Commute (16)

We can calculate and trace and map the melting of the polar caps, the decimation of the forests, the extinction of species. There is not yet a way to quantify the gouging-out of our spirits, or the cementing-over of our eyes.

Commute (15)

At 30 a woman is Christmas Cake: too late, too late!

So the students at the women's university tell me they will marry at 28. And when they become pregnant they will stop working. That’s the system.

They also say: Men are more logical than women. Men are more powerful than women. Women need men to take care of them.

Commute (14)

Recently I read a book about hikkikomori, the estimated one million Japanese who shut themselves into their rooms and do not come out for years.

The book describes not one but two men who were restored to life by going to Thailand and discovering that the buses there do not leave on time.

Commute (13)

No bird comes to this world casually anymore. Not on a lark. Just by looking at them you can tell: these birds are determined. Their acts of color and attention postpone the collapse of the office buildings.

Commute (12)

I see a woman sitting from girlhood to old age holding a jagged chunk of concrete. By the time her hair has gone gray the concrete is still concrete and at the same time it is entirely changed. She has discovered properties in concrete no one knew, or else she has imbued those properties. Sometimes it can be said to weep. If you watch closely you can see it dreaming, shuddering in its sleep.

downstairs from love and time.

Upstairs are two men with opposite attitudes toward time. You’re not conservative, are you? Actually they are sleeping together. They’re a couple. I know. Go figure.

I hope you’ll still consider living here. Even as we hear them upstairs fighting now: one with a bb gun, the other with a metal paint can: ping, ping!

Do you notice you always lie to yourself in the future tense? says one.

And the other says, Do you notice you always lie about sex?

You talk instead of act: I’m going to exercise, I’m going back to church, I’m going to make love to you every night, I’m going to change my life!

I have been BUSY everysinglesecond and I will get around to all those things.

Assuming you live as long as Darwin’s tortoise who by the way recently died as will you.

And what do you accomplish, actually, by being all the time uptight? This is a religious experience? It looks like a panic attack!

Indeed the uptight man (let’s call him Mister Now) is tremendously unpleasant. He is so obsessed by the passing moment, by the brevity of life, that he is entirely incapable of thinking straight. His house is always on fire. Which is poignant for about two seconds and afterwards really annoying.

The Tomorrow-Tomorrow guy (let’s call him Mr. Later) is only wasting his own life whereas Mr. Precious-Unrepeatable-Never-Come-Again-Here-It-Goes-Moment annoys the hell out of everyone.

Everyone, that is, except Mr. Infinite-Time-to-Waste, whose soul of inertia keeps him packed in existential blubber so thick that, even if you pierced him with, say, the inevitability of death, within thirty seconds housekeeping has already shown up with a can of paint. He’s been white and comfortable this long—who’s to say he can’t surf it right to the end?

Mr. Later would have been entirely all right, in fact, if only he hadn’t met Mr. Now. He would have gone on living here, peaceful as a cauliflower, until someone came along and lopped his head off.

Oh lucky man, who comes equipped with his own spiritual morphine drip! Every six minutes Mr. Later pushes the button and the optimism shoots right into his veins. Indeed, how else could he endure living with Mr. Infinite Panic of the Now, who must always remind you that this may be the last coffee you’ll ever drink, your last sunrise, your last irritating moment with Mr. NowNowNow.

You understand why we have a hard time finding renters to live downstairs from these two. One all the time singing “Summertime” and the other poking you in the eye. Have I mentioned that heat and air-conditioning ARE included?

And--let me warn you now—now and then they actually get through to each other and then, god forbid—

they switch.

Life is short! says Mr. Later. Run away with me tonight!

And lose my job? asks Mr. Now.

Live for the moment! shouts Mr. Later

And Mr. Now says, But I’m comfortable here.

It’s no wonder the neighbors have all disembarked and this space is available cheap—no deposit. All we ask is that you sweep out front—and serve referee for Mr. Now and Mr. Later. The location is wonderful. The neighborhood is (otherwise) first-rate. A steal at this price, a great opportunity for anyone willing to live downstairs from procrastination and sheer panic.

The Life and Adventures of Randy Mesmer

RANDY MESMER'S PUNK BAND MIND

Randy Mesmer found the way forward was clear, the instruction simple: just don't believe your mind at all. Pay no heed.

A straight-forward and impossible situation.

As if he were, for example, an impoverished graduate student struggling to complete his dissertation (William James, cosmic consciousness) while living in a small broken-down van with, hello, a punk band.

A full-blown punk band, complete with electric guitars, drum set, groupies, heroin, and all members stumbling about improvising, drunk at 7am wearing nothing but t-shirts (Christ could you at least put on some underpants!), checking to see if the microphone worked--testing, testing, bigger than Jesus, fuck yeah!--and all he had to do was ignore them, put his two million 3-by-5 cards in order and quietly finish his dissertation.

Of course the punk band wasn't real--YEAH, try telling that to them!

The Life and Adventures of Randy Mesmer

BACHELORS IN PERSONAL INSANITY

Randy’s family was forbearing, resigned, or too drunk to notice. Certainly they were not shocked. Addiction was the family talent. Between the lot of them, they’d managed to work up a dazzling variety of addictions. Gin and tonics, far-right politics, fishing, beer. Oxycontin, dieting, crosswords, tomato sandwiches made- just- so.

Together they suffered depression, mania, insomnia, nightmares, lethargy, panic attacks. They were either too shy to speak or couldn’t shut up. Everything Was Traumatic. Nonetheless they managed both to work and to marry, which only goes to show that some people’s lives aren’t complicated enough already.

Everyone was functional, at least intermittently, excepting of course, dear Aunt Lucy, hospitalized for life up in Laconia. Schizophrenia—though she didn’t really seem that crazy, did she? Well, sometimes. She did what the rest of the family did—she just took it a little bit further. Like they’d all gotten their B.A. in Personal Insanity, but Aunt Lucy had gone all the way, completed the course, and actually made a career of it.

Commute (11)

When the city crumbles our habits will persist, like drunks, like flaccid old men making the rounds at the baths. Years from now, men will come and carry the husks of the train cars from station to station. And they will make a great point of leaving at exactly 8:27.

Commute (10)

What happens to reality, what happens to the world, when it is left entirely un-watered by attention? The first step appears to be: it turns entirely gray.

Commute (9)

‘Convenient’ is the cousin of ‘automatic’ and requires almost as little attention. This is a terribly convenient city: we live with no attention at all. The most fashionable and coveted possessions, cell phone and iPod, are tools for ignoring one’s surroundings. Why not make a new ad campaign: Anywhere but here!

Commute (8)

In one of the legends of the Holy Grail, Parsifal, a young knight on a quest, wanders into a parched and devastated land where nothing grows. When he arrives at the capital of this wasteland, he finds the townspeople behaving as if everything were normal. They are not wondering, "What horror has befallen us?" or, "What can we do?" Rather, they are dull and mechanical, as if under a spell.

-- Tara Brach

Commute (7)

Why have we created a world we can hardly bear to show up for?

Commute (6)

Excuse me, how do you expect people to get to work? If everybody stopped to talk. . . It’s called efficiency. Hello?

Commute (5)

I am in a hurry too, planning what I have to do, wishing for a coffee or a beer, but now and then, in the middle of my routine, I show up and look around and it occurs to me that I am living in a cemetery. What else could be so perfectly ordered? How could anyone be so obedient, without having been previously cremated?

Commute (4)

From the train I hurry to the convenience store where a line of six cashiers awaits and each time they say the same speech, ask for my point card, and pass me my change on top of my receipt without a glance in my direction. It’s a perfect system: no one’s here.

Commute (3)

On Monday at 8:27 I board the same car through the same door at the same moment I did the Monday before. The strangers are also the same. This took a long time to recognize. I’d assumed strangers were by definition random. But this is no accidental meeting: we occupy the same seats, the same space to the left or the right of the door. Like a chocolate box, if chocolate could look acutely depressed.

Commute (2)

It is a surprise, then, when the train arrives at Shirokane-takanawa, to watch the businessmen lunge across the platform to transfer to the Mita line. The first year I lunged too. It took forever for me to see it didn’t matter if I boarded third or sixth. Still, every time I must talk to myself to keep from shoving and sprinting with the rest of the crowd. Like at a scary movie when the movie starts in. I have to remind myself: this isn’t real.

Commute (1)

Their suits are not actually black. Black is for funerals, for interviews, the very most official functions. The suits are dark gray. Charcoal. The suits are only nominally occupied, like a building left with a guard. The gentlemen will arrive later, behind their eyes, to occupy their suits. This is just the commute. Even when we are so jammed together our feet leave the ground, we are not here. Especially then.

All About H.Hatterr and Other Endangered Books

My life has been enlivened and sustained by books, many of them peculiar and idiosyncratic, printed in small editions by a band of believers living, more likely than not, on instant noodles.

I cannot imagine my life without the books I adore. I am wildly and permanently grateful to them, as I am to the people who hauled me in off the street when I was lost and grief-stricken. Where else could I have learned that I could have my own vision of the world, of language, and not just accept someone else’s hand-me-down?

Thus it is an act of loyalty for me to speak up for the books I love. Many of them seem on the verge of disappearing, bobbing in and out of print.

Thus it was with great delight that I discovered that NYRB classics will re-issue
G.V. Desani’s All About H. Hatterr. This book is near the top of my list of books that must not be allowed to disappear. I am very grateful that other, more powerful, people are concerned about it as well.

The pyrotechnics and word-juggling of Mr. Rushdie come hugely from this book—by Rushdie’s own admission. For me this book encapsulates the crazed gorgeous inventiveness of Indian English. It is an extraordinary book and for years you couldn’t find a copy on-line for less than 100 bucks.

I remember when I found my copy, buried in the back of a bookshop in Varanasi. For years I’d looked for it and suddenly there it was, looking like it had had a wide range of traumatic experiences which it did not wish to discuss but nonetheless intact.

I am known, of course, as a singularly sedate person, a veritable sea of equanimity, but I no doubt would slug anyone who so much as touched my copy of All About H. Hatterr. Thankfully violence is no longer necessary. You can get your own copy.

NYRB classics has performed a number of acts of literary heroism, including publishing Robert Walser, Nirad Chaudhuri, and Tatyana Tolstaya. What would I have done without these books? If you haven’t read Robert Walser, I just don’t understand how you are getting by.

The rescue of this book has made me think of other endangered books. Here are a few:

1) The stories of Lucia Berlin. The work of this American master is on the verge of disappearing. Every time I think of it I want to run into the street screaming.

2) One thousand and one-second stories by Inagaki Taruho, translated by Tricia Vita. One thousand and one seconds is longer than this book was in print. I know half a dozen people who want it and none of us can get it. (If you have a copy, don’t tell me. I will come to your house and steal it.)

3) Halldor Laxness’s books go in and out of print. It’s maddening. Someone needs to come out with a multi-volume Every-Last-Fucking-Scrap Collected Edition. Please.

4) Mahasweta Devi. Does anyone in America read her books? Sheesh!

5) James Broughton’s Ecstasies.

6) Henri Troyat’s biographies. Of course we need Chekhov: A Life so we can learn how to be a magnificent human being, but we also need Gogol so we can know that it is still possible to make something brilliant and beautiful even if you’re screwing up pretty much non-stop.