House Call
Every year, around the first week in November, I would come down with strep throat. While this meant a week off from school, it also meant a house call from Dr. Royce, and a shot of antibiotics. I remember him as a tall, rangy man, with an angular face, thick, wavy brown hair, and an imperious manner. I knew that he was coming. I could look out of my bedroom window and watch him pull up in front of the house in his black Buick. Once I caught him as he mashed a cigarette butt on the sidewalk; then he pulled the collar of his overcoat up to ward off a cold, rain-lashed wind. He would walk up to our front porch, tap lightly three or four times on the door, and wait patiently for my mother to answer. He would greet her with a solemn “Good morning, Mrs. Walters,” and she in turn would welcome him in with a demure “Thank you for coming, Dr. Royce.” Then I would hear them come up the stairs, his heavy footfall mixing with my mother’s lighter step, the two of them talking about the weather or how so many children were getting sick this time of year.
He’d sweep into my room, remove his overcoat, and drape it across the foot of my bed. He always wore a dark suit, starched white shirt, and striped tie. When he greeted me, it was always, “How are you feeling, young fella,” though as I got older it became “young man,” which made me think that I ought to have outgrown this yearly ritual and that he thought so too. His hair had begun to thin, and it was graying along the sides.
He’d sit in a chair beside my bed and place his bag on the floor. He’d take my temperature and pulse, listen to my heart, peer into my ears and nostrils with a small pen light, and look down my throat, gagging me with a tongue depressor while I choked out an “ahhh.” He would lean back and pronounce that I did, indeed, have strep throat. Then he would open his bag for what I knew was coming next. He would swab my upper arm in alcohol, reach into his bag and produce the syringe, and without a moment’s hesitation expertly jab it precisely where he intended, humming in a soft, distracted voice. I’d try not to wince, and my mother would look on in sympathy. A few second later he would quickly withdraw the needle, dab away the small drop of blood, and toss the syringe into a pocket in his bag labeled “USED.” This would be followed by the usual instructions: “He can go back to school in a few days. Call me if he doesn’t get better.” And so on.
One day—I was older, and curious—I looked into his bag. It was a typical doctor’s bag, made of black leather that opened into two halves. On one side was a collection of syringes, lined up like stick soldiers with hats, held in place by small elastic bands. Each one was labeled with the name of the patient. Next to the syringes was an assortment of instruments: a reflex hammer, attachments for his pen light, tongue depressors, and other devices, shiny stainless steel ones that reflected the light, whose use I didn’t want to know about. On the other side were his stethoscope, rubber gloves, pill bottles, and more silvery instruments of what seemed to me dubious provenance.
Everything was neatly placed and secured, as carefully arranged as words might be into sentences and paragraphs, nothing out of place. The bag told a story. I could tell, for instance, that I was his fifth patient to get a shot, that he had been looking down throats by the jumble of tongue depressors in the “USED” pocket, that pills had been dispensed because one bottle lay empty at the bottom of the bag.
What I did not expect to see was the gun. It was tucked in an inside pocket in one end of the bag. When I looked at him, my eyes must have shown surprise, because he took it out and showed it to me. I was certain it was a toy, but it looked real, like the kind of pistol TV detectives used. He twirled it on his finger like a gunslinger and pulled the trigger. My mother and I flinched at the CLICK, which echoed around the room like the crack of a snapping tree limb. But nothing happened. He looked at me and smiled. I was about to ask him if I could hold it, but he slipped it back into its pocket and closed the bag. “You’ll live,” he said, patting me on the leg.
Dr. Royce made his house calls on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and I know now that he would go to his office early on those days and pack his bag. He would be especially careful in preparing the syringes: measure out the correct amount of drugs, label them in his precise block printing, clip them into his bag in the exact order of his rounds. He would sterilize his instruments and review his patients’ records and smoke a cigarette while he finished his coffee. And just before he left to see his first patient he would cooly aim the gun at a silhouette target on the wall, close his one eye and squinting along the barrel with the other pull the trigger, CLICK, and in his sonorous voice emit a satisfied “Bang! You’re dead, you son of a bitch!”
But I knew nothing of this then. I would get sick, my mother would make a phone call, and a day later he would appear, like a stranger in a movie coming home after a long absence, black bag in hand, potent and deadly. When I was home sick I would draw cartoon strips, wildly undisciplined stories, usually cribbed from Sergeant Rock comic books. I couldn’t really draw. My characters were stick figures with bloated torsos and skinny arms and legs, living and dying in a world luridly colored with reds and blacks, death and dismemberment everywhere they went. Some of my characters suffered bodily damage no doctor could heal. As I got older I switched from drawing comic strips to writing stories, no less fantastic, words just as lurid, bodies just as damaged, substituting for pictures. The homework I was supposed to be doing sat untouched on my dresser.
Flushed with pride, I read one of my stories to a child psychologist I was seeing. He listened passively then asked me if I had written any “happy” stories. When my mother came to pick me up, he asked her to step into his office. She nodded and went in and he closed the door. Fifteen minutes later she came out with a worried look on her face. She never said what they had talked about, but soon after this I stopped writing stories. I sensed, as if hearing a warning whisper in a darkened room, that I had transgressed.
Dr. Royce was right. I lived. When I returned to school, the teachers would invariably ask me if I had done the homework they’d sent to my home, and I would just as invariably answer no. “Then what did you do?” they would ask. I would shrug my shoulders and say, “Nothing.”
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Friday, July 29, 2011
A Dream of Words to a Long Deceased Mother, Still Living
It’s confirmed. I’m certifiable. Not crazy, but more and more I find myself thinking and acting like a writer, which is almost the same thing. When I’m writing, which can go on for so many hours I forget the time, I sink into a warm bath of satisfaction and well-being, intermixed with moments of an exhilarating free fall into panic and terror, which can go on for so many hours the clock is all that's left in existence. And I think that’s perfectly OK. I’m not saying I’m perfectly OK; normalcy has its downside. But the struggle for words, which can get bloody, is a life every bit as keen at the edge as the struggle to cross an eddy line, to recapture a memory, or to make that next small affirming step in understanding someone we love.
I keep a notebook and pen on the table by my side of the bed, and sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with a great idea and write it down. Doing so plays havoc on my sleep, and in the morning when I look at what I wrote I sometimes scratch my head in bewilderment. But I have one foolproof test of whether what I wrote might be useful: my handwriting. If you’ve seen it, you would think that in a just world I’d be jailed for committing some kind of calligraphic assault on anyone who reads it. The test works like this. If I can read what I wrote, then I chalk the sleep-depriving experience up to a useful exercise and not much more. But if I can’t, then it’s probably the greatest thing I’ve written and I have to hope that the mere fact that I wrote it will jog my memory enough that I can recapture a little of it in the sentient morning.
What I wrote early this morning is legible, more or less, but I’m tied to it, win or lose. You’ll see why in a moment. But first, what was I writing about?
At 3:00 a.m. I awoke from a strange and vivid dream, and I wrote it down because it seemed like one of those dreams freighted with deep significance, box cars of Freudian symbolism that, when deciphered, would unlock hidden reservoirs (to mix metaphors) of my subconscious. Or, as I said, it’s just strange and says nothing about me.
I’m dreaming that Carol, my wife, and I live in Mt. Lebanon, a suburb south of Pittsburgh where we grew up, but we live in the very house we live in now, in Auburn, Alabama. We also happen to still own our first house, in Bethel Park, a suburb that shares a border with Mt. Lebanon. This is one of those “real time” dreams (I’m sure there’s a technical term for them), the kind that begins right where you are: in my case, in my own bed, at the house in Auburn, sometime around 2:30 in the morning on Friday, July 29, 2011. Carol and I have decided to spend the rest of the night at the house in Bethel Park. So we load up the two-wheeled push cart parked in our driveway; it's as big as the back half of a Conestoga wagon, and we've filled it with a surprising amount of junk for what will essentially be a four-hour sleepover. Don’t ask where the cart comes from. We have a perfectly good Volkswagen Jetta with a two-liter turbo that unleashes 200 horses at 4000 rpm, but it’s the cart we’ll take. I must be dreaming in Old West.
I’m pushing the cart up Route 88, a narrow, windy two-lane highway that links Mt. Lebanon and Bethel Park, just past the entrance to South Park. Carol’s in the cart, still in her pajamas, with Fast Eddie, our Maltese, on her stomach. She’s surrounded by books and by the mail that awaited us when we got home from a recent trip. There are no cars on the road, and I have this crazy notion that I can push the cart at the speed limit. But progress is slow. I push, I pull, held back by dream-world gravity, which answers to no law of physics. Fast Eddie keeps jumping out of the cart and I have to chase him down in the middle of the road. A couple of times I overturn the cart; it’s heavy, and those big wooden wheels wobble like a drunk. Carol takes it all in stride, laughing at my pratfalls (dreams sometimes mirror reality), surrounded by dog, books, and mail.
And it doesn’t help matters that there’s a live tiger running loose. Except that it’s not really alive; it’s a statue that’s come to life. This I can’t fathom. So far as I know, there are no tigers, living or statuesque, anywhere south of the Monongahela River until you get maybe to the National Zoo, but there’s this one, hiding in the shadows between Brightwood Drive and Logan Road, waiting in ambush, a nightmare with red eyes, like Dracula’s in the moonlight. A Freudian would say that this is my id monster. We all have one, that horror of beastly, uncontrollable urges that are the real us, deep and roiling, prowling and waiting for the right moment to pounce on our ego and devour it. I can hear it, padding softly through someone’s front yard, behind the hedges, me smeared with barbecue sauce. I know it’s a tiger because I saw it come to life in front of the Ivy Inn on Castle Shannon Boulevard. In broad daylight. While I push that cart. While Carol flips through Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird (a book about writing, wouldn’t you know). Fast Eddie’s ears perked, nose to the wind. He knows something’s wrong.
I should explain the tiger. It’s the mascot for Auburn University. A few years ago someone got the bright idea of putting up statues of tigers all over Auburn. It is estimated that there are some twenty of them, comprising a plaster-of-Paris menagerie of multi-hued felines, trolling the town like sailors just off the aircraft carrier after 6 months at sea. They’re in front of schools and banks and mounted on pedestals in parks; there’s one at Toomer’s Corner, a big orange and blue (the university's colors) monstrosity with a body shaped like a potato. Others are painted a dizzying array of untiger-like pigments. Not one that I’ve come across is the color of an actual tiger. How one got in front of the Ivy Inn is anyone’s guess. (Come to think of it, I do have a guess. On NPR I heard a story about a cougar—a mountain lion, a puma, a “painter,” as James Fenimore Cooper’s Nathaniel Bumpo calls them—that was struck by a car and killed in Bristol, Connecticut. Scientists examining its DNA determined that the cougar was from South Dakota. Yes, it had walked all the way from the Black Hills to Bristol, a distance of some 1500 miles, avoiding cities, the Great Lakes, and turnpikes, stalking purposively like a shadow from Mordor visible at the fleeting edge of vision, only to be T-boned by a car of unknown make, probably while jaywalking.)
“Honey, did you bring the key?”
No. Did you?”
“No.”
I don’t know who’s speaking what. It really doesn’t matter. There we are, in the middle of the night, somewhere on Route 88, Carol, me, Fast Eddie, books, mail, lumbering veggie cart, and no key to the house, which really isn’t ours anyway and hasn’t been since we sold it in waking life in 1977. So I tell Carol I’ll drop her off at the Bethel Park house and hustle back to the Mt. Lebanon house and get the key and hustle back to the Bethel Park house so we can go inside and go back to sleep. It shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes. Dream time. However, a small ray of rationality slips through a crack in the door of my sleep-veiled unconscious to remind me that (a) there’s no way I’m going to make the Bethel Park house before daybreak, and (b) it’s a 10-mile round trip, at least, between the two houses, one of which, recall, is actually 850 miles away in tiger-infested Auburn.
I don’t know how we got to the front porch of someone’s house. I don’t know whose house it is and where we are. I’m asking for a ride. In broad daylight. Dreams follow their own logic. Fast Eddie, all five furry pounds of him, is ready to rumble with a pit bull that has Fight Club trophies in a china cabinet. Carol’s thumbing through the Spring 2011 issue of Southern Humanities Review (full disclosure: it’s published by the Auburn English Department). And I’m negotiating for a ride with five or six people who can’t seem to understand a word I’m saying. A pickup would be nice, to carry the cart. I offer to buy a tank of gas. No takers. I throw in a case of Iron City Beer.
And I wake up. Or maybe I’ve been awake all along and have just been letting my synapses fire whichever way they will, just to see what will come out of all that electrical mayhem going on inside my head. So I get out of bed, grab my notebook and pen, tread softly to the kitchen, sit down at the table, and write the dream down, though in a much more truncated form than you’ve just read.
I turn on a small lamp. An old mantle pendulum clock, handed down through Carol’s side of the family since the Civil War, ticks loudly on a bookshelf in the front hallway. Mark, our son, is reading for his PhD exams, which he takes in September, and I can hear the rumble of his television through the heating grate in the floor. Our cat, Murphy, wants to sleep in my lap. (Yes, we have a dog named Eddie and a cat named Murphy. Totally serendipitous, that.) We have a number of antique lamps (circa 1920s) around the house, the kind that have a receptacle in the base for a small bulb, and we turn these on at night, so the house is suffused with a soft, electric glow. I decide not to have a cup of coffee, just in case I think I can get back to sleep. And in the most presentable crabbed handwriting I can muster at this dark hour, because I want to read this later, in the hour of light, I start writing.
And that’s how I discovered the real first sentence, the one that’s true and that starts to crack me open like an egg, to an essay I’m writing called “The Man with the Third Arm”: “The last time I saw my mother alive, she’d been dead for four hours.”
This also calls for explanation. My mother died around one o'clock in the morning on January 27, 1996, at my sister’s house in Spring Hill, Tennessee, about 30 miles south of Nashville. I found out about it at seven o’clock that morning, when Jan called with the news. What killed my mother was emphysema. For the last year or more of her life she was confined to bed, tethered to an oxygen tank, imprisoned in a small but comfortable spare bedroom on the first floor. Just walking her from the bed to the dining room table was a fifteen-minute ordeal that required rest stops. She could barely make it through a sentence without needing a minute or more to find the breath to finish it. But sentences she had, lots of them, often connected to photographs of her girlhood, Jan's and my childhood, the good years of her marriage to my father, sentences which she laboriously, patiently and lovingly, delivered, like breast milk to an infant. She would speak those sentences and no river on earth raged fiercely enough to wash her words away or drown out the sound of her voice. She was also reading books about mountain climbing expeditions to the Himalayas. I think what drew her to them were the descriptions of young, strong, virile men gasping for breath in the thin atmosphere. They told her she wasn’t alone.
If you’ve done the math, you’ll figure out that when I saw my mother alive four hours after she died, it was two hours before I knew she was dead.
That’s right, a dream. We’re driving north up I-65, between Montgomery and Birmingham, on the way to Spring Hill. Suddenly we’re passed by an SUV going dream-fast, but not so fast that I don’t get a good look at the woman sticking her head out of the passenger-side window, looking back at me. She’s beautiful, as beautiful as I remember my mother being when I was young. Her hair is a wind-blown gold, not the ropy white and gray of her encumbered old age. Her skin is fresh and smooth and white, like a bar of Ivory soap, not the mottled sallow that pocked her wrinkles and folds in her dying year. She’s wearing her trade-mark fifties housewife glasses, which make her eyes sparkle, exactly as I remember them. And she is laughing, gulping in volumes of fresh, clean air, and her laughter contains all the words I need to hear. “Look at me! I’m free! I can breathe! Look at me! I can breathe! I’m free!” And then the SUV speeds away and disappears over a hill, somewhere between Prattville and Heaven.
I woke up crying, more in relief than sadness, gladdened by her release from the grip of tanks and tubes and bed pans. I had a class at 9:00 o’clock, but as I sat there in bed, trying to stifle my sobs so as not to wake Carol, I knew there would be no point in my getting ready. But Carol heard me anyway, because she sat up and asked what was wrong. I don’t remember what I said, but it was either “I think mom’s dead” or “I think we’ll need to start packing.” Or both.
Somewhere I want to be able to write, Yes, cigarettes killed my mother, but they were also the gateway to a happiness that had been denied her during all the trying years of her later life, after the divorces and the onset of her illness. They made her suffer, and her suffering made us suffer with her, but in her dying year, between breaths that came with increasing difficulty, she told me the stories that I want to capture before my own breath slips away. Cigarettes were no different in agency than a runaway car, the strain of too much fatty foods on the heart, a bullet, or the slow, gentle easing away of life into that goodnight in the middle of a dream, when everything will be instantly made clear. Cigarettes, automobile accident, the endless sleep of sweet reason: what's the difference? The question sounds perverse. We’re conditioned to think that death is a kind of rattling ugliness, and that some kinds of deaths, death by smoking, for example, are uglier than others. But I think my mother understood that words are immortal no matter what, that they are more powerful than all the bringers of dead silence you or any god can conjure, and to her dying breath she never gave up the fight to speak her words. I last spoke to her on the phone the morning before she died. The conversation was necessarily brief, and I did most of the talking. She said she would call the next day. Of course, she never did. Not by phone. But I still hear her words, as clear and as strong as the words she spoke when I was a child.
Only if we want them to, only if we are not frightened by their possibilities, do words escape the death sentence we can impose on them. And then our mothers live again, and it is no dream.
I keep a notebook and pen on the table by my side of the bed, and sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with a great idea and write it down. Doing so plays havoc on my sleep, and in the morning when I look at what I wrote I sometimes scratch my head in bewilderment. But I have one foolproof test of whether what I wrote might be useful: my handwriting. If you’ve seen it, you would think that in a just world I’d be jailed for committing some kind of calligraphic assault on anyone who reads it. The test works like this. If I can read what I wrote, then I chalk the sleep-depriving experience up to a useful exercise and not much more. But if I can’t, then it’s probably the greatest thing I’ve written and I have to hope that the mere fact that I wrote it will jog my memory enough that I can recapture a little of it in the sentient morning.
What I wrote early this morning is legible, more or less, but I’m tied to it, win or lose. You’ll see why in a moment. But first, what was I writing about?
At 3:00 a.m. I awoke from a strange and vivid dream, and I wrote it down because it seemed like one of those dreams freighted with deep significance, box cars of Freudian symbolism that, when deciphered, would unlock hidden reservoirs (to mix metaphors) of my subconscious. Or, as I said, it’s just strange and says nothing about me.
I’m dreaming that Carol, my wife, and I live in Mt. Lebanon, a suburb south of Pittsburgh where we grew up, but we live in the very house we live in now, in Auburn, Alabama. We also happen to still own our first house, in Bethel Park, a suburb that shares a border with Mt. Lebanon. This is one of those “real time” dreams (I’m sure there’s a technical term for them), the kind that begins right where you are: in my case, in my own bed, at the house in Auburn, sometime around 2:30 in the morning on Friday, July 29, 2011. Carol and I have decided to spend the rest of the night at the house in Bethel Park. So we load up the two-wheeled push cart parked in our driveway; it's as big as the back half of a Conestoga wagon, and we've filled it with a surprising amount of junk for what will essentially be a four-hour sleepover. Don’t ask where the cart comes from. We have a perfectly good Volkswagen Jetta with a two-liter turbo that unleashes 200 horses at 4000 rpm, but it’s the cart we’ll take. I must be dreaming in Old West.
I’m pushing the cart up Route 88, a narrow, windy two-lane highway that links Mt. Lebanon and Bethel Park, just past the entrance to South Park. Carol’s in the cart, still in her pajamas, with Fast Eddie, our Maltese, on her stomach. She’s surrounded by books and by the mail that awaited us when we got home from a recent trip. There are no cars on the road, and I have this crazy notion that I can push the cart at the speed limit. But progress is slow. I push, I pull, held back by dream-world gravity, which answers to no law of physics. Fast Eddie keeps jumping out of the cart and I have to chase him down in the middle of the road. A couple of times I overturn the cart; it’s heavy, and those big wooden wheels wobble like a drunk. Carol takes it all in stride, laughing at my pratfalls (dreams sometimes mirror reality), surrounded by dog, books, and mail.
And it doesn’t help matters that there’s a live tiger running loose. Except that it’s not really alive; it’s a statue that’s come to life. This I can’t fathom. So far as I know, there are no tigers, living or statuesque, anywhere south of the Monongahela River until you get maybe to the National Zoo, but there’s this one, hiding in the shadows between Brightwood Drive and Logan Road, waiting in ambush, a nightmare with red eyes, like Dracula’s in the moonlight. A Freudian would say that this is my id monster. We all have one, that horror of beastly, uncontrollable urges that are the real us, deep and roiling, prowling and waiting for the right moment to pounce on our ego and devour it. I can hear it, padding softly through someone’s front yard, behind the hedges, me smeared with barbecue sauce. I know it’s a tiger because I saw it come to life in front of the Ivy Inn on Castle Shannon Boulevard. In broad daylight. While I push that cart. While Carol flips through Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird (a book about writing, wouldn’t you know). Fast Eddie’s ears perked, nose to the wind. He knows something’s wrong.
I should explain the tiger. It’s the mascot for Auburn University. A few years ago someone got the bright idea of putting up statues of tigers all over Auburn. It is estimated that there are some twenty of them, comprising a plaster-of-Paris menagerie of multi-hued felines, trolling the town like sailors just off the aircraft carrier after 6 months at sea. They’re in front of schools and banks and mounted on pedestals in parks; there’s one at Toomer’s Corner, a big orange and blue (the university's colors) monstrosity with a body shaped like a potato. Others are painted a dizzying array of untiger-like pigments. Not one that I’ve come across is the color of an actual tiger. How one got in front of the Ivy Inn is anyone’s guess. (Come to think of it, I do have a guess. On NPR I heard a story about a cougar—a mountain lion, a puma, a “painter,” as James Fenimore Cooper’s Nathaniel Bumpo calls them—that was struck by a car and killed in Bristol, Connecticut. Scientists examining its DNA determined that the cougar was from South Dakota. Yes, it had walked all the way from the Black Hills to Bristol, a distance of some 1500 miles, avoiding cities, the Great Lakes, and turnpikes, stalking purposively like a shadow from Mordor visible at the fleeting edge of vision, only to be T-boned by a car of unknown make, probably while jaywalking.)
“Honey, did you bring the key?”
No. Did you?”
“No.”
I don’t know who’s speaking what. It really doesn’t matter. There we are, in the middle of the night, somewhere on Route 88, Carol, me, Fast Eddie, books, mail, lumbering veggie cart, and no key to the house, which really isn’t ours anyway and hasn’t been since we sold it in waking life in 1977. So I tell Carol I’ll drop her off at the Bethel Park house and hustle back to the Mt. Lebanon house and get the key and hustle back to the Bethel Park house so we can go inside and go back to sleep. It shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes. Dream time. However, a small ray of rationality slips through a crack in the door of my sleep-veiled unconscious to remind me that (a) there’s no way I’m going to make the Bethel Park house before daybreak, and (b) it’s a 10-mile round trip, at least, between the two houses, one of which, recall, is actually 850 miles away in tiger-infested Auburn.
I don’t know how we got to the front porch of someone’s house. I don’t know whose house it is and where we are. I’m asking for a ride. In broad daylight. Dreams follow their own logic. Fast Eddie, all five furry pounds of him, is ready to rumble with a pit bull that has Fight Club trophies in a china cabinet. Carol’s thumbing through the Spring 2011 issue of Southern Humanities Review (full disclosure: it’s published by the Auburn English Department). And I’m negotiating for a ride with five or six people who can’t seem to understand a word I’m saying. A pickup would be nice, to carry the cart. I offer to buy a tank of gas. No takers. I throw in a case of Iron City Beer.
And I wake up. Or maybe I’ve been awake all along and have just been letting my synapses fire whichever way they will, just to see what will come out of all that electrical mayhem going on inside my head. So I get out of bed, grab my notebook and pen, tread softly to the kitchen, sit down at the table, and write the dream down, though in a much more truncated form than you’ve just read.
I turn on a small lamp. An old mantle pendulum clock, handed down through Carol’s side of the family since the Civil War, ticks loudly on a bookshelf in the front hallway. Mark, our son, is reading for his PhD exams, which he takes in September, and I can hear the rumble of his television through the heating grate in the floor. Our cat, Murphy, wants to sleep in my lap. (Yes, we have a dog named Eddie and a cat named Murphy. Totally serendipitous, that.) We have a number of antique lamps (circa 1920s) around the house, the kind that have a receptacle in the base for a small bulb, and we turn these on at night, so the house is suffused with a soft, electric glow. I decide not to have a cup of coffee, just in case I think I can get back to sleep. And in the most presentable crabbed handwriting I can muster at this dark hour, because I want to read this later, in the hour of light, I start writing.
And that’s how I discovered the real first sentence, the one that’s true and that starts to crack me open like an egg, to an essay I’m writing called “The Man with the Third Arm”: “The last time I saw my mother alive, she’d been dead for four hours.”
This also calls for explanation. My mother died around one o'clock in the morning on January 27, 1996, at my sister’s house in Spring Hill, Tennessee, about 30 miles south of Nashville. I found out about it at seven o’clock that morning, when Jan called with the news. What killed my mother was emphysema. For the last year or more of her life she was confined to bed, tethered to an oxygen tank, imprisoned in a small but comfortable spare bedroom on the first floor. Just walking her from the bed to the dining room table was a fifteen-minute ordeal that required rest stops. She could barely make it through a sentence without needing a minute or more to find the breath to finish it. But sentences she had, lots of them, often connected to photographs of her girlhood, Jan's and my childhood, the good years of her marriage to my father, sentences which she laboriously, patiently and lovingly, delivered, like breast milk to an infant. She would speak those sentences and no river on earth raged fiercely enough to wash her words away or drown out the sound of her voice. She was also reading books about mountain climbing expeditions to the Himalayas. I think what drew her to them were the descriptions of young, strong, virile men gasping for breath in the thin atmosphere. They told her she wasn’t alone.
If you’ve done the math, you’ll figure out that when I saw my mother alive four hours after she died, it was two hours before I knew she was dead.
That’s right, a dream. We’re driving north up I-65, between Montgomery and Birmingham, on the way to Spring Hill. Suddenly we’re passed by an SUV going dream-fast, but not so fast that I don’t get a good look at the woman sticking her head out of the passenger-side window, looking back at me. She’s beautiful, as beautiful as I remember my mother being when I was young. Her hair is a wind-blown gold, not the ropy white and gray of her encumbered old age. Her skin is fresh and smooth and white, like a bar of Ivory soap, not the mottled sallow that pocked her wrinkles and folds in her dying year. She’s wearing her trade-mark fifties housewife glasses, which make her eyes sparkle, exactly as I remember them. And she is laughing, gulping in volumes of fresh, clean air, and her laughter contains all the words I need to hear. “Look at me! I’m free! I can breathe! Look at me! I can breathe! I’m free!” And then the SUV speeds away and disappears over a hill, somewhere between Prattville and Heaven.
I woke up crying, more in relief than sadness, gladdened by her release from the grip of tanks and tubes and bed pans. I had a class at 9:00 o’clock, but as I sat there in bed, trying to stifle my sobs so as not to wake Carol, I knew there would be no point in my getting ready. But Carol heard me anyway, because she sat up and asked what was wrong. I don’t remember what I said, but it was either “I think mom’s dead” or “I think we’ll need to start packing.” Or both.
Somewhere I want to be able to write, Yes, cigarettes killed my mother, but they were also the gateway to a happiness that had been denied her during all the trying years of her later life, after the divorces and the onset of her illness. They made her suffer, and her suffering made us suffer with her, but in her dying year, between breaths that came with increasing difficulty, she told me the stories that I want to capture before my own breath slips away. Cigarettes were no different in agency than a runaway car, the strain of too much fatty foods on the heart, a bullet, or the slow, gentle easing away of life into that goodnight in the middle of a dream, when everything will be instantly made clear. Cigarettes, automobile accident, the endless sleep of sweet reason: what's the difference? The question sounds perverse. We’re conditioned to think that death is a kind of rattling ugliness, and that some kinds of deaths, death by smoking, for example, are uglier than others. But I think my mother understood that words are immortal no matter what, that they are more powerful than all the bringers of dead silence you or any god can conjure, and to her dying breath she never gave up the fight to speak her words. I last spoke to her on the phone the morning before she died. The conversation was necessarily brief, and I did most of the talking. She said she would call the next day. Of course, she never did. Not by phone. But I still hear her words, as clear and as strong as the words she spoke when I was a child.
Only if we want them to, only if we are not frightened by their possibilities, do words escape the death sentence we can impose on them. And then our mothers live again, and it is no dream.
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
The Man Who Tells Stories
Frank Walters
June 7, 2011
A draft: Part 1 of a 4-part nonfiction essay called "The Shadow of Assisi"
The Man Who Tells Stories
I begin by walking down Market Street toward The Embarcadero and pass a man wearing a sandwich sign advertising men’s suits. He is about fifty, white, of medium height and build, with a face that sparkles of intelligence. But we make eye contact and the façade comes down. He is handing out flyers to passers-by, but at the slightest sign of rejection he quickly jerks back, as if he’s suddenly noticed how filthy his hands are. A pale blush rises to his cheeks. I’m not sure why. We don’t know each other, but he seems to sense my inquisitiveness. Why is he here, doing this? What was he doing before? Is there a Microsoft paystub somewhere, some painful reminder of a lucrative past life gone irrevocably awry, tucked away in a drawer with the abandoned Stanford sweatshirt and the now useless white tie and cufflinks? He looks away as if he has heard my questions.
I turn left onto Montgomery Street and enter the gray canyonland of the Financial District. Under the canopy to the main door of the Transamerica Tower, I talk with two earnest college students who are passing out leaflets for the San Francisco affiliate of Planned Parenthood. “PPGG [Planned Parenthood Golden Gate] was dropped by the national organization last year,” one of them, a dark-haired woman in leggings and Converse high tops, tells me. “But we still need to provide services to thousands of poor women. No one hears their voices. No one speaks for them.” Her eyes grow moist and flare with anger. I describe the situation in Alabama, where I live, the high incidence of unwed teenage pregnancies, almost all of them carried to full term and delivered in the wasteland of a hastily-arranged marriage, an outcome viewed by clergy and lay alike as a seawall against the swell of liberal immorality. Her companion, a man wearing cargo pants and a golf shirt with PPGG sewn over the left pocket, asks me if I believe in a woman’s right to control her own body. I assent and give them five dollars.
I walk up Bush Street to Grant Street, the main thoroughfare through Chinatown. A few doors past Dragon Gate there is a shop bulging with Asian curiosities run by two Italian men who could be brothers, where I buy four small porcelain jewelry cases with dragon inlays for my wife. When I tell one of them where I’m from, he offers an exaggerated display of sympathy. “They let us out once in a while,” I joke. “Good football teams,” he says. He subtracts five dollars from the original price of twenty, adding that he really doesn’t know how much he paid for the cases. “So much junk here, you know? Who can keep track? Maybe I pay more than fifteen, maybe less. Who knows?” He shrugs and slaps my shoulder: “For the wife in Alabama,” he says. “She’s pretty, right?” “And Italian,” I add. I leave with an odd sort of Alabama feeling, like I’ve been thief and victim in the same transaction.
All along Grant I slip through throngs of entrepreneurs, lawyers, secretaries, tourists, shopkeepers, students, homeless, some pushing shopping carts laden with overstuffed plastic garbage bags. I cut over to Stockton, which crosses Broadway in the heart of North Beach. I’m now well away from the skyscrapers of downtown and their cold, permanent shadows. I thread my way among sidewalk cafes and in and out of the sunlight cast by the low buildings and trees. It is Monday, my third day in San Francisco, in late May. The temperature is only in the mid-fifties, the afternoon is brightly sunlit, and I’ve worked up a light sweat. But a stiff breeze, which threatens to blow away my baseball cap, has chilled me. My destination is the storied hairpins of Lombard Street, but when I stop at Washington Square for a water break, I discover that I’ve missed the Shrine of St. Francis of Assisi, a block over at Columbus and Valejo. I’ll have to backtrack, but for the moment I’m content to sit on a bench and warm myself in the sun.
Before me lies the expansive east face of Russian Hill, covered with the snowy likeness of white Victorian homes. Across Filbert Street, which forms the northern boundary of the Square, loom the ivory cathedral spires of Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church. The Square emanates its own cathedral aura. A full city block in size, it is ringed by cypress and poplar trees, and in the center sits a stand of poplars, an altar in the expansive nave of lawn, which is circumferenced by an asphalt path along which walkers can trace pilgrim-fashion the precise outline of a pear. Not far from where I sit is the statue of that old Deist Benjamin Franklin, beside whom Richard Brautigan and an unnamed female companion posed for the cover of Trout Fishing in America. It is a rambling and troubled story, and perhaps somewhere in its murky depths are clues to Brautigan’s suicide in 1984, at the age of forty-nine, but there is nothing I can discern in this bucolic garden, San Francisco’s Gethsemane, to prompt depression, unless it is the ghosts of the Beat Poets who in mystical tantric verse chronicled the hopes and despairs of their most unusual lives among the believers in North Beach more than half a century ago.
I’d read on Wikipedia that somewhere on the grounds of the shrine is a small replica of the Papal Basilica of San Francesco d’Assisi, the original of which overlooks the green Umbrian wine country where St. Francis was raised. Since then I’ve wanted to see it, for a reason that I admit combines my eye for absurd juxtapositions and a recently acquired interest in architecture. The juxtaposition can be found a block down the hill, at the corner of Columbus and Broadway. This is the site of The Condor Club, where history was made on the night of June 16, 1964, when a stripper named Carol Doda bared her breasts before a paying audience of admiring worshippers. By this act alone she became the first female topless dancer in America and the unofficial high-priestess of adult entertainment. She called her act the “Topless Swim Dance.” Five years later she added bottomless to her resume. A playbill from the old days called her a “true pioneer.” She has no doubt inspired, toward different ends, millions of pubescent girls and boys. She does not appear in E. D. Hirsch’s list of What Every American Needs to Know, but her place in cultural history was cemented when the State of California honored her with an historical marker (“WHERE IT ALL BEGAN”) on the brick wall outside the entrance to the club to commemorate her contribution to the nation’s attenuated nightlife.
What brings me to the Shrine is not the ancient quarrel between the permanent and the momentary, however. Stone and flesh will turn to dust in the end; that we know. No, what brings me here is a question that has nagged me since my first visit to San Francisco four months ago. Why do we build so ornately, with conscious attention to style and ornament, well beyond the functional need for protection from the elements and predators? It seems like such a hopelessly simplistic question—it’s like asking why we write poetry, why we cook for taste and presentation—that I’m embarrassed to raise it. But if you listen to the question closely, shift the emphasis just so, you’ll hear the voice of the inquisitor, whose question is delivered as a final judgment. In fact, the question is insidiously ambiguous, a thinly disguised command that we strip the ornamentation from our lives and all the possibilities for meaning it promises. The French architect Le Corbusier once called the “styles,” by which he meant the decorative features characteristic of Victorian architecture, “a lie,” and in place of the styles he proposed the “the mass-production house.” He thought the “House-Machine,” as he chillingly called it, superior not only as functional architecture, but as a better way of organizing modern life, healthier to the soul and body. The “styles” were the devil’s own noxious emissions, to be expunged like a disease. That is what I’m thinking about at the moment, scribbling in my notebook on a park bench. The desire for simplicity, which is a legitimate aesthetics, has been overtaken by a call for simpleness. Simplicity, which I find in the clear, sharp lines of a poem by W. S. Merwin, can isolate a truth and make it an object suitable for contemplation, a departure point for comprehending the complexity of the whole through its parts. The merely simple substitutes a phrase for an idea and tries to crush thought under the boulder of its ubiquity. Put simply, it expresses the fear of context and connection, the always possible new arising out of the old, and so tries to reduce the house, the written word, the drawing, tonight’s dinner to the bare minimum needed to keep us dry, to pass on some item of information, to show us what something looks like, to fuel us for another seven or eight hours of a gray and torpid existence.
I make a half-hearted attempt to render Saints Peter and Paul in pencil, but settle for a photograph on my phone. I can easily lose my train of thought, so I continue writing. Joseph Campbell was right: we can gauge the priorities of a culture by the relative prominence of its buildings: cathedrals in the Middle Ages, fifty-story office buildings in modern cities, football stadiums on college campuses. Architecture since the ancients has been the art by which we anchor ourselves to the earth and aspire to the heavens. Its purpose as shelter reminds us that our time on earth is short; nature will catch up with us sooner or later. Its achievement as art communicates our desire for immortality; we reach skyward for the permanent and immutable. Our bodies will crumble to dust, but we believe that marble will outlive rhyme. We build structures to enclose us, but in almost all cases we build larger than our bodies need. Vanity plays a part in this, no doubt, but there is also something in us that exceeds our own body’s physical limitations, and it needs room to stretch. Yet the paradoxical effect of standing in these enlarged spaces, the cathedrals, museums, hotel lobbies, concert halls, parliamentary chambers, which we don’t want to admit, is to feel diminished. Perhaps this is the answer to the question. Somewhere in the expansive volume of this shrine, I imagine that I’ll find a smaller church, small enough to fit on a tabletop, light enough to carry, as weighty as the soul’s transgressions, and a bit more comforting for this reason, a structure that will stand in counterpoint to the engorged and ephemeral object of veneration down the street. At any rate, from the Shrine it will be an easy jog back to Stockton and a turn north to Lombard Street. As an added bonus, there’s an Italian bakery en route, and a friend has admonished me not to pass it without buying some cream puffs.
I sling my backpack over a shoulder and go back the way I came. There is no missing it. When I reach Columbus and Green, the Transamerica Tower, center of the international banking order, poised like a spaceship for takeoff, is pinioned to the earth half a mile dead ahead. The twin alabaster spires of the shrine, elevated against a blue sky above a row of houses, reach skyward to the source of a different kind of wealth. I walk around the outside looking for an entrance to the grounds, but the gate to a narrow walkway leading to the back is padlocked. It is after 4:00 pm, and the shrine’s doors will be locked at 5:00 pm. Perhaps what I’m looking for is inside. I remove my baseball cap and climb the stairs to the main entrance and open the door.
The Parish of St. Francis was established on this site on June 12, 1859. Five days later the first parochial Mass in California was celebrated, possibly by the Blessed Junipero Serra, a Franciscan of the Mission Dolores, in a small wooden shack built by soldiers from the Presidio. Not long after, a larger adobe structure replaced the wooden shanty, but attending to the spiritual needs of San Francisco’s Catholic population, swelled daily by the Gold Rush, was more than a small mission church could handle. On October 2, 1859, parishioners laid the cornerstone of the building I am standing in now, and on March 17, 1860, the new church was formally dedicated. God’s thunderbolts may be tests of strength and faith or the wildly inaccurate tosses of a malicious and capricious will, but in either case the Shrine has seen its travails. The earthquake of 1906 badly damaged the building, as it did so many others below Russian and Nob Hills. The basic structure survived, but the brick exterior, spires and all, was scorched by the conflagration that followed. Everything inside the church was destroyed by fire. It would take engineers months to determine that the building could be saved and that the roof and floor were structurally sound enough to be supported by steel girders. The interior was rebuilt from scratch, with murals done by a migrant Italian painter named Luigi Brusatori and his students, sometime between 1912 and 1921. The rebuilt church was dedicated on March 2, 1919. In 1992, three years after the Loma Prieta earthquake, the Archdiocese of San Francisco, citing low attendance and seismic unsoundness, closed St. Francis, along with eight other churches, and earmarked it for demolition. The parish headquarters was relocated to the nearby Saints Peter and Paul, but in 1998, at the urging of prominent local Catholics, the building was reopened as a shrine to St. Francis, the only one of its kind outside Assisi. As of 2005, it still stood in need of a 3.8 million dollar seismic upgrade. That same year, something that more than one San Francisco Catholic has called a miracle began to take shape.
Once the echo of the closing door fades, I am surrounded by white columns which rise to white archivolts which are crowned by white arches that reach to a white ceiling that tapers to a point that extends endlessly upward into the great celestial vault of eternal whiteness. Without realizing it, I am craning my neck to look up, which has the double effect of making me feel small against the white vastness above me but a part of it as well. I have always loved old Catholic churches and cathedrals for their spaciousness, for their high vaulted ceilings and great arches and endlessly deep chancels--the newer ones being too modern with their sharp angles and low ceilings and minimalist, postmodern statues of Christ--because they encourage me to look up and so promote the belief that heaven is far larger and more accommodating than even the most liberal Christian can imagine, and because they echo the voices of the past as numerous as Whitman’s multitudes. If the intention of the architect of St. Francis was to represent the experience of passing from life through death to heaven, the journey from the colors and shapes of this world to the blazing white of the next, from the muted tones (the reddish-brown of the carpet, the dark brown of the pews) of the earth to the purity of the sky, then he has not disappointed.
I walk down the center aisle to the steps leading to the chancel. The architecture of every Catholic Church is the sum of its bricks and mortar, of the history written and painted on its walls, and of the carefully laid out geography of worship. Decades ago, when a communion rail separated the chancel from the nave, and the priest distributed the communion wafer directly to the communicant’s tongue, I would stand beside him, robed in a white surplice, and hold the brass paten to catch any wayward hosts that might otherwise fall to the floor. In those days he said the Mass in Latin at the sanctuary altar, his back to the congregation. In the wake of Vatican II the communion rails are mostly gone, and the priest conducts Mass in the vernacular at an altar located near the front of the chancel, facing the congregation. The only vestige of the old medieval geography that remains, besides the sanctuary, are the four or five steps that elevate the chancel, whose care is seen to by the rector, above the nave, the responsibility of the parish laity.
The Shrine of St. Francis reflects these changes, of course. No communion rail, and the main altar, draped in white linen and stationed forward of the sanctuary, is reached by five steps from the nave. The sanctuary altar sits under a ribbed dome, each rib projecting upward to a point from the top of an arch. Within the five arches, framed by columns, are murals, the center one of which shows Francis, who bore the stigmata, at the foot of Christ on the Cross. It is, of course, an imaginative representation of Francis’ devotion, but I notice that Christ’s arm is freed from the crossbeam and draped over Francis’ shoulder in a fatherly gesture. Francis has his arms around Christ’s waist, supporting him, which takes the dead weight of Christ’s body off the other hand, still nailed fast to the beam. Other murals depict moments in Francis’s life: he receives the stigmata above the side altar dedicated to him; he preaches to the birds at the right hand of the dying Christ; he dies attended by friars and seraphim. At the back of the church, overlooking the east aisle, the Virgin Mary, holding the Christ child, receives the prayers of Francis. But the crowning achievements of this church of achievements are the statues, of which I count ten. There is, of course, St. Francis; also St. Clare, Assisi’s lesser-known saint; St. Ann and her teenage daughter, Mary, the mother of Jesus; Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception; Our Lady of the Perpetual Miracle; St. Joseph and the Child; The Pieta, a heart-rending study in a mother’s grief; St. Rita of Cascia; St. Therese of Lisieux; and the saint whose own sickliness and poverty made him a friend of the sick and the poor, Anthony of Padua. The church was empty when I entered. Now it is filled.
It is almost five, and I have not found the basilica.
I exit the church and turn left on Valejo Street and walk under the long, late afternoon shadows of trees, across the street from a row of police motorcycles parked in front of Café Trieste, an old haunt of the Beat Poets. When I reach the corner at Grant, I am stopped by a voice: “I remember cherry tree summer and my mother’s tattered dress.” In truth, I cannot be certain now that these were his exact words; there was a tree and a mother’s dress. One sentence follows another, a litany of recollections that seem random and private. “The recoilless rifle shot of a word that burns the heart.” “Vessels of blood and a mind searing afar.” There is nonsense and lucidity. His mother again. I have read the beat poets, and I recognize images: nakedness, police cars, vacant buildings, bombs, corpses. He could be reciting bits of their poetry he remembers, and he has the look of a poet, which perhaps reinforces my impression. He wears a tattered brown jacket and gray pants, worn work boots, and his generally unkempt appearance is in keeping with the street. His Ginsberg beard makes it hard to guess his age. He sits on the sidewalk, back against the adobe wall, and I listen to him, and he never acknowledges my existence. Next to him are a small backpack and a paper bag, and spread out before him are pictures—they appear to be photographs, though from where I stand it is hard to tell. There is nothing to indicate that he is selling them, no cup with bills stuffed into it, no sign with prices. He speaks on, weaves stories that have an origin and that I want to believe have a destination. I have been told that he might have come from money and lives off a trust fund, which is parceled out to him in small amounts, and which he promptly gives away. The sun peeks through the trees, and shadows play across his lined face. In it I see pain and years, or simply nothing more than the long wear of life.
Across the street at the café, I buy a sandwich and small bottle of orange juice. He motions for me to set them down next to him without breaking stride. “Do we step on what we can’t see?” I ask him if he has a name, but except for a slight pause in his delivery, as if I’ve stepped on a fellow-actor’s lines, he does not acknowledge me. He remembers a childhood, a playground, a father’s stern warning, hunger. Love? Beauty? I suspect that he’ll forget me as soon as I leave. He appears to have become utterly lost within himself.
June 7, 2011
A draft: Part 1 of a 4-part nonfiction essay called "The Shadow of Assisi"
The Man Who Tells Stories
I begin by walking down Market Street toward The Embarcadero and pass a man wearing a sandwich sign advertising men’s suits. He is about fifty, white, of medium height and build, with a face that sparkles of intelligence. But we make eye contact and the façade comes down. He is handing out flyers to passers-by, but at the slightest sign of rejection he quickly jerks back, as if he’s suddenly noticed how filthy his hands are. A pale blush rises to his cheeks. I’m not sure why. We don’t know each other, but he seems to sense my inquisitiveness. Why is he here, doing this? What was he doing before? Is there a Microsoft paystub somewhere, some painful reminder of a lucrative past life gone irrevocably awry, tucked away in a drawer with the abandoned Stanford sweatshirt and the now useless white tie and cufflinks? He looks away as if he has heard my questions.
I turn left onto Montgomery Street and enter the gray canyonland of the Financial District. Under the canopy to the main door of the Transamerica Tower, I talk with two earnest college students who are passing out leaflets for the San Francisco affiliate of Planned Parenthood. “PPGG [Planned Parenthood Golden Gate] was dropped by the national organization last year,” one of them, a dark-haired woman in leggings and Converse high tops, tells me. “But we still need to provide services to thousands of poor women. No one hears their voices. No one speaks for them.” Her eyes grow moist and flare with anger. I describe the situation in Alabama, where I live, the high incidence of unwed teenage pregnancies, almost all of them carried to full term and delivered in the wasteland of a hastily-arranged marriage, an outcome viewed by clergy and lay alike as a seawall against the swell of liberal immorality. Her companion, a man wearing cargo pants and a golf shirt with PPGG sewn over the left pocket, asks me if I believe in a woman’s right to control her own body. I assent and give them five dollars.
I walk up Bush Street to Grant Street, the main thoroughfare through Chinatown. A few doors past Dragon Gate there is a shop bulging with Asian curiosities run by two Italian men who could be brothers, where I buy four small porcelain jewelry cases with dragon inlays for my wife. When I tell one of them where I’m from, he offers an exaggerated display of sympathy. “They let us out once in a while,” I joke. “Good football teams,” he says. He subtracts five dollars from the original price of twenty, adding that he really doesn’t know how much he paid for the cases. “So much junk here, you know? Who can keep track? Maybe I pay more than fifteen, maybe less. Who knows?” He shrugs and slaps my shoulder: “For the wife in Alabama,” he says. “She’s pretty, right?” “And Italian,” I add. I leave with an odd sort of Alabama feeling, like I’ve been thief and victim in the same transaction.
All along Grant I slip through throngs of entrepreneurs, lawyers, secretaries, tourists, shopkeepers, students, homeless, some pushing shopping carts laden with overstuffed plastic garbage bags. I cut over to Stockton, which crosses Broadway in the heart of North Beach. I’m now well away from the skyscrapers of downtown and their cold, permanent shadows. I thread my way among sidewalk cafes and in and out of the sunlight cast by the low buildings and trees. It is Monday, my third day in San Francisco, in late May. The temperature is only in the mid-fifties, the afternoon is brightly sunlit, and I’ve worked up a light sweat. But a stiff breeze, which threatens to blow away my baseball cap, has chilled me. My destination is the storied hairpins of Lombard Street, but when I stop at Washington Square for a water break, I discover that I’ve missed the Shrine of St. Francis of Assisi, a block over at Columbus and Valejo. I’ll have to backtrack, but for the moment I’m content to sit on a bench and warm myself in the sun.
Before me lies the expansive east face of Russian Hill, covered with the snowy likeness of white Victorian homes. Across Filbert Street, which forms the northern boundary of the Square, loom the ivory cathedral spires of Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church. The Square emanates its own cathedral aura. A full city block in size, it is ringed by cypress and poplar trees, and in the center sits a stand of poplars, an altar in the expansive nave of lawn, which is circumferenced by an asphalt path along which walkers can trace pilgrim-fashion the precise outline of a pear. Not far from where I sit is the statue of that old Deist Benjamin Franklin, beside whom Richard Brautigan and an unnamed female companion posed for the cover of Trout Fishing in America. It is a rambling and troubled story, and perhaps somewhere in its murky depths are clues to Brautigan’s suicide in 1984, at the age of forty-nine, but there is nothing I can discern in this bucolic garden, San Francisco’s Gethsemane, to prompt depression, unless it is the ghosts of the Beat Poets who in mystical tantric verse chronicled the hopes and despairs of their most unusual lives among the believers in North Beach more than half a century ago.
I’d read on Wikipedia that somewhere on the grounds of the shrine is a small replica of the Papal Basilica of San Francesco d’Assisi, the original of which overlooks the green Umbrian wine country where St. Francis was raised. Since then I’ve wanted to see it, for a reason that I admit combines my eye for absurd juxtapositions and a recently acquired interest in architecture. The juxtaposition can be found a block down the hill, at the corner of Columbus and Broadway. This is the site of The Condor Club, where history was made on the night of June 16, 1964, when a stripper named Carol Doda bared her breasts before a paying audience of admiring worshippers. By this act alone she became the first female topless dancer in America and the unofficial high-priestess of adult entertainment. She called her act the “Topless Swim Dance.” Five years later she added bottomless to her resume. A playbill from the old days called her a “true pioneer.” She has no doubt inspired, toward different ends, millions of pubescent girls and boys. She does not appear in E. D. Hirsch’s list of What Every American Needs to Know, but her place in cultural history was cemented when the State of California honored her with an historical marker (“WHERE IT ALL BEGAN”) on the brick wall outside the entrance to the club to commemorate her contribution to the nation’s attenuated nightlife.
What brings me to the Shrine is not the ancient quarrel between the permanent and the momentary, however. Stone and flesh will turn to dust in the end; that we know. No, what brings me here is a question that has nagged me since my first visit to San Francisco four months ago. Why do we build so ornately, with conscious attention to style and ornament, well beyond the functional need for protection from the elements and predators? It seems like such a hopelessly simplistic question—it’s like asking why we write poetry, why we cook for taste and presentation—that I’m embarrassed to raise it. But if you listen to the question closely, shift the emphasis just so, you’ll hear the voice of the inquisitor, whose question is delivered as a final judgment. In fact, the question is insidiously ambiguous, a thinly disguised command that we strip the ornamentation from our lives and all the possibilities for meaning it promises. The French architect Le Corbusier once called the “styles,” by which he meant the decorative features characteristic of Victorian architecture, “a lie,” and in place of the styles he proposed the “the mass-production house.” He thought the “House-Machine,” as he chillingly called it, superior not only as functional architecture, but as a better way of organizing modern life, healthier to the soul and body. The “styles” were the devil’s own noxious emissions, to be expunged like a disease. That is what I’m thinking about at the moment, scribbling in my notebook on a park bench. The desire for simplicity, which is a legitimate aesthetics, has been overtaken by a call for simpleness. Simplicity, which I find in the clear, sharp lines of a poem by W. S. Merwin, can isolate a truth and make it an object suitable for contemplation, a departure point for comprehending the complexity of the whole through its parts. The merely simple substitutes a phrase for an idea and tries to crush thought under the boulder of its ubiquity. Put simply, it expresses the fear of context and connection, the always possible new arising out of the old, and so tries to reduce the house, the written word, the drawing, tonight’s dinner to the bare minimum needed to keep us dry, to pass on some item of information, to show us what something looks like, to fuel us for another seven or eight hours of a gray and torpid existence.
I make a half-hearted attempt to render Saints Peter and Paul in pencil, but settle for a photograph on my phone. I can easily lose my train of thought, so I continue writing. Joseph Campbell was right: we can gauge the priorities of a culture by the relative prominence of its buildings: cathedrals in the Middle Ages, fifty-story office buildings in modern cities, football stadiums on college campuses. Architecture since the ancients has been the art by which we anchor ourselves to the earth and aspire to the heavens. Its purpose as shelter reminds us that our time on earth is short; nature will catch up with us sooner or later. Its achievement as art communicates our desire for immortality; we reach skyward for the permanent and immutable. Our bodies will crumble to dust, but we believe that marble will outlive rhyme. We build structures to enclose us, but in almost all cases we build larger than our bodies need. Vanity plays a part in this, no doubt, but there is also something in us that exceeds our own body’s physical limitations, and it needs room to stretch. Yet the paradoxical effect of standing in these enlarged spaces, the cathedrals, museums, hotel lobbies, concert halls, parliamentary chambers, which we don’t want to admit, is to feel diminished. Perhaps this is the answer to the question. Somewhere in the expansive volume of this shrine, I imagine that I’ll find a smaller church, small enough to fit on a tabletop, light enough to carry, as weighty as the soul’s transgressions, and a bit more comforting for this reason, a structure that will stand in counterpoint to the engorged and ephemeral object of veneration down the street. At any rate, from the Shrine it will be an easy jog back to Stockton and a turn north to Lombard Street. As an added bonus, there’s an Italian bakery en route, and a friend has admonished me not to pass it without buying some cream puffs.
I sling my backpack over a shoulder and go back the way I came. There is no missing it. When I reach Columbus and Green, the Transamerica Tower, center of the international banking order, poised like a spaceship for takeoff, is pinioned to the earth half a mile dead ahead. The twin alabaster spires of the shrine, elevated against a blue sky above a row of houses, reach skyward to the source of a different kind of wealth. I walk around the outside looking for an entrance to the grounds, but the gate to a narrow walkway leading to the back is padlocked. It is after 4:00 pm, and the shrine’s doors will be locked at 5:00 pm. Perhaps what I’m looking for is inside. I remove my baseball cap and climb the stairs to the main entrance and open the door.
The Parish of St. Francis was established on this site on June 12, 1859. Five days later the first parochial Mass in California was celebrated, possibly by the Blessed Junipero Serra, a Franciscan of the Mission Dolores, in a small wooden shack built by soldiers from the Presidio. Not long after, a larger adobe structure replaced the wooden shanty, but attending to the spiritual needs of San Francisco’s Catholic population, swelled daily by the Gold Rush, was more than a small mission church could handle. On October 2, 1859, parishioners laid the cornerstone of the building I am standing in now, and on March 17, 1860, the new church was formally dedicated. God’s thunderbolts may be tests of strength and faith or the wildly inaccurate tosses of a malicious and capricious will, but in either case the Shrine has seen its travails. The earthquake of 1906 badly damaged the building, as it did so many others below Russian and Nob Hills. The basic structure survived, but the brick exterior, spires and all, was scorched by the conflagration that followed. Everything inside the church was destroyed by fire. It would take engineers months to determine that the building could be saved and that the roof and floor were structurally sound enough to be supported by steel girders. The interior was rebuilt from scratch, with murals done by a migrant Italian painter named Luigi Brusatori and his students, sometime between 1912 and 1921. The rebuilt church was dedicated on March 2, 1919. In 1992, three years after the Loma Prieta earthquake, the Archdiocese of San Francisco, citing low attendance and seismic unsoundness, closed St. Francis, along with eight other churches, and earmarked it for demolition. The parish headquarters was relocated to the nearby Saints Peter and Paul, but in 1998, at the urging of prominent local Catholics, the building was reopened as a shrine to St. Francis, the only one of its kind outside Assisi. As of 2005, it still stood in need of a 3.8 million dollar seismic upgrade. That same year, something that more than one San Francisco Catholic has called a miracle began to take shape.
Once the echo of the closing door fades, I am surrounded by white columns which rise to white archivolts which are crowned by white arches that reach to a white ceiling that tapers to a point that extends endlessly upward into the great celestial vault of eternal whiteness. Without realizing it, I am craning my neck to look up, which has the double effect of making me feel small against the white vastness above me but a part of it as well. I have always loved old Catholic churches and cathedrals for their spaciousness, for their high vaulted ceilings and great arches and endlessly deep chancels--the newer ones being too modern with their sharp angles and low ceilings and minimalist, postmodern statues of Christ--because they encourage me to look up and so promote the belief that heaven is far larger and more accommodating than even the most liberal Christian can imagine, and because they echo the voices of the past as numerous as Whitman’s multitudes. If the intention of the architect of St. Francis was to represent the experience of passing from life through death to heaven, the journey from the colors and shapes of this world to the blazing white of the next, from the muted tones (the reddish-brown of the carpet, the dark brown of the pews) of the earth to the purity of the sky, then he has not disappointed.
I walk down the center aisle to the steps leading to the chancel. The architecture of every Catholic Church is the sum of its bricks and mortar, of the history written and painted on its walls, and of the carefully laid out geography of worship. Decades ago, when a communion rail separated the chancel from the nave, and the priest distributed the communion wafer directly to the communicant’s tongue, I would stand beside him, robed in a white surplice, and hold the brass paten to catch any wayward hosts that might otherwise fall to the floor. In those days he said the Mass in Latin at the sanctuary altar, his back to the congregation. In the wake of Vatican II the communion rails are mostly gone, and the priest conducts Mass in the vernacular at an altar located near the front of the chancel, facing the congregation. The only vestige of the old medieval geography that remains, besides the sanctuary, are the four or five steps that elevate the chancel, whose care is seen to by the rector, above the nave, the responsibility of the parish laity.
The Shrine of St. Francis reflects these changes, of course. No communion rail, and the main altar, draped in white linen and stationed forward of the sanctuary, is reached by five steps from the nave. The sanctuary altar sits under a ribbed dome, each rib projecting upward to a point from the top of an arch. Within the five arches, framed by columns, are murals, the center one of which shows Francis, who bore the stigmata, at the foot of Christ on the Cross. It is, of course, an imaginative representation of Francis’ devotion, but I notice that Christ’s arm is freed from the crossbeam and draped over Francis’ shoulder in a fatherly gesture. Francis has his arms around Christ’s waist, supporting him, which takes the dead weight of Christ’s body off the other hand, still nailed fast to the beam. Other murals depict moments in Francis’s life: he receives the stigmata above the side altar dedicated to him; he preaches to the birds at the right hand of the dying Christ; he dies attended by friars and seraphim. At the back of the church, overlooking the east aisle, the Virgin Mary, holding the Christ child, receives the prayers of Francis. But the crowning achievements of this church of achievements are the statues, of which I count ten. There is, of course, St. Francis; also St. Clare, Assisi’s lesser-known saint; St. Ann and her teenage daughter, Mary, the mother of Jesus; Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception; Our Lady of the Perpetual Miracle; St. Joseph and the Child; The Pieta, a heart-rending study in a mother’s grief; St. Rita of Cascia; St. Therese of Lisieux; and the saint whose own sickliness and poverty made him a friend of the sick and the poor, Anthony of Padua. The church was empty when I entered. Now it is filled.
It is almost five, and I have not found the basilica.
I exit the church and turn left on Valejo Street and walk under the long, late afternoon shadows of trees, across the street from a row of police motorcycles parked in front of Café Trieste, an old haunt of the Beat Poets. When I reach the corner at Grant, I am stopped by a voice: “I remember cherry tree summer and my mother’s tattered dress.” In truth, I cannot be certain now that these were his exact words; there was a tree and a mother’s dress. One sentence follows another, a litany of recollections that seem random and private. “The recoilless rifle shot of a word that burns the heart.” “Vessels of blood and a mind searing afar.” There is nonsense and lucidity. His mother again. I have read the beat poets, and I recognize images: nakedness, police cars, vacant buildings, bombs, corpses. He could be reciting bits of their poetry he remembers, and he has the look of a poet, which perhaps reinforces my impression. He wears a tattered brown jacket and gray pants, worn work boots, and his generally unkempt appearance is in keeping with the street. His Ginsberg beard makes it hard to guess his age. He sits on the sidewalk, back against the adobe wall, and I listen to him, and he never acknowledges my existence. Next to him are a small backpack and a paper bag, and spread out before him are pictures—they appear to be photographs, though from where I stand it is hard to tell. There is nothing to indicate that he is selling them, no cup with bills stuffed into it, no sign with prices. He speaks on, weaves stories that have an origin and that I want to believe have a destination. I have been told that he might have come from money and lives off a trust fund, which is parceled out to him in small amounts, and which he promptly gives away. The sun peeks through the trees, and shadows play across his lined face. In it I see pain and years, or simply nothing more than the long wear of life.
Across the street at the café, I buy a sandwich and small bottle of orange juice. He motions for me to set them down next to him without breaking stride. “Do we step on what we can’t see?” I ask him if he has a name, but except for a slight pause in his delivery, as if I’ve stepped on a fellow-actor’s lines, he does not acknowledge me. He remembers a childhood, a playground, a father’s stern warning, hunger. Love? Beauty? I suspect that he’ll forget me as soon as I leave. He appears to have become utterly lost within himself.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Going Ollie Airwalk at the MLA
I have been properly upbraided for neglecting this site, and by a former student. Role reversal! So here begins A Thousand Words (more or less) Every Two Weeks (more or less).
My thanks to fellow scribbler and Facebook companion Tiffany Clemons.
Going Ollie Airwalk at the MLA
In the lobby of the Los Angeles Convention Center, the professors come and go, talking of job searches, book contracts, the fate of theory, salary freezes, and the New Orleans Saints, who are in the process of losing to the Seattle Seahawks, which is adjudged by this observer as an event more portentous than the flipping of the globe: say tenure requirements that include the 40-yard sprint.
The occasion is the annual get together of the Modern Language Association, and it is in competition with more than 2000 high school students attending the annual meeting of the National Black Students Association. They’re talking of Ludacris, T.I., and Nappy Roots, but also Toni Morrison and Kobe Bryant, who will be playing tonight at the Staples Center next door. Another competition is taking place in the plaza between the Centers: skateboarders and BMXers performing can-you-top-this stunts. We conference goers and high schoolers, hundreds of us milling around the entrance, are obstacles to get around. Think of us as moving traffic cones on a driving skills course.
I’m sitting on a stone bench watching them, reading up on digital parasites as the new subject of the post-humanist age, in preparation for a session called “Whither Posthumanism?” I think I’m seeing whither it has gone. The boarders are sixteen at most, crew-cutted and long-haired, all wearing baggie board shorts, T-shirts, and variations on the Nike Encore. The intensity of their concentration belies their apparent indifference to social propriety. I watch one kid do a maneuver I’ll later learn is a Pogo Fingerflip, which involves standing the board up vertically then flipping it lengthwise while the boarder jumps high enough to give the board time to land on its wheels. Another one catches air doing the Helipop (also known as a Backside 360 Nollie), whereby the board does a full 360, over a short flight of steps.
The session on “Whither Posthumanism?”, at the J. W. Marriott, a short walk from the Convention Center, is focused on ability difference. We learn, for example, that posthumanist critique takes aim at “techno-determinism,” which asks whether we are losing our minds to the new digital world. The fate of bodies is of special concern. If we live, as one speaker puts it, in “universal woundedness,” then it is no longer possible to speak of disability as a category, which undermines the whole logic of the categorical imperative by which we judge ability. We are all, in some way, wounded. This leads the designated responder to speculate that posthumanism is what comes after poststructuralism, because the languages we use to reject the disabled are themselves the products of an amputated way of thinking. Woundedness, he says, is built into our ways of dividing up the world, and he wonders if posthumanism will usher in a new linguistic “After People” creative regeneration in what we say about the Other. I wonder too. A few weeks later The Washington Post runs an article (“Video Diaries Reveal Life for Those Committed to St. Elizabeths,” January 28, 2011) which includes a video of the criminally insane reflecting on their lives. It prompts one commenter to ask whether the next article will feature a “griping [sic] documentary” on cockroaches.
The BMXers have a more challenging task. They must negotiate their way among the throng, performing their stunts, without “dabbing” (touching their feet to the ground) or colliding with us. Being a mountain biker, I can appreciate the skill this involves. One of their favorite tricks is to go flying over the steps that lead from the plaza to a walkway that passes the Staples Center; it is crowded with people walking between the Conference Center and the Marriott. One of the bikers told me that they’ll do timed runs around Staples, but I don’t tell him, because he’ll learn about it soon enough, that motorcyclists will do timed races around the beltways in cities like Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio.
I’m about to head inside for my next session, “The Currency of the Category ‘Creative Nonfiction,’” when I notice a group of boarders conferring near the sign that reads, “No Skateboarding, Bicycling, Inline Skating, or Roller Skating.” They break, like football players from a huddle, and one of them, a tall, lanky kid, with hair flipped to one side, wearing a black Nine Inch Nails T and black cargo shorts, skates a few feet away, pivots to face the steps, and stops. His eyes give away exactly what he’s thinking; they undergo a near physical transformation as he gathers his nerve. And then he pushes off, three hard kicks with his right foot toward the steps. At the very brink he executes an Ollie, which raises the front of the board off the ground. He grabs the rail (the side of the board) and, harnessing the laws of physics in a way never taught to him in school, launches himself into the air, like an F-16. The board’s trucks (wheel assemblies) catch the railing, and like Shaun White in the half pipe he slides to the bottom, catches air, grabs the board’s rail, lays back just enough to angle the nose up, and lands on the back wheels. He wobbles a bit—for a split second I think he’s going to flip—but steadies himself, stands up, kicks the back end out, and to the grating scrunch of plastic wheels against concrete comes to a complete stop. As a finishing flourish, he stands the board up with a swift kick, ala Marty McFly, grabs it by the front truck, and walks back to the huddle, grinning.
The currency of the category creative nonfiction is, as one speaker puts it, hard to locate on any literary values metric. Right now it’s wildly popular, like the stock of Silicon Valley startups in the 90s, and it’s taught under that name in colleges across the country. That’s my own metaphor, and I’m troubled by it, because as a practitioner I hope I’m not riding a bubble. I’m more intrigued by another speaker’s observation that CNF differs from fiction, not in the obvious requirement that the essay must be grounded in fact, but in the way that facts are represented. The baseline of CNF is to use the techniques of literary writing to understand something that actually happened. Writers reflect and interpret, and their reflections and interpretations begin at what the speaker calls the “actual.” This is the name she gives to the singular fact that initiates the reflection and interpretation that grow into the essay. Joan Didion has written of how a single photograph of a mob scene in an airport in San Salvador launched her book, Salvador. I found myself reflecting on the names of donors to a restoration of Coit Tower, carved into the steps leading to the top of Telegraph Hill, which led me to write about the architectural wonders of San Francisco.
But the actual, she says, is no more than a “shadowy image.” The body, the whole concatenation of events we experienced, now tucked away in memory, is lost to us. At best we have access to an indistinct outline, piecemeal remembrances; someone said something to us and we think we remember what it was word-for-word, but we probably don’t. So the “creative” in CNF seems to involve more than the mechanics of literary technique; or, perhaps more to the point, the mechanics become the midwife to a creative reconstruction of the story of which the actual is its shadow. I like the idea, because it justifies the creative but doesn’t authorize the fictive to give the story point. We still have to write the truth.
In my notes, beside the words “shadowy image,” I’ve written, “Plato?” She doesn’t mention the Allegory of the Cave, but the connection seems pretty clear, especially when I come downstairs into the lobby of the Marriott and see what’s on the TV monitors. On one, President Obama is speaking from the podium in the White House press room. The sound is turned down, but the caption reads, “Obama addresses nation on shootings in Tucson.” On the other TV, the Jets are wrapping up their victory over the Colts in the NFL playoffs.
I’ve often wondered whether the allegory, which says that we live in a cave and know only the shadows projected on the wall cast by an unattainable light from outside, was Plato’s invention or Socrates’s. It sounds like something Plato, curmudgeonly sequestered in his garret, nursing old wounds, would come up with. Socrates would have been hanging out at the plaza, and might have even tried to do a Nosehook Impossible or an Ollie Airwalk, though where he’d come up with the money for an Anti Hero Nothins Free is beyond me.
So, shadowy images. “What is truth?”, Pilate asked? I know the answer to that: sticking the landing.
As I walk in the dying afternoon toward the 7th Avenue subway stop, a BMXer whizzes past me, expertly dodging and weaving among the pedestrians, like Ali dancing around the ring. He approaches the street corner and at the last second comes to a near full stop, hops down over the curb, darts between two cars, and wheelies back onto the sidewalk. He blends into the crowd, only his bobbing and weaving blue Lakers baseball cap a clue to his whereabouts.
My thanks to fellow scribbler and Facebook companion Tiffany Clemons.
Going Ollie Airwalk at the MLA
In the lobby of the Los Angeles Convention Center, the professors come and go, talking of job searches, book contracts, the fate of theory, salary freezes, and the New Orleans Saints, who are in the process of losing to the Seattle Seahawks, which is adjudged by this observer as an event more portentous than the flipping of the globe: say tenure requirements that include the 40-yard sprint.
The occasion is the annual get together of the Modern Language Association, and it is in competition with more than 2000 high school students attending the annual meeting of the National Black Students Association. They’re talking of Ludacris, T.I., and Nappy Roots, but also Toni Morrison and Kobe Bryant, who will be playing tonight at the Staples Center next door. Another competition is taking place in the plaza between the Centers: skateboarders and BMXers performing can-you-top-this stunts. We conference goers and high schoolers, hundreds of us milling around the entrance, are obstacles to get around. Think of us as moving traffic cones on a driving skills course.
I’m sitting on a stone bench watching them, reading up on digital parasites as the new subject of the post-humanist age, in preparation for a session called “Whither Posthumanism?” I think I’m seeing whither it has gone. The boarders are sixteen at most, crew-cutted and long-haired, all wearing baggie board shorts, T-shirts, and variations on the Nike Encore. The intensity of their concentration belies their apparent indifference to social propriety. I watch one kid do a maneuver I’ll later learn is a Pogo Fingerflip, which involves standing the board up vertically then flipping it lengthwise while the boarder jumps high enough to give the board time to land on its wheels. Another one catches air doing the Helipop (also known as a Backside 360 Nollie), whereby the board does a full 360, over a short flight of steps.
The session on “Whither Posthumanism?”, at the J. W. Marriott, a short walk from the Convention Center, is focused on ability difference. We learn, for example, that posthumanist critique takes aim at “techno-determinism,” which asks whether we are losing our minds to the new digital world. The fate of bodies is of special concern. If we live, as one speaker puts it, in “universal woundedness,” then it is no longer possible to speak of disability as a category, which undermines the whole logic of the categorical imperative by which we judge ability. We are all, in some way, wounded. This leads the designated responder to speculate that posthumanism is what comes after poststructuralism, because the languages we use to reject the disabled are themselves the products of an amputated way of thinking. Woundedness, he says, is built into our ways of dividing up the world, and he wonders if posthumanism will usher in a new linguistic “After People” creative regeneration in what we say about the Other. I wonder too. A few weeks later The Washington Post runs an article (“Video Diaries Reveal Life for Those Committed to St. Elizabeths,” January 28, 2011) which includes a video of the criminally insane reflecting on their lives. It prompts one commenter to ask whether the next article will feature a “griping [sic] documentary” on cockroaches.
The BMXers have a more challenging task. They must negotiate their way among the throng, performing their stunts, without “dabbing” (touching their feet to the ground) or colliding with us. Being a mountain biker, I can appreciate the skill this involves. One of their favorite tricks is to go flying over the steps that lead from the plaza to a walkway that passes the Staples Center; it is crowded with people walking between the Conference Center and the Marriott. One of the bikers told me that they’ll do timed runs around Staples, but I don’t tell him, because he’ll learn about it soon enough, that motorcyclists will do timed races around the beltways in cities like Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio.
I’m about to head inside for my next session, “The Currency of the Category ‘Creative Nonfiction,’” when I notice a group of boarders conferring near the sign that reads, “No Skateboarding, Bicycling, Inline Skating, or Roller Skating.” They break, like football players from a huddle, and one of them, a tall, lanky kid, with hair flipped to one side, wearing a black Nine Inch Nails T and black cargo shorts, skates a few feet away, pivots to face the steps, and stops. His eyes give away exactly what he’s thinking; they undergo a near physical transformation as he gathers his nerve. And then he pushes off, three hard kicks with his right foot toward the steps. At the very brink he executes an Ollie, which raises the front of the board off the ground. He grabs the rail (the side of the board) and, harnessing the laws of physics in a way never taught to him in school, launches himself into the air, like an F-16. The board’s trucks (wheel assemblies) catch the railing, and like Shaun White in the half pipe he slides to the bottom, catches air, grabs the board’s rail, lays back just enough to angle the nose up, and lands on the back wheels. He wobbles a bit—for a split second I think he’s going to flip—but steadies himself, stands up, kicks the back end out, and to the grating scrunch of plastic wheels against concrete comes to a complete stop. As a finishing flourish, he stands the board up with a swift kick, ala Marty McFly, grabs it by the front truck, and walks back to the huddle, grinning.
The currency of the category creative nonfiction is, as one speaker puts it, hard to locate on any literary values metric. Right now it’s wildly popular, like the stock of Silicon Valley startups in the 90s, and it’s taught under that name in colleges across the country. That’s my own metaphor, and I’m troubled by it, because as a practitioner I hope I’m not riding a bubble. I’m more intrigued by another speaker’s observation that CNF differs from fiction, not in the obvious requirement that the essay must be grounded in fact, but in the way that facts are represented. The baseline of CNF is to use the techniques of literary writing to understand something that actually happened. Writers reflect and interpret, and their reflections and interpretations begin at what the speaker calls the “actual.” This is the name she gives to the singular fact that initiates the reflection and interpretation that grow into the essay. Joan Didion has written of how a single photograph of a mob scene in an airport in San Salvador launched her book, Salvador. I found myself reflecting on the names of donors to a restoration of Coit Tower, carved into the steps leading to the top of Telegraph Hill, which led me to write about the architectural wonders of San Francisco.
But the actual, she says, is no more than a “shadowy image.” The body, the whole concatenation of events we experienced, now tucked away in memory, is lost to us. At best we have access to an indistinct outline, piecemeal remembrances; someone said something to us and we think we remember what it was word-for-word, but we probably don’t. So the “creative” in CNF seems to involve more than the mechanics of literary technique; or, perhaps more to the point, the mechanics become the midwife to a creative reconstruction of the story of which the actual is its shadow. I like the idea, because it justifies the creative but doesn’t authorize the fictive to give the story point. We still have to write the truth.
In my notes, beside the words “shadowy image,” I’ve written, “Plato?” She doesn’t mention the Allegory of the Cave, but the connection seems pretty clear, especially when I come downstairs into the lobby of the Marriott and see what’s on the TV monitors. On one, President Obama is speaking from the podium in the White House press room. The sound is turned down, but the caption reads, “Obama addresses nation on shootings in Tucson.” On the other TV, the Jets are wrapping up their victory over the Colts in the NFL playoffs.
I’ve often wondered whether the allegory, which says that we live in a cave and know only the shadows projected on the wall cast by an unattainable light from outside, was Plato’s invention or Socrates’s. It sounds like something Plato, curmudgeonly sequestered in his garret, nursing old wounds, would come up with. Socrates would have been hanging out at the plaza, and might have even tried to do a Nosehook Impossible or an Ollie Airwalk, though where he’d come up with the money for an Anti Hero Nothins Free is beyond me.
So, shadowy images. “What is truth?”, Pilate asked? I know the answer to that: sticking the landing.
As I walk in the dying afternoon toward the 7th Avenue subway stop, a BMXer whizzes past me, expertly dodging and weaving among the pedestrians, like Ali dancing around the ring. He approaches the street corner and at the last second comes to a near full stop, hops down over the curb, darts between two cars, and wheelies back onto the sidewalk. He blends into the crowd, only his bobbing and weaving blue Lakers baseball cap a clue to his whereabouts.
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