Adventure #7: New Orleans, or the Innocence of Debauchery

[Disclaimer: Do not assume that anything you read here is autobiographical (even if you are sure it is) unless you take the time to sit with me over a beer or whiskey and have an intimate conversation. Remember that while art deals with life, life is not necessarily art. And if you are too young, a student, or otherwise compromised than you must assume everything I write is an egregious lie. But if you are one who cares, and are concerned about the truth, and its transience, than you know what I drink and where I live.]

In New Orleans

Many years ago, after seven years of graduate study in the heat and self-imposed isolation of Oklahoma, I returned to work in northern Michigan, only a few hours north of where I grew up among the cedar swamps, small lakes, and chatter-bumped seasonal roads of Clare County.  I returned to teach English, striving to inspire students to understand their lives as the product of finely crafted prose, as I hoped to find on Lake Superior’s rocky shore and in that long view a place to be. What I couldn’t have expected was that such comfort, the transcendence of being in place, would require an intense battle with this place’s very nature.

Near the end of my first term, buried under composition papers and technical reports, I stepped from the porch of the shack I had rented into a snow bank that had literally appeared overnight.[1] After years in the humid heat of Oklahoma, I had forgotten about the length and intensity of a proper northern winter.  I had forgotten that the accurate appellation for nature should not be prefaced with “cute” or “benevolent” but rather should have more to do with mean spirited, disingenuous, and vindictive.  I had forgotten that the people, left to fend for themselves among this natural temperament, reflected this attitude.  These people were tough in a withered sort of way, hearty in a numbingly bland way, and as cold and intellectually weak as the diner’s coffee.

If people looked at me it was often to scowl, staring an inch or so above my head at the eminent emptiness there, as though the halo they fully expected to be there had fallen off in the laundry or rusted to dust. Their look suggested that the reality, or maybe audacity, of my passing represented an affront; they resisted my presence as one fends off the cold:  they folded inward as shell upon shell insulated them and ensured their hard-won isolation.  One learns from this, for instance, not to leave the front door open in the middle of the winter.

Men I met drank heavily—fifty beers at a sitting, the writer Jim Harrison notes in his essay “Bar Pool.”  The women ignored the empties and the drunkeness, plodding dumbly, angrily, rudely through the concerns of others. And belligerent and fatalistic children ventured with squinted eyes into the cold, mumbling curses and prayers through their cupped hands, scoffing. Of course these generalizations are inaccurate, or perhaps capricious. Yet they do represent the gist of my memories, the spur that assed me toward travel and tugged me out, again and again, of certain hard won complacencies.

In the midst of this battle against the light, against the dreary air being sucked in through hair-hemmed and lipstickless mouths, squawks the seagull.  It’s a sign.  Not a groundhog or the melting of the snow mountains erected by the city plows, but the enlivened erudition of those dirty white birds that announces the change, the first nearly temperate breeze of spring.  The city in all its intemperance breathes deeply, exhaling slowly.  And I think stay, please stay.

Since I had forgotten the intensity of winter, I had also forgotten the euphoria that comes with the long-awaited spring.  A light enters the eye with the longer days, the sun returns and the effect is like a sigh.  I wake to light; my car starts with less resistance, less metal on metal refutations of my argument to begin the day; my coat seems less inadequate; and life (quite literally) is revived as the region’s collective circulation improves.

I had forgotten how the daylight slowly begins to lengthen (thanks in part to “springing forward” an hour) and the air thin with that curious and constant water-weary breeze. It exhilarates, carrying with it the wanderlust that always prods me to travel, to move, to leave as much as possible of my formal education behind and learn from experience (from painful and humbling trial and error).

With the instinct to be always elsewhere awakened, I set out into the woods and marshes, breathing deeply the scent of newly budding cedars, going wherever the highway and my own neuroses take me.[2]  From roadside turnouts, rest areas, and small towns, I watch the clouds roiling late in the afternoon, as I avoid the icy rain and rest in the healthful chill of a late spring morning occasionally decorated by the frost that clings dumbly, with no fear of its fate, to the tops of wilted though expectant grasses.

I sit at Dairy Queens and disregarded city parks, where second-thought memorials to war dead and survivors of occasionally terrible spring storms stand chiseled out of cheap granite or marble. From this vantage, I watch people navigate their days, noticing that only a few ever get out of their cars to walk along the sidewalks of these small towns.  Instead, they pick up children, grab a snack, feed a duck, or make a phone call on a cell phone. These people always seem present but elsewhere, pushing their intellectual engagement beyond their immediate surroundings, and so, beyond the appreciation of the moment, the tug of immediate experience.

I wander, as I feel I must (a feeling that is nearly an obsession), across the nation this way, ending this spring in New Orleans, which is as strange and exhilarating a place as I could’ve imagined. And within two hours, I butt my head against its enigmatic quality.

The city, in this case the French Quarter, is rend, and thus made more surreal, by its contradictions—those juxtapositions that define it, give it depth and color, but also imbue it with a distinct sense of fear.  In A Confederacy of Dunces, John Toole captures this impressionistic quality in his description of Ignatius J. Reilly, the book’s hot dog-selling protagonist:

Ignatius himself was dressed comfortably and sensibly. The hunting cap prevented head colds. The voluminous tweed trousers were durable and permitted unusually free locomotion. Their pleats and nooks contained pockets of stale, warm air that soothed Ignatius. The plaid flannel shirt made a jacket unnecessary while the muffler guarded exposed Reilly skin between earflap and collar.  The outfit was acceptable by any theological and geometric standards, however abstruse, and suggested a rich inner life. (1)

Even though I never saw an “Ignatius Reilly” during my visit to New Orleans, I do suspect such caricatures-come-to-life exist there.  Regardless, I did get a sense of the conflict Toole suggests in his description of Mr. Reilly: those living in New Orleans, and because they live in this city that was once a swamp and whose dead occasionally float to the surface, seem to act as though their lives are continually interrupted by independent clauses, by the editorial aside, or the philosophical monologue.  They are products of satirical imaginations, such as Toole’s, and seem to live vicariously through their own misrepresentations.  They butt up against, again and again, their own interior dialogues and because of this seem to vibrate with a centripetal force that pulls any spectators into their exclusive, intellectually bipolar parities.  On the taxi ride to my hotel, for instance, I often felt the cab driver was speaking to and about me at the same time.

“You come to not just see but experience the French Quarter?” he asked in a creole accent, which wasn’t as thick as I had expected, “and you will see much.”  He laughed and pointed to a few of the graveyards the expressway had been built over: “These, you see, are odd places.  The dead I notice come to life here.”

After dropping off my bag, I decided to wander along one of the streets that make up the French Quarter. After a left and right and another right, I passed a gapping steel door and heard, “Come on in here.” Just inside this heavy door, I saw a man, smiling and handsome, sitting on a stool.  Behind him, I noticed a lovely Asian woman in black-lace stockings.  I stuttered and kept on walking.  I had been warned about the hawkers, but never experienced any except those at the county fair, who seemed belligerently uninterested in their jobs.  This hawker was no different, suspecting, I assume, that the sex he was selling would sell itself.

“Not right now,” I said, aware of my childish fear of such dimly lit sex dens, a fear that has thudded, sometimes dimly, behind my eyes since I first touched a nipple in the backseat of a Chevy Chevette.  Tellingly, I once spent three days in Amsterdam and never visited the mythic enticements of the red-light district.  At the time, I couldn’t bring myself to gawk at what I assumed was the misfortune of these women, displayed, as I heard they were, in storefront windows.  The need for sex, and the buying and selling of it, seemed cynical, the very type of moral pudding that kept idiot kids in school and dimwitted men and women in ridiculously bad marriages.  Don’t get me wrong, I find very little, except the obvious, about sex morally repugnant, but as I passed the open door of the club and saw those attractive women scattered around the bar and cascading across the dark stage, I couldn’t help but feel depressed.  It was after noon, I had just finished eating lunch, and the image of the Asian woman smoking a cigarette in fishnet stockings, black lace panties, and a green silk top seemed absurd.  I thought of Sherwood Anderson, and wondered how he might capture this figure? How might he convey the subtleties of this woman’s psychology?  Focus on her hands, perhaps, as he does in his characterization of the eccentric Wing Biddlebaum in Winesburg, Ohio.  The hands being those instruments we use to interact with our world, and as such reflect the violence of those meetings.

Needing a drink, or at least wanting one, I walked into a bar a few buildings down the street and had a few beers.  By five the day I arrived, I was drunk, rambling on the phone to a woman I had dated several months before, explaining, at a dollar a minute, the city’s ineffability.  No language to convey the impression, just grunts, guffaws, and gestures she couldn’t see.  She laughed; surprised I called, seeming to resist the implications of such a spontaneous gesture.  When my mind is on fire, I must talk, ramble, sputter and spatter.  It may be sad or just stupid, but I’ve come to except this about myself.

“I live like this,” I said, “a bit frantically.  I just do things; I think about what I’m doing or saying sometimes while I’m doing or saying them, regrettably sometimes only afterward, but, anyway, I’m like this.  I go off half-cocked, that’s the cliché, right? I want to experience things, but never too closely.  I just want to see, hear, and observe things going on.  Anyway, how are you? I’m drunk.”  She laughed and resisted her desire to avoid this conversation.  I could tell it made her a little uncomfortable.

I fell into the moment and was as much watching myself from a few feet away as living the moments I observed.  The split is indicative of travel, in which the traveler leaves his present, responsible life in one place and takes his spontaneous, timeless self across physical and emotional boundaries.  To travel is in essence to transgress.

We want (or, I should say, I want) to travel to such parenthetical places (ideas sandwiched between dissimilar images), such as a frozen forest, a nearly deserted small town, a forgotten stretch of highway, or the darkened confines of an inner-city neighborhood.  When we travel, many of us want to visit someplace different, but the difference should also be, to a certain extent, indescribable: there should be the excitement of personal discovery; something similar to Van Morrison’s entering “into the mystic” or experiencing a sense of wonder.  We seek to experience something unique, or at least something that seems so, which we might later be able to offer our friends around the campfire or while seated at the local bar, a story that is both weird and wonderful, full of outlandish characters (albeit “real”) and embarrassing or titillating episodes, seemingly drawn from the Decameron or The Canterbury Tales.[3]  To be lost, scared, overjoyed are a few of the emotions important to adventure, and traveling should at the very least explore these otherwise elusive or impractical emotions.

New Orleans is an Idea

 This is literarily true.  New Orleans is an idea where Cajuns, the vaguely French, and obdurate southerners of Tennessee Williams’s plays and stories materialize.  The idea also has something to do with the characters found in the literature of William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson.  Imagine Faulkner, drunk (as he only sometimes was), ruminating on the weird personalities and malignant relationships of the Sartorisand Snopes families; Sherwood Anderson quietly compiling the vignettes that make up Winesburg, Ohio, creating along the way young George to carry Anderson’s sense of the Midwest into literary posterity; or Williams imagining Stella, Stanley, and desire’s street car among the few cobblestone streets of the French Quarter.  All the anger and angst of several generations compacted into a few timeless narratives—the archetypes of a deeply depressed generation.

These literary ideas emerged from the city.  The buildings here are composed of contradictions that make them vague and eerie, creating a town that seems to be drawing within itself, losing its skin and slowly dissolving from view.  A painting of a street in the Quarter suggests the relationship between these contradictions and those exposed to them.  The bold colors of the painting express the vivid, vivacious character of New Orleans, which is always half-awake and playing.  This livid atmosphere is contrasted with the painting’s lack of focus and conventional coherence.  Where reality, as most of us know it, calls for mostly right angles, the lines of this painting create obtuse angles and the buildings lining the street seem to enfold a secret: the arrangement of images is indistinct (technically expressionistic), as though the painter, a New Orleans native, was nervous to commit to a definite point of view.  This lack of coherence is not a mistake, but suggests the complexity of the city that, as many modernist artists discovered of all objects, calls for an equally suggestive representation.  Of course, the artist is trying to tie a sense of Jazz into his portrayal of the typical Quarter street scene, which works at least in theory:  this painting is, in part, improvisational, as are both Jazz and the city, a city that is at one time Christian and pagan, alive with a vibrant joy and deeply rooted sorrow and guilt.  The city, unlike many either too clean or dilapidated to suggest much of their histories, is ideal for the tragic—eminent mortality seems to leak onto and wind through the atmospheric cobblestones, like the urine that taints the air.  The smell of the Quarter is that of panic.

While walking these streets, I felt part of something about to go very badly, and of some kind of exultation, a carnivalesque spirit, rejoicing in the city’s own inconsistencies.  I was making just then Williams’s Glass Menagerie.  I wanted to jump and run along the streets, talk with everyone, while certain someone wanted to do me harm.  The sense is moribund, as though death sits ruminating around every corner.  The city feels as though it is decaying; a zombie, a timid madness, similar to that of Laura Wingfield’s memory—images strained like rancid whey through cheesecloth.

Death Comes for the Professor

The Quarter is nestled along the river, and is itself just above the waterline.  With ear to ground, if anyone would ever do that, one might hear the water rushing through the spongy earth as blood through hardened arteries. As many visitors have, I noticed that all the graves around the French Quarter are above ground, which adds to the city’s morbid atmosphere.  A haze often lifts with the heat of day and lies upon the vegetation like a burial shroud—think of the pre-Raphaelites misty vistas or dead virgins drifting in lily strewn ponds wreathed by muslin gowns.  Mausoleums, stacked with coffins, crumbling and moss covered, rest in marshy plots below the expressway that leads from the airport to the Quarter; they mingle with the old buildings, both appear to melt into the other, emerging the next instant from the other’s detritus.  Death is on display, but few it seems overt their eyes; they stare at the interred history without self-consciousness, only a grudgingly given respect, reminiscent of Agamemnon’s speech in “Book XI” of the Odyssey, from which Faulkner took the title for his novel As I Lay Dying:  “As I lay dying the woman with the dog’s eyes would not close my eyes for me as I descended into Hades.”  Hades does seem to walk among the streets of this city, perhaps a little curious and enjoying the titillating and jiggling body parts so often on display, as though a little skin might bring some life and color to all the gray—that fatalistic drape that descends, wavering, from the city’s seedy nooks.

Just off Bourbon Street, I saw the lady with dog’s eyes.  She was dressed in green shorts, a tight white top, and wore sandals that clopped as she walked to the corner to hail a cab.  She looked at me as I passed and, shocked, I glanced down at the gutter.  Her eyes were pale[4]  like the glass in the dog’s eye marbles I used to collect as a child, perfectly round and uninterrupted by her thin eyelids; they were wet, not teary, but glistening, catching the lights over the doorway of the bar I was about to enter.  Painters seek such eyes.  Goya, the Spanish painter who chronicled the atrocities committed by Napoleon upon Spanish soldiers and peasants, caught the intensity of these kinds of eyes in the alarmed faces of those about to be executed.  In her final motion, a wave—flicking the wrist slightly up—the woman with the dog’s eyes, like the mausoleums, seemed to blend into the city, emotive and similarly ghostly, dissipating into the humid, breezy night.

The buildings here wave, as in Michalopoulos’s painting (see Figure 2), seeming to become part of old stories, expressing loss in flaking plaster, some of which ended up on the tops of my shoes as I strolled leisurely about—a little buzzed and often weirded out.  These are stories of early America, mythic and magic--times populated by Johnny Appleseed, Paul Bunyan, and the Klu Klux Clan.  Hope often cut by the will-to-destruction, the culture of death, the darkness of hurt minds and sinful souls.  Stories recalling an America poised on the precipice of a swamp, on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain, the Gulf of Mexico.  From French colonists, Confederate soldiers, war ships, typhoid and malaria, fevers of all sorts (the air in the city feels like the tepid breath of the sick), racial tensions, and mysterious inner spaces—dark lofts, alleys, rusty fire escapes, courtyards protected by razor wire (new neuroses invading ancient images of open space), creating everywhere a peculiar inner light, not necessarily of inspiration but rather illumination accompanying the swamp gas that is emitted sporadically among the dreary cedars of the surrounding marshes, or the groan and rumble of jazz bands among the Quarter’s shadowy bars.  Secrets twitter, are whispered tantalizingly from doorways.  To hear some of them, I entered pub after pub, crawling from bar stool to bar stool, an interest I acquired while living, as Jim Harrison did, in northern Michigan, entering into easy conversations with friendly, sometimes too congenial, strangers.

Strangers Call me Roy

Drunk and a little curb-wise, I walked into the Decatur Pub.  As with all the bars I visited, this pub opened directly into the street.  French doors, this was of course a frenchified place, gaped to the breeze and surprisingly gentle street sounds.  I ordered a beer, watched the hockey game on the small television attached to a pole, and sketched the bar.  Images emerged from the lead, revealing the relationship between time and shape, shadow and emotion as they must have for Goya in the days before images were easily mass produced and, so, turned into mere information: “This drawing describes only the place you are in.”

I love these places and collect sketches of them in my notebooks,.  They are small tokens of my passing among those trying to escape or force some enjoyment, even only a moments worth, from the day.  I note the assortment and alignment of the liquor bottles—bourbon stage left, schnapps and other syrupy liquors stage right—the placement and style of the mirror that seems of little use, except that it gives the bartender eyes in the back of his head.  In the mirror, since I didn’t want to gawk directly at them, I watched two couples settle in, gathering beers and mixed drinks between them (quite a bridge to pass sentiments across).  I was trying to get into a stride, drinking a few draft beers, hoping my tongue would loosen just enough to interview these people.

The hockey and basketball playoffs were on different televisions, and an attractive woman with curly black hair was working on a crossword puzzle.  I jotted ideas and drew pictures in my notes, hoping she or somebody might ask me what I was doing.  No one did, so I engaged the bartender, who was in shape (a personal trainer) and vaguely ambitious, hoping to become an actor or model or a similar kind of docent.  To gain requisite exposure (for what?), he claimed he had gone on a limousine dating program, something like the once popular Blind Date show, in which every move of the erstwhile romancers was spoofed with satirical thought bubbles.  Just as he was describing this show to me (by this point I had told him that I was thinking of writing an article about New Orleans) a few strippers, as Luke noted before helping them, dropped on the bar stools and drank a few shots and talked to him—a couple hand signs filling the gaps.  I snuck a peek through my beer glass.  These women were physically stunning, and seemingly of good humor, and I was, as always, feeling lonely.  How, I wondered, does someone capture the interest of the awfully attractive?  Of course, my concern was how to entice a physically attractive woman to find me physically attractive. The economics of attraction, as we all are taught to believe, have little value; yet the desire for this form of affirmation persists. How? Be someone else, I thought, which is too often the case and utterly impossible.  I had nothing to offer these women, but my quirky personality and ability to act the writer, to sound something like a literati, upon whom grace is conferred and in whom wisdom could be assumed to have amassed.  I was committed to fulfilling neither expectation, even though I am (sometimes) a literature professor.

Women, I’ve noticed, don’t really go for English professors, even though innumerable scripts penned by equally innumerable frustrated professors and novelists suggest otherwise. Women are, I think, reminded of the grammarians who had haunted them during their first years of college or last years of high school; or the frumpy, and vaguely profane teachers of arcane authors, such as John Donne, Margery Kemp, or Aphra Behn. I suspect these were teachers who found poems like Donne’s “Flea,” which metaphysically unites flea spit with the sweat of sexual intercourse, not only funny but moving. Yet, if in these professors place and asked why I think the poem is important, I’d have a hard time offering a convincing explanation: “Note,” I might say, “the language, the audacity,” while the petitioners simply stare straight ahead, considering the meaning of “audacity” and the aesthetics of dust bunnies. “The point is,” I might continue, “that the human race is sick and perverted, and isn't that reassuring?  It’s okay to be a pig, but, such poems remind us, if you make that choice you should still be an artful one.”

I told Luke, the hairless commodity breathing rarefied air, that I’d be back around and thanked him for his stories.

The city was humid but cooling, and a stiff breeze blew along the buildings and dried my sweat.  I was just about buzzed, nearing a cruising speed, and walked into the “Best Fucking Irish Pub in the World,” which was run by a small, wiry Irishman named Ryan (who displayed support for the American troops in Iraq with a yellow ribbon attached to a small American Flag hung from a rafter).  At the end of the bar, answering the question I had posed to the apparently mute bartender, “What beer do you suggest?” was a Labatt sales representative, who suggested that I try Hoegaarden: De Kluis(a Belgian wheat beer). In a suspiciously small bottle, the beer did indeed turn out to be crisp and refreshing enough to fend off the humidity, having a taste that tickles at the sides of the tongue rather than lingering, dryly, at its back.

The sales representative explained to me that Rolling Rock, a beer bottled already skunked, was a good seller in the French Quarter (it’s hard to get the seller out of the salesman).  I didn't doubt this; yet I've never met anyone who drank Rolling Rock because he liked its taste; I get the impression, rather, that people drink it (annoying people like lawyers and bankers) because the product has been successfully marketed to them; therefore, drinking it appears to confer status.

The salesman was certainly gregarious enough to sell products simply on the attractiveness of his personality.  And his stunning wife (I pulled up short of the door when she walked in), who stopped by as I was about to leave, made me realize, upon the sight of her kissing him, that my personality had listed somewhere, lost in the folds of a billowy button down or pen-stained kakis, and that my pockets even after all these years remained too empty and lint laden.

Women like her have always seemed to give me a wide berth.  I haven’t always understood it—a friend said the Ph. D  after my name is both intimidating, because of the esoteric knowledge and geekiness it suggests, and confusing, because of the degrees humorlessness and general audacity. I've never bought this explanation because I know it is, for the most part, entirely untrue. The way I wear the Ph. D  like a floppy beret is probably more unnerving; in so many ways, I just don’t look the part.  Another said my size, which is partially genetic and partly due to my years as a college tight end, is unsettling in a person who wants to talk about “deep travel” and “the nuances of metaphysical poets.” This explanation also doesn't pass the sphincter test except that on one occasion when I was 28 a woman I asked out declined because, as she unselfconsciously claimed, “You could kill me with your hands.”  Needless to say, I was offended by what she was suggesting.  Of course, I never believed any of these explanations.

The popular version of Ockham’s Razor[5] holds:  the easiest explanation is always the best, and is, oddly enough, usually right because what you see, what you can empirically refer to, is indeed what is actually there. The easiest explanation of why I’m alone then, assuming it isn't just general unattractiveness, is that I’m emotional tumescent. I have rarely offered a woman what she wants or needs. In part because I’m not sure what that is and in part because I’m afraid of what doing so might mean. A female friend once told me to “figure out what a woman wants and then give it to her.” However, this transaction seems too simple minded to be true. I assume a woman wants a man who is more like a painting than a pitcher of beer: someone layered with significance and nuanced complexity, someone who requires close reading and careful interpretation, someone who must be convinced of everything again and again, and not someone who pours out all sudsy, lukewarm, and pleasant. But I suspect that my sense of intimate relationships is as one ex-girlfriend put it, “totally fucked.”

Consciously trying not to stumble, I walked into the Hide Out where one patron was seated drinking out of a large can (an oilcan I think these overzealous containers are called) of Budweiser, the worst tasting lager ever mass-marketed to an undiscerning public.  The patron seemed forlorn; he was, as I soon found out, a midshipman and a regular at this bar.  The two female bartenders talked with him about life on the east coast.

Maulka, the exotically attractive bartender, though gruff voiced and a touch seedy, was a single mother and, upon my request, wrote a poem and drew two lovely pictures in my notes.  As with bar sketches, I love to gather verbal artifacts as I travel: graffiti, quirky or not-so-quirky wording on signs or bumper stickers, and the little things people will admit in a bar.  These pictures, she said, reminded her of her daughter’s “special soul.”  I forgave her, almost immediately, for the cliché and found her poem and drawings touching.

Perfection

 I am a heart, in love

With the idea of Perfection

Or perhaps the Perfection of

Love.

Perfection, a word most would

Define in a simple phrase,

“Better half”;

The one person that is there

When everything else seems

To be gone, the one thing

That makes you whole!

You are my Perfection,

As if I were a puzzle and

You would be that missing

“Peace”!

Without you I am like

A hiker with no camps,

A mountain climber with

No rope.  And a heat

With no soul.

You are my camps, until

I find you I am forever

Lost.

As a work of literature, this poem is doggerel[6]; however,  as a personal vision from someone struggling to express herself and make sense of and to the world, it is striking.  Maulka, I assume, isn't concerned with being “visible,” as academics often articulate the apparent motivation behind marginalized voices seeking the center.  She’d be fine being unknown and essentially unheard.  Listening to her, she seemed more concerned with allowing her emotions to enter the world, no matter the scale.  Her desire to comprehend perfection (the poem’s premise) in herself and in others is heartbreaking because such a concept doesn't exist; she is in essence lying to herself.  But this lie, I realized, is a symptom of living. The ideal of perfection, as with any ideal that one thinks might be achieved, undermines an acceptance of reality as an imperfect state—ultimately one of negotiation, which can never achieve definite closure.  Yet those who have had to struggle, as have most of us to one degree or another, hope that their efforts and hardships will come to an end, and that that end will deposit us somewhere near joy and independence.

The other bartender, who was a little round, mixed me a horrible bourbon old fashioned, claimed she knew Hunter S. Thompson personally, a notorious bourbon drinker, and that he had assured her that he would help her write and publish a book recounting her experiences as a bartender in America.  What would the title of this book be: Beer and Bones?  The idea is indeed reminiscent of Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas.  Actually, Thompson, I’m sure, could’ve put a peculiar and perhaps oddly attractive spin on the whacked-out tales this woman might have logged from behind so many bent, polished, and stained monoliths to desperation and hope.

Her boyfriend, not unlike the lawyer in Fear and Loathing, seemed entrenched in a kind of hair-band stupor, both mentally and physically abusive and appeared unimpressed and was wholly unimpressive.  Supposedly he was a descent musician, having opened for this or that band, but he looked like a bored child who played rather too inconsistently at drinking hard.  Actually, the entire group seemed throwbacks to Sixties’ style debauchery, but had forgotten the essential part of it: the actual act of debauchery. Stories of Grace Slick, as wound as an electric guitar while singing “White Bunny” or Jim Morrison, exposing his penis to a Miami audience, suggest the paradoxical innocence at the center of debauchery, as with most forms of transgression

After a few drinks, I lost interest in any kind of debauchery, which is, of course, indicative of my skittish and hyper-conscious nature.  I felt that I was somehow out of character.  But there I was, libido-less, and talking to a compellingly misplaced midshipman, who had no idea how to counteract the interest I had stolen from his bartenders.  He drank, talked, and related stories, even writing a few aphorisms in my notes, such as “When I go, I want to go like my grandfather, in my sleep.  Not like the three screaming passengers in his car.”  I couldn't tell, after reading this while hung-over the next morning, if it was the kind of debased joke midshipmen tell each other, or an actual experience.

When he completed these aphorisms, he left without a huff, which would have been my inclination in his place.  However, when I woke the next morning, read as I mentioned some of these drunken inscriptions, and prepared to get to the airport (always something of an odyssey), I realized that there are mistakes here, embedded in the few cobblestones remaining from less technological times—mistakes as palpable and painful as the humid air.  On each urine-soaked corner, among the old homes and the garden nooks, in the extreme, hazy vistas is suggested a hard won redemption: a chance to remake oneself in the face, in the persistence, of sin and tragedy.

The Airport is Replete with Corridors

As I lugged my bags into the airport, with as bad a hangover as I have ever had, I thought about the people I met (many I couldn't mention) and I wondered how their stories would continue:  What did Maulka do when she got up this morning?  Whom did Luke go home with?  What do the sales representative and his new wife talk about when only the sun and dust and coffee sit between them?  Is there a sense of hope in the city for those who are afraid they might disappear or simply never wake?  What happens when nights become the focus of one’s days?  What happens when time racks one’s emotions?  How, I still need to know, does one get from day to day in a city that could easily forget they ever existed?  Is it simply the power of habit that makes waking possible, especially when the places we find ourselves in are, as Theodore Roethke once suggested, “lonely places behind the eyes?”

As I approached the terminal gate, I saw that my colleague was already there.  “I have a hard time sleeping the night before a flight,” she told me.  She was reading a book about vampires, one in a popular series that had been mentioned at a conference session the previous day.

“I’m hurting,” I told her.  Very organized and prepared, she offered me some aspirin from her purse, two of which I swallowed quickly.

At that moment, I felt as though I’d been seduced the night before by some night-walker and sucked nearly dry.  The light from the large airport windows was painful and the heat nauseating.  I needed to sleep, but had five or six hours of flying to survive before I’d get the chance.

“Is it a good novel?” I asked.

“It’s not really good,” she said, “but it’s interesting the way she uses the vampire motif to tell a romantic story.  It’s nothing heavy, just fun.”

I could imagine vampires walking the streets of New Orleans.  Being the home of Ann Rice, vampirism does seem infused in its equally gloomy and glowing atmosphere: the detritus of the streets feeding, occasionally undermining, the jazz and the city’s long history. More than other places I've been, New Orleans offers the freedom to be unconscious, to explore one’s pathology (because face it we are all sick), and this freedom is what makes the city simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying.

---

[1] A week later, I would lose control of my car and end up in the median of the highway, waiting for a tow truck to save me while a state trooper wondered why I had “moved all the way up here.”

[2] A few hours of hypoglycemic-induced indecision and I found myself among the windy expanses of South Dakota looking, somewhat bewildered, at a giant billboard of Laura Ingalls Wilder.  She appeared so stoic, facing her and her students’ ignorance with a belligerence characteristic of that time and place—the kind of belligerence that had lead to the destruction of much of North America’s indigenous population.

[3] No contemporary satirists, except for maybe Don Delillo and his White Noise, capture the unreality of real life as well as did Boccaccio and Chaucer.

[4]Probably caused by designer contacts or the early onset of cataracts

[5] “William of Ockham formulated the most radically nominalistic criticism of the Scholastic belief in intangible, invisible things such as forms, essences, and universals. He maintained that such abstract entities are merely references of words to other words rather than to actual things. His famous rule, known as Ockham’s razor—which said that one should not assume the existence of more things than are logically necessary—became a fundamental principle of modern science and philosophy” ("Philosophy, Western," Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia, 2003. Web).

[6] Maulka’s poem helped me realize that literature matters because it can inspire people to speak with confidence and beauty.

Asking a Woman Out, Cold: A Prose Poem and a Memory of My Childhood

I am going to be bold, walking like this, a slight list to the right on my injured leg, to your door and knocking, having seen you several times from there, leashing your dogs into a trot; walking these fifty yards, past barking pugs and an elderly stare that measures the lilt of my eagerness, to say when you finally answer, looking at something near your right nostril, as deep and dark as that is, something almost witty about a beer and a shot or maybe you’d rather just sip a coffee and watch a lifetime of cream drip into it, drip like the drizzle off the shadow of the leaves I stepped under on the lake shore, watching a moment as you tugged and twisted your bathing suit, swimming, God knows where, maybe toward the fantasy of the far shore, diving just then, a flash of yellow ties, to gather pebbles you would polish and trade for the feathers your mother would use, use to make the headdress you wore on that Thanksgiving we wrote in large, tentative letters on the paper of flimsy turkeys, in the quacking uncertainty of first thoughts; I watched from only a gesture away while slow tears welled at the corners of your eyes, as you gathered the pine needles you had dropped in the hall on the first day of kindergarten or maybe it was the last. 

Lunch: The Angle of Introspection (September 23, 2012)

I try to eat lean--salads, fruits, and a variety of lean meats with a bit of cottage cheese and a few other items to provide those ephemeral nutrients we often overlook. Doing this requires me to cook pretty much every meal or on occasion eat lunch at the University cafeteria, which is actually well suited to my needs. This day, as I was wedging cherry tomatoes next to leaves of Romaine, green peppers, mushrooms and a scattering of yellowized cheese, I was struck by the mundanity rooted beneath the chaos. Students pass through lunch, as do most of us, in a frantic plate-to-gullet procession. And putting aside the gorging and, frankly, nauseating table manners, they confront lunch as little more than a gnat flitting about their eyes. Get it out of the way and move on. While this youthful gluttony is in part developmental, they simply need a lot of fuel, it suggests how few have been raised to appreciate the pause, that moment of reflection, lunchtime offers, and how this lack of interest is reflected in the larger culture. Students have classes at noon, adults have working lunches, and everyone moves rapidly toward dinner and death.

Those cultures that appreciate the time lunch provides are well rehearsed. The Spanish and large swaths of Latin America have the siesta, the East Indians take long lunch breaks even though they may work all day, the French drink wine and enjoy cafe society, an older American enjoyed the martini over a plate of corned beef and sauerkraut. What seems obvious now, as I make my circuit around the salad bar following the train of mastication, is that a person or culture that doesn't appreciate lunch, doesn't appreciate the morning, and the experiences that emerge from the ebb and flow of the day. 

When I was in Vienna, in which the cafe is an institution, I noticed not only that people took long lunches, as this is the main meal of the day, but also talked to each other. This point may seem obvious: I see people, one might say, talking at lunch all the time; however, along the Ringstrasse a different tenor in this conversation seemed to prevail. Reminiscent of stories about Brahms’s, Beethoven’s, Mozart’s, or Hofmannsthal’s mid-day declamations, people engaged each other, using this time as an opportunity to explore ideas, linking the efforts of the morning to the reflection of the evening. Over the last year, due to myriad, I'd forgotten the potential of this time to help me find equilibrium, as I reflect not only on my work but also on what makes that work and my life meaningful.

To do this, however, we need to retire with a thought and rise early with the intent to think. Ask a friend or student or whoever to describe the sunrise and she might say, "I couldn't see it I was driving to work," or "I couldn't see it I was driving home from work," or "I didn't realize the sun rose. Isn't it always up there?" Of course, when you see the morning, you realize why so many cultures revered it. A feeling of comfort and calm emerges from the aesthetic as well as the genetic response to its promise of beginnings. Of course, reams of self-help books and new-age treatises expound on this idea, and for the most part their pronouncements range from humorous to absurd. For example, one such book mewls that the “morning uplifts the soul to the potential of the day.” Of course any day has potential to be good only in the abstract. I could meditate into utter inaction and contemplate the cosmos in complete disregard of where my next foot might fall. Yet, as with all things, poetry provides an insight where conscious or even conscientious insight ends. 

For some the morning colors the fog of memory, bringing to these moments an air of redemption, a breath we might take to diminish fear and see the day as we do a wide stretch of calm water. As we look over it, our perception is pulled toward that distant shore, a horizon that suggests a transition, perhaps a revision, among forms: earth diffusing into sky as that moment of exhalation frames the angle of introspection. Such an angle is suggested in the opening stanza of Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning.”

Complacencies of the peignoir, and lateCoffee and oranges in a sunny chair,And the green freedom of a cockatooUpon a rug mingle to dissipateThe holy hush of ancient sacrifice. (1-5)

A still life, these objects frame an absence that dissipates the divine, which in scattering infiltrates each object with a whisper of presence, a presence that recalls the gnostic concept of a divine spark.  In that whisper resides knowledge, a knowledge that emerges for us in the construction of meaning. In complacencies of the peignoir and the lateness of the coffee, for instance, is a reluctance to engage in the ritual of Sunday, certainly, but also the expectations of the day itself. In this resistance, both complacent and late, we are drawn into a moment of introspection, a moment similar to that of gazing over water that begs us to ask, to ponder, to mine existence for meaning and invest this meaning in the objects around us. Manifesting meaning into the world is the function of introspection, and the action we witness in Stevens’s poem. These objects are not merely present; they suggest in their relationship, their “angle of repose” in Wallace Stegner’s words, fragments of meaning around which consciousness, a being in place, eddies. Our understanding of our life emerges as we draw this fragments into coherence as either a thought or maybe something more structured, such as a narrative. 


In Boston, I noticed this angle of introspection in the robe of the woman I was with as she draped it over the dais on her way to the shower. In the folds of the fabric and bend of the loosened belt, I began to outline a structure of feeling that defined the emotional composition of the room. The perspective emerged in a drawing I completed while she showered. In retrospect, this image defines loss, but had the love I felt for her been reciprocated, the image would no doubt suggest a link between us, a moment when emotion previously ephemerally became manifest in the movement of lines and the weight of values, gestures that articulate in the reification of an instance of sincere feeling. The dissonance between what I felt as I completed this drawing, which I did before she came out of the bathroom, and that conveyed in a poem I wrote in response to it a few months later reveals that irony that defines heartbreak.

It’s done like this, quickly,lines becoming shapesand hatching hinting at shadows—
a breath taken and held to shape the word from the chill off the street,or to trace the curve of the beltthat winds across the robe and hangs,falling to quiet
the exhale that is lusty in line workfaint in crosshatch, loosein a touch thatmistook the impossible for the possible.

The dissonance--however I might describe its central irony: heartbreak, sadness, loss—is the meaning encompassed by juxtaposing these two texts. Lunch is the time, the moment of introspection, that allows me to confront this meaning and make it part of my life, as painful as that is to do. 

And now, holding the doggy bag, I stumble wearier toward dinner. 

Breakfast: Reading the Coffee Grounds (September 14, 2012)

"THE HAGGARD woman with a hacking cough and a deathless love whispers of white
flowers … in your poem you pour like a cup of coffee, Gabriel" (Carl Sandburg from "Cups of Coffee")

I woke from a weird dream, rehearsing to myself, as I often do, the names of women I have known. I don't know why I do this, perhaps it is because I find comfort in giving voice to a woman's name; or maybe it's a way to remember some of those to whom I once mattered; or maybe, like Boethius languishing in an Italian prison, it’s an attempt to invoke the muse and wrench inspiration from the anxieties and confusion that shutter us from insight and the happiness it could bring.

With only the hazy afterimage of the dream in mind, I stumbled downstairs for coffee. I like my coffee strong, which Jim Harrison once described as having enough density to obscure a dime dropped into it. Months ago the plunger of my French press broke, so now I use a tin measuring cup, which has gathered innumerable dents. The number of uses indicated by these dents reflects the desperation I feel in the morning as I seek to force a few hours of lucidity into my day.

I drank my coffee, and after finishing the cup I noticed that the grounds resembled pictures of the Milky Way: at the bottom was a disk composed of dark spots of various sizes increasing in intensity toward the center. A wisp of chunks rose from the disk to cling to the lip. As we all do in the actual Milky Way, I ride that outer bit, hunkered down in the galactic outskirts, looking both in at the luminosities around which so many gather and out toward the silence that wanders away. As with so many introverts, I am pulled toward the calm of those open stretches, such as that I experienced from the portion of US 2 running through North Dakota. Along the margins of the highway are wild flowers, remnants of the mostly lost tall-grass prairie, and huge, steroid-heavy bulls that rise as high as the stunted and mangled ash trees.

On one trip, I stopped, after hours without seeing a soul, at a rest area, which amounted to a green-stained cinder block building, housing one stall with what struck me as a very lonely toilet. I approached one of the bulls that snorted at the sight of me; its skin rippling against the horse flies that darted from bush to bush. When the bull moved the earth stuttered in protest, and an instinctual panic rose in me. The bull could have turned me into a pool of guts in seconds. In that moment, however, I felt outside of time, maybe lost maybe rooted in the whispers rather than yawps of life. Unlike Emerson and Thoreau, I don't suppose that place or time led me to any insight nearer the source; indeed, I'd argue there is no source. Yet at that moment I wasn't in a hurry, and I had no desire to justify my existence in terms relevant to the enormity of those luminosities, those meanings that allows us to place our meager minds in relation to the clock. Maybe that moment drew me nearer freedom where personal failings and vulnerabilities don't paralyze the mind and chill the blood. A location where those you disappoint don't cut and run, but crack a beer or poor a drink and tell you a joke, waiting out your "hard time," as you do theirs. The cynics would no doubt claim that this is utopian crap; the optimists might wonder how such behavior would "pay off"; and those remaining might just ignore the slightly embarrassing, existential drivel.

The shutter across my window shuddered, and I sat the cup down, grabbed a banana and headed out toward Lunch.

Adventure #6, "Try a Sonnet," she said: Ending with Bad Rhyme

The Last Stall on the Left

She scrapes her nail along her stretch marks
conscious his lips read between each line
those remnants of seed; warm water descending
vines that wind through rooms—a boy’s pail, a girl’s twine
a father’s bent boot, a mother’s worn coat
dirt and cold; sipped whiskey and warm coffee
words and teeth twisted with worry and toffee.

A hoarse whisper, lips (again) brushing her throat
like many before, words stick, withered to gasps
beside leaves turning brown then yellow
and those red letters, printed slowly, explain
bad decisions born of the bar, recalled in rasps
heard in bathroom stalls, reflected in Jell-O
shots, where fathers and then sons learn of pain.

Adventure #5, Cashing a Check: Young Girls Ponder the Metaphysics of Powdered Cream and Sugar

I went to the bank to deposit a $25 check. Apparently, I'd been throwing money at my insurance company, hoping, I now realize, that the stained fold of the figurative bills would unbend beneath the assessor's flaccid palm and initiate a new age of compassion. However, crouching to the crinkled and imagined seam, reading "in God we Trust," she smiled, a clandestine chunk of parsley wedged between her bicuspids, and decided to fling back a pittance. As the Supreme Court noted compassion and of course God have no place in the business of health care.

Check folded in the breast pocket of my Oxford, I scuffed into the bank; its high ceiling and windowy openness reminding me of a high school gym or modern debit-card cathedral extracted, as both are, from eager-lipped neo-liberals or blue-veined dementians. As I waited in the line that wound this and that way around a red couch and oddly placed work station, I noticed two small girls standing at the complimentary coffee bar. They appeared to be around five or six and were leaning close, whispering in those elvish tones little girls master and quickly lose, replaced by the insipid weasely-whine, "whatever" or "I don't care" or "I'm bored" or texting thumbs plunging in mute disregard.

The hiss of their whispering seemed to register the seriousness of their work as they sought to unravel the mysteries of the powdered cream and assorted sweeteners, mysteries that melted into the hot liquids their parents drank while bent to their own breathy and subdued exhalations. Beneath each cup, held earnestly and balanced by a thumb, ran the strained undercurrents of concern, etched by cracked nails into the table top, meandering toward the margins of sense. That place where inveterate pen marks linger, etchings of mind and moments lost.

The girls seemed to pondered the alchemy, placing pinches of dust from the pink packet with a sqwinch of the grains from the glass jar and mixing both into the faintly yellow powder from the plastic cylinder. They traced patterns through the resulting concoction, one adding to the other's trailing thought, not communicating but engaged in symbolic play, building an image that would inhabit their separate stories. An image that emerged in relation, in emotive reaction, to the other's imagination--a bend inspired a line that ended in an elaboration of both. These girls were not collaborating in the creation of a communal tale, but responding to the remnants of whatever tale was left in the dusty confection.

Perhaps among the sweetened tailings were stories about mothers meeting fathers beside sinks to clink among the mysteries of plates and glasses, dipping tired hands that have held too much into scalding water, for a moment, to have some feeling affirmed. Deeper, where wood grain resists the powder, is the valley of absence, a dark country where children walk bent to labor, distance, and loneliness; where feet and moss meet again and again among ant and slug. A scary place from which their parents rescue them again and again from the amorphous, the abstract--"Mom and Dad, I don't want to die." The girls are absorbed as each shapes and reshapes her vision, neither yet suffering the anxiety of meaning.

Unfolding the check, and confirming my identity by committing cheap ink into the interstices between cheaper fibers, I realized that it is the story, even in pre-operational children, that establishes the ground for compassion or the edifice for hate. What stories might the creamer and sweetener packets tell the children to refract and realign their neurons with the spark of compassion? The inane Veggie Tales probably function in this way, investing common foods with Christian virtues that children can then assimilate. Yet when Bob the Tomato or Larry the Cucumber are daily eviscerated by parents, I wonder if children experience some sense of the carnage, the history of hate and murder, central to these same Christian beliefs? At one moment, Pa Grape is explaining to Junior Asparagus why the baby carrot should be kind to the cherry tomato (i.e. because Jesus said so) while in the next the child's parent is drawing and quartering the tomato and decapitating the carrot, putting the remnants of each between pieces of wheat bread. The pre-operational mind probably fails to make this connection, believing each instance separate, belonging to its own universe and abiding by its own set of peculiar but equally valid laws. The carrot is alive only within the borders of the virtual environment. The green thing that tastes bad and gets stuck in the child's teeth exists somewhere else.

Compassion might have begun to emerge among the girls as I waited for the bank teller to invite me to the counter. As the girls began to link the mental idea with the images they were tracing into their confection, they were exploring the links between ideas, testing how continuity relates to causality and how these inform commonality. Where one dusty fingertip met another, the girls might have experienced the transactional nature of sharing, in which one's perspective does not merely overlap but is infused with another's. This complex titration defines compassion, which is an irreversible transformation of sense, a salient structure of feeling. For this reason, those without compassion, as long as they are not mentally disabled, chose to ignore out of spite their better natures.

When I think of the concern my niece has for the feelings of those around her, or my friend's boy who cries at the suffering Portrayed in UNICEF commercials, I worry. I think of the ambition and associated meanness that interferes with this innate sense of compassion, this fellow feeling that can be and so often has been redemptive. I think of the belligerent attacks I face at work, the sadism, as Roland Barthes might interpret it, of those who find pleasure (often of a sexual sort) in ridiculing others, using for example the feigned complement of one to insult another over and over and over, believing, I assume, that such inanity is the pinnacle of wit. I think of my own mistakes and those moments when I treated others with disregard and could not be bothered with their problems.

As I watched these girls draw their fingers through the cream and sugar, I realized that it is storytelling and literature that have the potential to sustain compassion because they continual externalize our perceptions. When we read we move beyond ourselves to the detailed machinations of others, assessing the characters' experiences in relation to our own (it is worth noting that those who express a disdain for imaginative literature and the thoughtful interpretation of it, those who read nothing or claim that only non-fiction is valuable, are those who exhibit the most insensitivity toward others). This evaluative process, when supplemented with experience, leads perhaps to wisdom, the wisdom to know and speak thoughtfully and soberly of that knowing in ways that unite rather than divide, that embrace rather than resist debate, that encompass rather than exclude those different from themselves. What might a Veggie Tale look like that used this as its model rather than the dogmatic nonsense of religion, ending as these tales do with those acontextual biblical verses that, once examined closely, undermine anything endearing in the story that preceded it? What might an education look like that elevates literature and art, teaching children not only to read stories but also to interpret them and tell their own? What might a society look like that values its teachers as much as professional athletes or corporate CEOs? It would probably look, feel, and function differently and that difference might feel something like hope.

Adventure #4, An American Sentence: A Life in 17 Syllables

(See "An Adventure a week . . ." for a description of this project)

Week of February 26

That straight lip wavered, maturing to frown, stuck for a breath to a tooth.

Adventure #2, Opera at the Gracie: Broken Wings to "Meow, Meow"

(See "An Adventure a Week . . ." for a description of this project)


Week of February 12


In from the needling cold, I enter The Gracie theater, with its roof shaped like a gentle ocean wave or a rakish pompadour. I pass the tasteful art, acrylic collage on large canvases, lining the entrance-way; a calming light filters down the dark walls. I suspect that the stroll calms the patrons, depositing them in their seats in a state of slack-jawed bliss, ready to receive the evening's entertainment.

Duly benumbed, I am led to my seat by a slender attendant, who assures me that even though "row 'H' hasn't been numbered yet" she will find me my seat. Around me, happily limping, galumphing, and hacking into their seats, is the over-sixty set, the group that makes up the majority of the audience. Lodged between canes and purses and ensconced in clouds of acrid perfume and aftershave, they roar on about politics and the misadventures of their children and grandchildren. Behind them plop down pockets of undergraduates illuminated by the wispish lights from their cell phones as the tiny devices stutter on and off. They unfold and refold their extra-credit assignment sheets and whisper concerns about "the purpose of . . . " or the "point in journaling about. . . ." Others enrapt slouch in their seats, tapping clammy fingers on the bridges of their noses.

In a tuxedo, with mirror-shined black shoes, the signer mounts the stage followed by his pianist, who sits quickly and flips first this and then that way through the evening's sheet music. Immediately something strikes me as odd; I've seen something, but I haven't yet processed it; my mind is compiling the cross-sections to form a coherent image. Then, catching the light, the stain on the crotch of the singer's pants takes shape, a comma pursed in a pout, a glaring opprobrium. Transfixed, I can imagine at least three reasons for the stain. (1) The male member, being a wily thing, and the prostate, being an occasionally unreliable valve, can work in concert to retain and then release just enough urine to besmirch one's slacks in that moment of relaxation after raising, buttoning, belting, and zipping up. (2) Also, as ads for ED treatments attest (and we know that pharmaceutical companies never lie), one cannot always predict or fully prepare for an amorous moment. And because of this, as any sixteen year old might admit, accidents can happen. (3) However--as William of Okham made clear in his often misquoted razor, "the most likely explanation is the one that is easiest to understand"--the simplest conclusion to draw in this case is that the stain was probably a dollop of makeup transferred from the singer's right thumb to his crotch in a pre-performance adjustment (remember that the putative member is often unruly). But, rather than detracting from the event, this humbling guffaw added humanity to it, an element that can seem lacking in the most polished operas.

The first opera I attended was a huge production of Der Rosenkavalier at Vienna's StaatsOper in 1991, during the semester I spent abroad. I attended the performance with one of my English Professors and a classmate, who fancied himself something of an aesthete (he did have, as he often reminded us, both French and American citizenship, which informed a snobbishness I often redressed with that age-old and ill-informed American crassness, "You're nothing until you pick one or the other"). In the stiff, lightly padded seats, I watched the gender-bending tale unfold through excruciating recitatives and often moving soprano arias while actors in wonderful 18th Century costumes gallivanted up then down and around a gigantic staircase. First performed in 1911, the opera did seem a prelude to the crown prince of Austria's assassination, for who wouldn't want to slap that opulent look off those puffed and powdered aristocratic faces.


Nodding in and out of the performance, unable to care much about the amorous misadventures of oligarchs being all oligarchish, I noticed my English professor's blissful countenance. Her head wafted subtly, as though it were attached by a lose string to the conductor's wand, suggesting that this music transported her to a time along the shores of the Danube or Rhine Rivers when affection was communicated in such emotionally eloquent (and insincere) tones.

As the singer performs arias from a smattering of wonderful operas (my favorite was "la fleur que tu m'avis jetée" from Carmen), I can't help but be drawn, almost obscenely, to the makeup stain's half-grin, until I am certain it might giggle, tell a joke, or sputter some insult: "A priest, a rabbi, and an mullah walk into a bar. The priest says . . . and everybody goes. . ., which is why no one should eat saltines dipped in olive oil." At the end of each aria (performances of which compose the first part of the show), the man behind me exclaims, "ah!" or "oh!" or "mmm!" and claps with gusto. The singer is talented, as far as I can tell, and does seem to convey the emotional depths inherent in an operatic arrangement. Yet the first half of the show dissatisfies in the same way Kempff's Complete Beethoven Sampler does. We are presented with snippets pulled from larger tales and asked to consume them, acting the cultural jeunesse dorée nibbling on bits of finery with little sense for the slop, the rattle of mind, that makes the pretty vibrato part of a structure of feeling, a structure upon which the stained fabric of culture loosely hangs as it ruffles in the wind.

During intermission, I saunter about the atrium of the Gracie Theater. Chambers like these seem cathedrals to anticipation, encouraging supplication and whispered intonations in preparation for the spectacle that promises to elevate the yet unbuttered neophyte. Yet elevate to where or to what? The answer or the anticipation of one oxygenates the space, enlivening those present for the revelation they will vigorously investigate afterward over a glass of theater champagne or in my case a crinkled bottle of tepid water. "Go hence," says the Prince at the end of Romeo and Juliet, "to have more talk of these sad things." The atrium was built, I have no doubt, to give a certain ambiance and validity to these "sad" discussions and post-performance improvisations, improvisations that have led to warmer beds on many winter nights in many tiny apartments over many centuries.

The second half of the show is short and seems to devolve quickly into mere fancy. I am left with the impression of titterings and tra la la-ings rather than the moving exhortations of the first half. Being 8:30, I am beginning to fade and my left knee is aching when the singer rolls into selections from Candid, which seem infused too much with hay dust or hay seed, or maybe it's that I find English unoperatic. However, my observations offer little real criticism other than noting that a libretto can occasionally ring as sentimental tripe (though exceptions abound, such as Georges Bizet's libretto for Carmen). If left only with librettos, one might come to imagine that we find tragedy in the awkward clink of a tea cup and are about as observant as a blinded snail.

Wrenched out of the Candid's implausible revelry, the singer offers up a few standards from Cole Porter, which are jarringly unexpected. When I think of Porter, I imagine Billy Holliday swaying in a dim, smoke-chocked speakeasy in a cellar in Chicago or Kansas City, with the taint of spoiled beef just a few notes off the nose. Maybe Ernest Hemingway morose and blood stained leans in a corner listening, drinking a majito with fleck of mint stuck to his front tooth, imagining the simplicities of character and tapping his temple to "A Fool there Was." But the singer carries the turn with an operatic flourish that seems distinctly out of character. I want the wavering touch of the grizzled rummy but get the precision of the trained aesthete, and feel just a little embarrassed as a smattering applause follows him off the stage.

When the singer trots out for the encore (I can't imagine he still has this much energy), I hope for something serious to take with me into the atrium. However, we get "Meow, Meow." In this spoof, the singer and his pianist call and respond to the others version of "meow," which is occasionally interrupted or perhaps accentuated with a hiss. This piece is a crowd-pleaser, given that many--I imagine--probably spend as much time with cats as they do people. However, its triteness seems to undermine the express purpose of the first half of the show, which according the singer was to share the transformational possibilities of opera.

The singer seems intent upon disarming opera, suggesting that it can have popular appeal, but this is exactly the appeal I'd rather it avoid. At its best, opera provides a link to a different aesthetic experience, one that is defined by almost magical vocal and musical abilities. These abilities don't simply emerge, as they might on American Idol or the X Factor, but are learned through arduous training and apprenticeship. This process merges not only technically skilled musicians (watch someone really play the viola, for example) and singers but also those who can understand and feel some of the most complex and beautiful music ever created. I know someone could attend Mozart's Don Giovanni, Verdi's La Traviata, or Puccini's La Bohéme and care less; I've witnessed it. But doing so calls into question the very existence of that person's bellybutton, the same way that remaining dry eyed at the end of Russel Bank's The Sweet Hereafter or Tillie Olson's Tell Me a Riddle does.

The applause and bows and thank yous follow me and my few remaining thoughts out of the theater and into the atrium, which is silent. A cold breeze meets my brow; I scrunch at it, the same way a dog might, and am out into the prickish winter evening, wondering how much one of those antique, bronze bed-warmers cost.

Adventure #3, Staring at the Wall: Meaning Falls Inward

(See "An Adventure a Week . . ." for a description of this project)

Week of February 19, 2012

One evening after work, I found myself staring at the wall, lost in thought and unable to move. I would say I had been hypnotized, but that isn't exactly right. No agent was involved in placing me into an introspective torpor. Rather, I had settled into that place, not only state, of contemplation, a dimension not unlike that entered when counting grains of sand or delineators along the shoulder of the expressway. How long does it take to count to one million and, once achieving this, what does one do with the number?  The last time this happened to me, and it used to happen often enough, I was in graduate school.

In those days, I would get back to my apartment (furnished in the rickety, paste-and-plywood remnants of the 60s), either after teaching for pennies or nodding through a seminar, and drop on the lime-green upholstered couch. Fatigued, I'd stare into the liminal space between the wall and the air running along it; that moment in which the temperature is changing--never really one degree or another. In some ways, I was experiencing the caloric profile of a decision, the way thought transforms sugar into energy and how energy takes root as an image, and in this resonating object-thought I was transfixed, contemplating not really meanings but rather the mere presence of this wiffling supposition, riling among the off-white chips that gave texture to the wall.

A few evenings ago, finding myself once again similarly enthralled, drawn out of myself only to fall back in, recalled the netherly explorations of a few literary characters. In Kurt Vonnegut's the Sirens of Titan, the omniscient narrator notes that at the time the novel is set the outward search for meaning had been exhausted and "only inwardness remained to be explored." A few feet from the wall and its subtle textures, I felt something of this inward turn, and noted how it related to a scene in a story I published years ago. In this story, my narrator, who just happened to be wearing my life, receives a call from his frustrated girlfriend, who asks him what he was planning to do with his life  now that he quit his job at the bank. Sincerely, he replies, "I plan to sit for a hundred years." Why, she rejoins. "Because," he says, "I don't know what else to do." The complexities that define any decision, or that determine the acts required to make any decision, are those that paralyzes this character.

The old adage that not making a decision is still making a decision muddles the issue underlying my narrator's distress and his girlfriend's dismay. He can't commit to a decision and she doesn't understand why; it is inaction as a legitimate form of action. Fyodor Dostoevsky's underground man, in his comically befuddled way, might offer some insight, but, as he would argue just to spite us, probably not: "I Am a sick man. . . . I am a spiteful man. I am unattractive." Yet this forty-year old isn't spiteful, but claims he is out of spite. The man's frustrating ambivalence (the issue that often drives dichotomy-obsessed students to distraction) indicates the nature of the liminal space into which I was staring: The way one decision, even when that decision is not made, is often immediately countered by an indecision that undermines the comfort often associated with certainty, creating the intellectual nausea or ennui that Jean-Paul Sartre describes: "Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quiet enough" (italics is mine). One condition or reality is equally manifested in its apparent (not actual) negation, if not its opposite--pain, for example, by comfort; love by hatred; or fear by joy--which makes any proposition reductive to the point of absurdity (e.g. "I love you" but as soon as I say it I know that at some time and in some place I am not loving you. These discursive conditions are irreducible).

And into this absurd moment, I gazed with my creased leather bag between my feet. I was embraced by the process of decisions emerging as images that were destroyed simultaneously by equally viable possibilities and alternative perspectives. And because of this, I could not move. As Keats knew, the inward turn leads to outward displacement, and living is the visceral, gristle-chewing confrontation with uncertainty. If I did not believe otherwise, I would assume I am still there before that wall, working on finding something that literally makes sense, but I am here and here is quickly being transformed into a period that begins the sentence ending with a thought. You are reading that thought that I wish I could end with this period.