'm aware this afternoon of a new exhaustion in my legs, my eyes, my heart. Perhaps it's this exhaustion that has me nostalgic for my youth—for Argentina and G.G.M.'s literature of joy, for soccer and its elegant, futile virility. Whatever the case, my life continues to be undeniably beautiful, but also saturated with sadness and tinged with new despair at a certain unrelenting maliciousness from over the hill that I cannot—and will no longer attempt to—surmount.

Eric in Belmont approaches his terminus. I cheer him up by reminding him of the girls in their summer dresses, and dinner tonight with Nathan and his new love, and the almond eyes that illuminate his dreams, and The Character of Rain (our next book), and the mystery of what tomorrow holds, be it sacred or profane.

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

An Open Letter

I write this letter in response to a text message I received last night from one of the most important people in my life. Of course at some level I'm writing this letter to myself. 

Dear ---,

          Love doesn't condemn, so it has no need to forgive. If you're worried about other people forgiving you—condemning you—then you have already condemned yourself, which is not my responsibility. I mean to say: I'm not to blame if you're worried about condemnation and forgiveness (the Law). It's not my place to condemn you or forgive, and if I imagine that it is, I haven't spent enough time in front of a mirror.

          If you're right about us and it's true that we condemn you, that's not your problem. Don't condemn us for our failure and, as a consequence, become like us.

          The Gospel—life—isn't about forgiveness. Too often we forget that fact and use a perverse obsession with guilt and innocence to justify ourselves. Mostly we do this because we want to control how people feel about us. My advice: don't worry about how we feel about you, and don't bother justifying yourself. You were justified before you were born. Or you never will be. It amounts to the same thing.

          I remind you of what you've taught me: Love doesn't accuse, it doesn't impose, it doesn't demand, it doesn't require. Love is or it is not—either way, with or without it, it  makes us free. Guilt, innocence, condemnation, forgiveness—those words belong to those of us who are enslaved by an attachment to the Law, which has never saved us and never will.

          For my part: I love you. In the freedom of my love for you, we live. Yes: not always, perhaps, to our liking. But our love for each other frees us from transforming our failures into sins.

          Jesus told Mary Magdelene: "Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more." The first clause contains the essence of Christian ethics. The second clause was not a commandment but a compassionate appeal. Jesus didn't forgive Mary: she had no need of forgiveness. She, like you, is beyond forgiveness. Together we all abide in the grace of love, free. Whether we know it or not.

Your ---,

Eric

Sunday, June 10, 2012

The Meaning of LMFAO

Everything deserves to be thought about seriously, especially clowns. On Friday night I went with a friend of mine to see clowns: he had two free tickets to the LMFAO concert at Oracle Arena.

We arrived exactly when the show began, which gave us an hour and a half to buy a beer, find our seats, and look at each other with bemusement. But after the concert's first ten songs, which were remarkable only for the magnitude of their mediocrity, the band gave us "Party Rock Anthem." And we shuffled—by which I mean we attempted the song's famous zombie dance—and confetti fell and we laughed with other shufflers around us, and when the song ended we declared the night a success and left. Five minutes of heartfelt, unmitigated, shufflin' joy. How often do you get to experience that?

Clowns like LMFAO get the big bucks—and over 446,000,000 hits on YouTube, at last count—by reminding us that a clown's life is more than an imaginative possibility. Beckett actually tells us the same thing, more enduringly, more grimly: the clown is a legitimate answer, a common answer, to life's deepest problems.

The famous refrain from "Party Rock Anthem" says "Everyday, I'm shufflin'." Until Friday night, I had heard the line as: "Everyday, I'm sufferin'." Walking through the Oracle's doors into the night air I realized with a smile that at some level those are two ways of saying the same thing.

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Rascals

At night now and then outside my bedroom window the raccoons fight. I find the sound of their fighting beautiful in its directness. Not for raccoons, the 20th century affection for allusion and irony. They explode with brief, precise violence, becoming, by the sound of it, a lacerating flurry of claws and teeth. Then, within seconds, a squeal and flight through the shrubbery.

On the balconies of the apartments above college students laugh, talking loudly, drunk. I can't smell their cigarettes; the hot smoke rises above our roofs, drifting south. I envy the sounds of their friendships—the talking most of all. It's not uncommon to hear them fight—a boyfriend and girlfriend, maybe—but in comparison to the raccoons, the fights are tedious. The banality of the problems they dispute seems to be the fighting's point. They are reassuring each other—themselves—that they're alive; the fighting says, I care.

Friday, June 1, 2012

TFTD

The anti-utopias of our century (Zamyatin, Huxley, Orwell) depicted societies under total control where the absence of freedom was called freedom. In such societies, the rulers take care to supply the ruled with suitable diversions to prevent mental anxiety. Sexual games best fulfill that function. It is a credit to the intuition of the authors of those books that they depict Eros acting as a subversive force, which is no secret to the authorities: sex is anti-erotic and not only poses no threat but effectively prevents the appearance of the passions, which draw persons, not bodies, together and engage them both as flesh and as spirit. The hero enters upon a dangerous path when he is awakened by love. Only then is the slavery that was in disguise and accepted by everyone revealed to him as slavery.

— Czeslaw Milosz, Visions of San Francisco Bay