"The man with the sky blue eyes invites everyone to keep on working, fabricating, jointly creating: we are all of us dreamers by nature, after all, brothers under the sign of the trowel, destined to be master builders."

Bruno Schulz, "The Republic of Dreams"

On Trying to Make Less Noise

Recently I’ve been experimenting. I imagine that every thought makes a sound. Rehearsed conversation is like rain on a tin roof and self-justification like a squeaky old cassette. Lustful crotch-watching makes a snuffling sound. Resentment, of course, is loud. Fury toward oblivious waddling tourists here in the narrow streets of Florence produces barking.

And I say to myself, “Now, dear guttersnipe, on your way to the library, try to be as quiet as you can.”

I aim to see how gentle and unobtrusive I can be, so that the cobblestones will receive no injury from my feet, so that I may pass unnoticed. I aim to be instantly forgotten. I try to walk so as to make no sound and leave no trace.

I am lucky, of course, that my thoughts do not make sound. Otherwise I would be immediately arrested for lewd lascivious irritating enervating disruptive dangerous conduct.

Actually I would throw myself into the arms of the police. I am all the time longing to do so. Have you seen the police here in Florence? Ohmigod. It is impossible for them to actually do anything because lithe young female tourists are constantly asking them to pose for photos. I am jealous of this. The only way I can get their attention is by getting myself arrested. Yes and I would beg, “Please, officer, don’t use too much force. But a little force is okay! No handcuffs, please. Just hold me.”

A moment, please, whilst I regain my composure.

As I was saying, it’s a good thing my thoughts do not make noise. My mind is that of a drug dealer who smuggles a stolen subwoofer into a stolen ambulance and uses both bass and siren to make his rounds. Yes, my mind is at the same time both Boom Boom and Woo Woo.

There is something very strange about the sirens of ambulances here in Italy: their tune is unmistakably victorious, like the bells that ring as coins pour from the machine in Vegas. These are good Catholic ambulances, firmly of the opinion that the next world is better than this one.

“This is my day!” these ambulances seem to say, as if in hope that the mind will be silenced with death and there won’t be this nonstop deafening cacophonic hubbub, all the time barking and snuffling, muttering and shouting, all day and all night blaring both Boom Boom and Woo Woo.

AT HOME WITH THE PUMPKIN KING

Below are all the existing parts of At Home With the Pumpkin King slightly revised, in more or less the correct order, with two new sections.

FATHER.

(from At Home With The Pumpkin King)

Our mother was the fount of tolerance, our father the test case. Reputedly charming in his youth, or at least good-looking, he’d gone mad, tragically, sometime around the birth of his children. He imagined himself some kind of petty king. His house was a castle, his family only subjects, and he was the lord of his domain, as well as some kind of imperial arbiter on matters of good taste and decorum.

He spoke only in pronouncements, which invariably began “it is obvious that. . .”, “it is needless to say. . .”, “it is unassailable how. . .” and, his favorite, “any idiot would know. . .” My lunatic father was certain he was the only non-idiot left in the world. This was natural, of course, since my father saw himself as privy to all manner of secret information, all of which was about as real as the Loch Ness Monster’s birthday cake, its waterproof blue frosting, its underwater candles.

Since becoming an adult, I have met many people who had fathers similar to mine and suffered. This seems to me both crazy and stupid. Our aunt talked to leprechauns, our father imagined he was in charge. We fed and ignored them both. It did not occur to us to suffer.

The first time your beloved granny imagines you are her English maid, you correct her and feel horrified. After ten times you get used to it. After twenty times you say, “Shall I get you a spot of tea and some scones, mum?”

We did not need to follow his orders, he forgot them. Anyway, it did not matter what we did, he was perpetually aggrieved, the victim of a world of idiots. He made his own unfathomable connections. In the morning he demanded geraniums. In the evening he lamented our deplorable lack of nationalism.

Once my father left the room, there was no pretense that his ravings had any connection whatsoever to reality. We were inconvenienced but not harmed. I firmly recommend this strategy to the American family.

Also, it helped that my father was a pumpkin farmer. Not exactly anesthesiology. Not even as complicated as grapes or strawberries. If he wanted to be the Pumpkin King, let him.

My father decided to have a secret affair. Of course everyone knew. The farm had hired a secretary for pumpkin season, a local aerobics instructor who never seemed at home with herself unless she was clobbering space to Flashdance. Reduced to regular speed she was timid and anxious to please.

How cunningly they plotted. They met for lunch; they hid in the office, in the salesroom, in the pumpkin patch and, once, behind a bin of Blue Hubbard squash. He stayed out late and told Mother he feared for frost.

Our mother was neither hysterical nor stoic. She saw herself not as a woman wronged, but, rather, as a woman propitiously granted free daycare. When he did not come home for lunch, she threw his tomato sandwiches in the trash. We ate food full of the spices he could not digest: ham with hot mustard, curried potato salad, pickled hot peppers.

Taking cues from our mother, my brothers and I remained calm. We did not hate the aerobics instructor. Nonetheless, we matter-of-factly decided, as children will, that she must die. Karl wanted to kill Father as well, but we were concerned that he might yet retain some sentimental value for Mother.

Duncan and Thom wanted to inculcate her spandex with a neurotoxin absorbed through the skin, I favored lethal injection, and Karl, machine gun fire. We were American children, remember. We trusted all these options would be locally available.

In the end murder was blessedly unnecessary. Our father tired of his jumpy lover. He got bored. We read it in his face: to tell the truth, with all due humility, when it came right down to it, to the brass tacks, she just wasn’t good enough for him. Despite her muscular thighs, her green pumpkin buttocks, she was an idiot, like all the idiots who tormented our father, that savant.

And so, his tomato sandwiches reinstated, Father returned to lunch at home. A new lecture series was inaugurated on the necessity of self-restraint. We boys should expect to be visited by temptation. And we oughtn’t feel ashamed--it had happened to him too, when he was a boy. Were we listening? We nodded reverentially to our father, the Pumpkin King. When we felt, uh, you know, overwhelmed by urges, we ought to substitute some wholesome activity, such as swimming, especially in very cold water.

MOTHER.

(from At Home With the Pumpkin King)

My mother was an extremely unusual person. She lived in reality. Lord knows how she ever got a taste for it. Obviously not from my father. Sometimes I worry she must have been lonely, all day in reality, by herself. But then the loneliness was also real, and so she must have liked it.

If anyone tried to commiserate with her about our lunatic father, she would cheerfully announce that soon they would both be dead and therefore why not be nice to him? Spilt milk, fine lines, nocturnal emissions, shattered glass, all gave her a particular satisfaction. Here was reality, behaving as it should.

There was a time, I admit, when I thought her cold*. Other children’s mothers waited afternoons on the doorstep for the bus to arrive. I saw other children scooped up and praised. Even my father, when delusion was going well, would wax rapturous about his four sons, though generally he forgot which of us was good at what.

My mother, on the other hand, did not praise or condemn. She was only interested. Honors in Social Studies, failures in geometry, got much the same reception. She’d nod, ask a few questions and that would be it.

We worried about her. She was awfully isolated, wasn’t she? We thought she must be depressed. My father lectured her on the importance of being involved in the community. He himself was terribly involved, to the despair of many. He built bicycle paths as commanded by God in Heaven, who did not recognize that land could be held by private individuals.

Our mother, he decided, should likewise become involved. She ought to help out at school. All her children agreed. We wanted her to be one of the shiny, enthusiastic mothers of the Parent Teacher Association.

How difficult it must have been to balance sometimes, even for one anchored in reality: on one side, love, and, on the other, sanity. She joined. She attended meeting and field trips, saved popsicle sticks and soup labels.

It wasn’t long before the rumors reached our ears. The other mothers told the other children and they reported to us: our mother was a sociopath. She was incapable of being shocked by budget cuts, enraged by Phys Ed teachers, or delighted by art involving macaroni. She had no passion for bake sales. She cooperated but, still, she was unnerving. It was delicately suggested she stay home.

“I was told I am not a team player,” she explained.

The other mothers looked upon us with sympathy forever after: our mother was a PTA apostate.

But this was nothing, really, compared to the trouble she got in at church. We all thought it would be lovely to have a mother who went to church. We hoped she might learn, as the other church mothers had, to bake Black Forest cupcakes and smile with sweet resignation. She seemed amenable to God and even to the afterlife, though whenever we asked her about it she looked at us as if we’d phrased our questions slightly wrong.

If, in her presence, anyone became pushy about theological or metaphysical matters she would leave to the table and stir whatever was on the stove, remarking, half to herself, “Consciousness has many interesting properties.”

For a number of weeks she dutifully attended Bible Study, the Pastoral Search Committee, and Lady Lamplighters. On Sunday morning we accompanied her proudly to church and paid no notice of anyone but her, in her good but practical denim skirt, her gentle milk white face, and the sterling silver owl she wore everywhere. We did not bother trying to understand the sermon. This was her department: Mother was in charge of God.

I admit I don’t know exactly what happened. There was an extraordinary amount of tumult at church to which Mother was somehow connected. For example, the very nice man who directed the choir, and the very nice man who played organ, suddenly moved in together and gave birth to a beautiful Vietnamese girl whom they named Claire, after our mother.

Other people were not so appreciative. Bible Study took a violent turn. The Lady Lamplighters turned militant, and the church as a whole seemed headed for schism. A big meeting was held in the high school auditorium where it was decided -- if I may summarize -- that the church must either reinvestigate its deeply held beliefs, question its assumptions, revamp its politics, rethink its role in the community, or kindly request that my mother choose some other denomination.

Thereafter my mother stayed home. One of the few times I saw her show irritation was when a visitor pressed her to explain exactly what had occurred.

“All I did,” she insisted “was ask a few very obvious questions.”

* My mother’s predilection for reality was not, alas, inherited by me. I take after my father.

GRANDMOTHER.

(from At Home With the Pumpkin King)

Suicide is a tradition in my family. Of course it is not required. Nonetheless we pretty much abide by it. My father’s mother killed herself on Leap Year Day. (We also possess a doomed fondness for theatrics.) Unfortunately she was caught in the Leap Year Effect, still little understood in 1964, and got persephone’d into the situation she’s in now, three-quarters dead, or nine months of the year. The other three months she spends with us.

March 1st she appears at the door, fresh from death, in her gray cloak smelling like the wet sheep of the afterlife, and her pockets full of candy skulls. My darlings, she says, and one by one picks us up and enfolds us in her cloak so that we will not be so afraid when death comes for us.

Grandmother seems very much to enjoy her time with us. All day she sits in the same corner, humming a song I can never remember when she’s not around.

My father remains formal; he’s never gotten used to having his mother around. The gunshot had seemed so irreparable. Now she only has a small scar on her temple, though she gets headaches sometimes and my mother makes chamomile tea. Apparently suicide is not something you just get over, especially not when it’s your own.

Grandmother doesn’t often speak about death. She spends enough time there as it is. Sometimes she admits it is dreary. Of course it is different for her--she’s still commuting. She’d like to move to a different neighborhood, but first she must finish here.

“There are things that need looking after,” she says and smiles upon her four grandsons: the one who cares only for books, the one who loves dirty pictures, the one who only does right and resents it, and the one who is always drunk, as she was, in her first life.

She admits she is not sure what comes after death. Death is all she’s seen so far. But nonetheless she expects we’ll visit her, not in the dreary suburb of death where she is now, but in the life after. “I intend to race camels,” she said. All of us laughed; she wasn’t kidding.

“You are so lovable,” she says “And at the same time full of poison.” She claps her hands. “Come sit with Granny, my dears. I am the anti-venom.”

To one grandson she says, “Forgive” and, to another “Buckle up!” How stern she looks when she orders me, “Do not remain on the periphery of life!”

There is no question that my drunk brother is her favorite. I remember him as he was then, a boy, his forest full of birds still visible, the forest he would clear-cut and then tar over.

In her chair in the corner, she holds him, rubs his back and coos to him until he begins quietly to vomit. In her white tea cup she catches this and cheerfully she drinks it.

My father leaves the room and all the grandsons cry and only my mother remains at the stove. My sad-eyed grandmother continues calmly to sip her teacup of vomited poison. The scar on her temple, her elderly throat, turn blue as a late summer evening.

She does not allow the cup to be pried from her hand. She says, “I am your granny from death, my dears, and this is what I am here for.”

HOUSEKEEPING.

(from At Home With the Pumpkin King)

Our farmhouse had a number of staircases, between three and five, and twelve rooms, or three times as many, depending on whether you were scouting beds for relatives, renting out, dusting, hunting for Easter eggs or searching for your car keys at the last possible moment.

The critic in the corner -- see him there, he holds his hand over his mouth because his breath is bad -- he says, “Here we are indulging in magical realism.”

Magical realism my ass*. Anyone who has ever tried to clean such a house will know that I am only telling the truth in the simplest way. And, if I am over-sensitive, it is only because this is how my excellent mother met her end -- at least I think she did -- cleaning this impossible house.

It it conceivable there may have been, in my mother’s vast and comprehensive sanity, a small gap marked ‘housekeeping’. She believed even lunch ought to be accompanied by appetizer and dessert; she regarded the accumulation of dust as a personal failure. She never once allowed herself beans from a can, a jar of sauerkraut.

‘She makes everything herself.’ we say, to praise our mother. But this is a sentence which ought to be reserved for goddesses. Instead we shackle mortal women with it. Little wonder they get tired.

Our mother moved endlessly through the house, sweeping, dusting, washing up, trying to reach every corner, trying to finish before it was time to begin again. A reasonable woman, she expected a reasonable house. But the house, please remember, was from my father’s side of the family and thus prone to fits and manias and, most of all, to frequent self-inflation. Just when she was catching up, the house would sprout another corner, another closet, or even an entire bathroom with a claw-foot tub and a toilet with a unique perspective on the Civil War.

When we got up, when we went to bed, Mother was cleaning, on her hands and knees, or up on a ladder, straining to reach into the corner and vanquish the last bit of dust. But, like a flock of pigeons, the dust only left one place to land on another, surrounding her always, an inch from the tip of her feather duster. I believe the dust loved her, in keeping with the habit it had learned when it was skin of ours.

Meanwhile the roof leaked, a little here and a little there; the horsehair beneath the carpets got wet and stank like a stable. Lustful knick-knacks fucked and gave birth. The pineapples she’d stenciled fell off the vine and rotted sweetly in corners. The daisies in her wallpaper all died.
To every setback she responded with more energy, more bleach, more lemon-scented polish. My father’s helpfulness can be predicted. One day he insisted the drawer went: forks, knives and spoons. The next day, as any idiot knows, it’s knives, forks and spoons. Most of the time he was the kind of guy who’d leave around coffee cans full of his urine but suddenly he’d want to know--why aren’t the spices alphabetized?

My mother remained proud throughout her battles with our mad implacable house, but perhaps the family madness touched her then, through the gap marked ‘housekeeping’. Who makes their own sauerkraut? What’s wrong with store-bought bread?

One night we arrived home to find a note on the table: Dinner in freezer. Scrubbing North Wing guest bath. Back later.

In the freezer our meals were neatly labeled. In the pantry were three pies: a pumpkin, a pecan, a cherry with a lattice crust.

I am ashamed to say we ate for nearly a week before Duncan asked, “What part is the North Wing anyway?”

Karl slammed his glass on the table. “Don’t you get it? She’s gone.”

Father said, “Your mother has never had a sense of direction. She doesn’t mean ‘North’, she means ‘South‘.”

First in teams, then one by one, we searched the house but none of us were able to find her. Really it is astonishing, it is astronomical, how many rooms a house has when your mother is gone.

At the base of the attic stairs we found her silver owl necklace, her wedding ring, a rag and a can of extra-strength Comet. We assumed she’d chosen to end her life and deposit her body in one of the trunks in the attic. A number of our ancestors have done this**.

We lived as best we could, our mad father and his four sons. We grieved and persevered and sometimes, without warning, one of us would stumble upon a room that was absolutely perfectly clean.

Duncan said, “It’s a big old house. Maybe we’re just missing her.” He was already drinking then or else he never would have said something so ludicrous.

Still, there were questions none of us were willing to ask as we sat together at the kitchen table, waiting for Father to scrape another omelet out of the pan. Not one of us, for example, ever asked, “If all of us are sitting here, who is moving furniture and slamming doors upstairs?” We did not question. We sat silently and we ate in tears.


* We ought to mount an anti-discrimination campaign, don’t you think, to call to task those for whom the world is flat and mute, who must therefore look enviously upon our world and call it “magical”. Imagine what we could accomplish, if every levitating aunt just once spoke up?

** This also explains why, despite many stated intentions, no one ever gets around to cleaning the attic.

BROTHERS.

(from At Home With the Pumpkin King)

Is it true other people have childhoods and then become different and are called adults? This progression was never observed in my family. Obviously my father was never an adult--unless the word be synonym for madness. By the age of 8, probably sooner, my brothers and I were pretty much as we are now--bookish, drunk, horny, resentful. The first grudge, beer, novel, dirty picture we recognized as if it were the 10,000th. We did not begin; we continued.

WHAT I MEAN.

(from At Home With the Pumpkin King)

Do you know? This thing. Waiting sometimes on the stairs, curled up in the mailbox, or in the eyes of strangers walking toward me. Mostly it’s inside which is, I suppose, why it’s so difficult. A constriction in the throat, an ache in the gut. The usual words: feeling, mood are hopelessly insufficient, even misleading. You might as well call the Emperor mister. Yes, and uranium’s that spunky stuff. This edgy anxiety underlying everything, yes, this anxious ineffable tortoise. For me, that tortoise is a dull gray cloud. At its very worst I can almost see it: it has rusty spots the color of dried blood and coils around my head like barbed wire.

The anxious ineffable tortoise, which is also an evil blood-stained cloud, has two voices. Both speak at once. An urgent whisper: something must be done, time’s running out, something must be done at once. The other voice pleads But what? But what? And never pauses for an answer to the question. Both voice hammer down at once, the panic and the confusion together. (The playing of two songs at once has been known to reduce me to hysteria.) The voices don’t stop, my gut turns to stone, my voice, if it can be heard at all, sounds like a castrato three hills away.

In the morning sometimes I am left alone, but in the afternoon it is almost always there, that demon tortoise, that cloud of panicked confusion. In the evening, well, there are books. There’s beer.

Do you know what I mean? You do, don’t you? Some people say they know, they had it once at 3am. Some people say, “You can get a prescription for that.” Some people say, “Everybody knows that.” Some people switch to another chair. Some people say they don’t know but from the way they clutch their G&T it’s obvious they do.

All four sons have got it, my brothers and I. Our father says it’s genetic. He says he got it from his mother and passed it down. My mother says “it’s always the obvious that nobody notices” and says we ought to get to know it.

We do not. What we have instead are strategies.

THE SAME WORD FOR PENIS AND PROBLEM.

(from At Home With the Pumpkin King)

About my brother Thom it is best to say as little as possible. Almost anything that can be said about Thom is obscene. And why talk about him, when he talks so much about himself? Oh no, my brother Thom is not shy, not even when we wish he would be, when anyone else would be at least discreet, but not our Thom, not even at the dinner table or near surveillance cameras, not on the Sabbath, not even on his dates in court.

No, Thom always has to pipe up and insist that the panicked tortoise does takes off, the anxious cloud evaporates, whenever he’s in the middle of an orgy.

Thom! Not any orgy, of course. It has to be first-rate, inclusive of all orifices, not neglecting the nipples, with him doing everything and everything being done to him, with no fewer than 5 people in all genders and everyone has to be hot or well-hung or there has to be something about them anyway--then, Thom says, that tortoise entirely vanishes.

Such occasions are difficult to arrange. (Forgive me when I tell you things you already know.) There are complications always. Conservative wives come home early. No, no, that’s not lubricant, that’s mousse! Gunshots are fired. Someone shouts Ride ‘em cowboy! and so-and-so, you know, cannot stop giggling. And what’s the chance a number of cocks will perform as required at once? Still, Thom swears it has been known to happen, that perfect orgy, and he swears that he was happy, then.

In between perfect orgies, Thom spends three to five years in chat-rooms, dead bored and buried in self-disgust, exaggerating the size of his prick by two inches at least.

I am sorry if I have said too much. My propriety’s been blasted by living too long with Thom. Our appalling Thom: obscenity for all occasions. I myself am perverse only by association.
Of course I have penis problems of my own. (Somewhere--don’t you think--there’s got to be a culture that uses one same word for penis and for problem.) Unlike Thom, whose penis only garners fines, doctor’s appointments and internet appearances, my penis makes me money. My penis has made me a rich man. Yes, I am living the American Dream.

Not the old American Dream. The new one.

I wanted to be a success. Of course I did. I wanted to strive, to achieve. Then I discovered I’d have to work. Forty hours a week or more. Which seems excessive. And wasteful. Is life so long that we can afford to spend so much time working? Especially those of us who like to read.
My life was over, I thought. No chance for it--I had to work. Then opportunity knocked. I needed a new doorknob, so I went to the local home goods store, which of course was bigger than Greenland on an old map. And I was trying to choose the best doorknob. Of the thirty-nine available doorknobs. I was tired and distracted. What do I know about doorknobs? What in my life has prepared me for choices of this magnitude?

It was then that I was visited by a very American miracle.

A miracle which was the marvelous and improbable conjunction of the stars above and certain events down below: a superstore, a speeding forklift, a selection of doorknobs, a clerk on Ativan, and tired, distracted, near-sighted me.

I went into HomePlus with five dollars. After seven weeks in the hospital I came out with a slight but persistent limp and a penis that does function, no matter how odd it looks, and 1.75 million dollars to support myself in idleness and non-achievement. America! Never mind blindness and amputation: there’s no jury in America that won’t approve a million dollars extra for a penis injury.

You may want to keep this in mind.

As I was saying, we all have our strategies. Let’s continue this discussion and I promise I won’t mention penises again for several pages.

SON OF THE PUMPKIN KING.

(from At Home With the Pumpkin King)

Of the four brothers, only Karl took self-restraint as a serious option. (When the rest of us appeared restrained, we were just storing up.) Karl breathed deeply until the urge to do that thing passed, and calm was restored--or the next mad urge arrived. We heard him in the corner sometimes, breathing like a horse.

When dull anxiety arrived Karl didn’t drink or jack off. He didn’t even read tales of the Arctic. He just stayed there, remaining alert and uncomfortable, like a 12 hour guard at a summer festival in a polyester faux-fur gorilla suit. Incredible. Herculean, even. Naturally he was somewhat irritable. At night he wore teeth guards. His neck was not something he used. Anyone could see he was thinking, “I’m going to sit right here until the urge to do that thing passes.” And it did pass. But mostly it stayed.

* * *

Karl was actually Karl Jr., which is another thing which ought to be illegal. Everyone ought to receive a name of their own to use, to burnish or to soil, as they choose. Whereas Karl got a name our father was already using. Our father who had zero concept of sharing. No wonder they did not get along, those two big men with the same small name.

* * *

Karl’s voice was always kind and always soft, but the way he looked at me always made me feel like I reminded him of something terrible which, try as he might, he just couldn’t forget.

Karl never did anything wrong, as far as I know. He might even have been a saint, if a new variety of saint could be minted, one with zero forgiveness.

I make him sound harsh. He did not mean to be. I suspect he was incapable of forgetting. His mind was like exceptional historical mud, which is found to carry the imprint of a woman fleeing, three-point-two million years ago and even her panic remains visible there, on the in-step. Likewise Karl could not forget the chocolate I refused to share with him but then left to mold, or Duncan’s attempt at hard cider which ended in such a comprehensive and sticky explosion, or Thom’s theft and humiliating exhibition of Karl’s entire soft porn collection, which really was downright virtuous, at least compared to what the rest of us were looking at. All this along with a lifetime’s worth of snide remarks, small incidents, hurts intended or un--, embarrassments, humiliations.

Still, none of these harms compared to the damage done by Karl’s principal madness, his crucial mistake: Father was real to him. The rest of us dismissed Father as mad and paid little notice of his manias and petty rages. Karl, however, was unable to do this: Father must be proven wrong, Father must be confronted, Father must be obeyed. Karl thus charted his days by the ever-shifting map of our father’s madness.

Father thought Karl ought to go to school for computers, that was where the money was. And Karl should improve his posture. And show more respect and more independence. And be more spontaneous!

Then, with the rest of us, Karl would discuss--was Father right or wrong, should he obey or disobey, or would it be better to compromise? But Karl never seemed to understand that Father was a loony as a cuckoo bird.

Needless to say, Karl’s respect and concern made Father drastically worse. He seldom had a good word to say about poor Karl, his troubled son. The rest of us generally spoke to Father as if he were a Black Labrador Retriever. We were kind but firm and when he was causing a problem we put him outside. Thom, especially, was not above swatting Father with a newspaper when he got out of hand and seemed liable to soil the furniture. Father respected this and ceased to criticize us: even our court dates were only evidence of ’high-spiritedness’. But Karl, who gave importance to our father’s every word, Karl was really a problem.

Father decided that Karl was uppity, going to school for computers. What was wrong with working with working on a pumpkin farm? Did he look down on his father’s honest labor, the sweat of his brow? Father thought Karl ought to quit school and come to work on the farm.
And Karl agreed, which caused even our placid Mother to turn pale.

Pumpkin farming is of course an outrageous bit of larceny which makes even Christmas tree plantations seem honorable in comparison. Untold numbers of city people are conned into believing that, because it is a holiday, it is reasonable to pay thirty-five dollars for a squash. The scribes of ancient scriptures would have added it to the list of prohibited occupations had they but known: the whores, the usurers, the arms-dealers, the pumpkin farmers.

Our father of course thought nothing in the world was finer than being a pumpkin farmer. Also, it was quite a low-impact profession. He paid high school boys to hoe; in the Fall he sat behind the money box.

Not that Karl could take it easy, oh no, Karl must make an effort. Suddenly the pumpkin flowers could not be pollinated without Karl’s help and every sprig of ragweed was a reflection of his bad attitude. Soon Karl was spending all day out in the field, twisting the pumpkins on their vines, making sure they ’ripened equally on both sides’. He seemed to believe it was all some rite of passage, after which he would, once and for all, gain Father’s respect.

Karl was so earnest and so easily hurt. We did not know how to tell him that, yes, it was a rite of passage, but only to being a loony cuckoo-bird.

The Blue Hubbard acquired a scaly fungus, the acorn squash grew lopsided. The pumpkins, unaccustomed to so much attention, became self-conscious, started making mistakes.

One brilliant afternoon in the Fall, we heard shouting and found Karl and Father in Field #3, heaving pumpkins at each other, the small sweet ones which are so good for pie. Pumpkin guts were everywhere and the air was full of the smell of freshly cracked pumpkin, which is so shamefully intimate.

Karl and Father declared they could not work together, which was the first sane thing we’d heard out of either one of them for months. Our mother gathered up the shards of busted pumpkin, skinned them, boiled them down. Karl moved out, then back in, then out again, as all of us did, continually, for so many years. Karl arrived for holidays on time, he brought flowers or wine, he never raised his voice, but we could see from how he looked at us that he had not forgotten, and that he did not forgive us, not for anything.

Carrying Capacity (Song)

Other people can hold a two-ton truck full of the world, or at least fill the back of their pick-up full. Many could astound a waitress, balancing six plates full of the world. Even those who are not so graceful can manage a backpack full, a basket. Me, I hold out my cupped hands and already I am overwhelmed, must rush back to my silent room. How it is I can hold so little and love so much?

Holy Books of Guttersnipe Das: Bruno Schulz

Bruno Schulz,
The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories,
Translated by Celina Wieniewska, Penguin reprint, 2008

If I could cancel one murder and save one life from history, I'd save Bruno Schulz, killed by the Nazis in 1942. If I could save one lost book, I'd save Schulz's Messiah. I can't. At least there is this book of treasures, Schulz's collected works. Actually, two books are included here: Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of The Hourglass.


The first, Schulz's masterpiece, is only 100 pages long. I could never choose a favorite book, but this is the one I reread most often. Any attempt by me to descibe its contents is a mockery. Reading it is like peering into a strange, dark painting: a mad father, a bewitching sister, a dark corner where something never before seen grows (almost) to life. This book may only take you a day to read but I promise you it will be a illumined and unforgettable day.


Sanatorium, which I think was written earlier, seems in part a workshop for what Crocodiles would become, but this is appropriate for Schulz: he is the master of describing life half-created: the life of mannequins, mad relatives, stuffed birds.


My only practical advice is: allow yourself to skim the surreal novella "Spring" if you get bogged down in it the first time you try. Just make sure you don't miss the rest of the stories!


There is nothing else like this book--and this one book is all there is. I envy anyone reading it for the first time.

Annual Genitals

As per your request, the instructions:

On January 1st you arrive in a new world with new genitals and a year to figure out what to do with them. (And what not to do, though this is less crucial.) Sometimes just finding your genitals is a hassle. And there it was, on your head, all along. What you mistook for an ear!

Other genitals must be strapped down, especially when driving. Or pruned vigorously.
Then you must find your partner’s genitals, also orifices, which may or may not be like your own, and find artful and absurd ways to jam them together.

Be mindful--a year is all you have. Expect ridiculous contortions. And taboos. Like the time you shook hands at an interview and were immediately arrested. Like having to wear a hat down there.

You may find in yourself a new sympathy for the fumbling of adolescents, for the jealousy of elms. You may be frustrated for months until the day you turn on the vacuum cleaner and are catapulted at once into ecstasy.

Sudden growths, sudden shrinkages. Odd liquids. I’m afraid there will be no further instructions, no helpful charts of the slots, tabs and protuberances. Remember, this is supposed to be fun.

Meanwhile, also, you’ve arrived in an entirely new world. But never mind--you have genitals to discover!

Y2K

One of my good friends (he doesn’t exist) is an expert on Y2K. He knows everything about the disaster which did not happen. He worries about it all the time. It might still happen. Which reminds me of my friends (real this time) who worry they might still seroconvert because of sex they had years ago. This is true 21st century luxury living--to take refuge in the disasters which did not happen and ignore those umpteen and imminent.

History Can Happen To You

Monica says, “You think it’s easy to live with so much history? When they removed the cobblestones of Piazza Signoria they found an entirely new city. For three years they blocked it off while they decided what to do. Finally they covered it up again. Too much trouble.

“But history is something that can happen to a person. My house was being built and I got a call: there was a problem. What now? I said. They’d found an Etruscan kiln beneath my house. Enormous thing. For three months I had men digging in my backyard with tiny spoons. They want to cover my backyard in plexiglass, light it up from beneath and give tours. I’d make a lot of money. Of course the government will never get around to it.

“Still, when I park my bicycle I like to think of what is under there. I’d like to be able to see it. I would have the most wonderful parties, looking down at the ancient times in my backyard.

“On the last day two hundred people came and sat in my back yard. I sat in my upstairs window watching them. Very nice, I thought. But give me back my house.

“Of course they made a book about it, the history I’m living with. Then they came and covered it back up with dirt. Now I get special tax breaks and in return I must plant no trees. Small plants only, nothing with roots.”

Honors

When I struggle with the gorgeous and disgruntled citizens of Firenze, I remind myself: these people are descendants of the people who drove out Dante! It is an honor to be here. I stand absolutely no chance.

Or So We Are Hoping:

“God chooses what human nature discards and human prudence neglects, out of which he works his wonders and reveals himself to all souls who believe that is where they will find him.”

Fr. Jean-Pierre de Caussade
Abandonment to Divine Providence

Finally I Had It All Worked Out

On the first day at the monastery in Taize, Brother Pedro explained the book of Genesis. He told us all about the irony of creation, about God’s irony, about our participation in that irony. Wow, I thought, maybe I can relate to Christianity after all. I have often thought that God must have a wicked sense of irony. Brother Pedro explained that we just needed to find our place in God’s irony. Sitting there on my folding metal chair, I thought I had a whole worldview pretty well worked out.

Then I realized that Brother Pedro was from Madrid and what he was saying was harmony. He was talking all about God’s harmony, of which there are not so many examples, it seems to me, as of God’s irony.

Thank You

For about an hour after talking to you, I am suspended in a very unusual cloud: a cumulonimbus of good choices. In that hour, I run around and try to make as many good choices as I can, tie things down, tape the windows, before the thunderheads move in, before the crazy people come back.

“As for Dante, there is not a single fact of human experience, from the lowly to the sublime, that cannot find a place in his Comedy.” (xxvi, Esolen, Inferno)

Forest Ranger

A man in Cairo calls Tokyo for phone sex.

“Hey, is this Ben? We’re out deep in the forest, Ben.”

Way out in the woods. Miles from anyone.”

“Heavy underbrush, briars, just a narrow path tickling its way through.”

“There’s a stream we hear. And birds.”

“A little breeze but still too hot to wear a shirt.”

And so on from these civilized and stranded boys, who, before even imaginary fucks, must first resume the world, return the green, a stream where they can tug off their pants and swim. A whole forest, restored, before one can snarl,

“I’m the forest ranger and you, mister, have pitched a tent with no permit.”

T-Shirt

Some days I am supposed to be sturdy I find that there is almost nothing to me. Recognizably male but inexcusably flimsy, like the cheap undershirts my father used to wear until they were translucent, which one day tore like an omelet.

Other people, meanwhile, are so much there.

Owls

Have I mentioned someone is here with me? My husband.

Anyone who reads those words must necessarily feel a pang of sympathy for him. Poverino!

Certainly he is first-rate, has chosen me the way my brother used to rescue baby owls and attempt to nurse them back to health in a cardboard box.

A hopeless endeavor, but still admirable, don’t you think?

Loons

It is suspicious, I admit, the pleasure I felt when I broke the news to him that loons do not in fact mate for life. It’s true that the two same loons are often seen together but--DNA testing proves--that loyal bird is not the father. The loons have been sleeping around.

“Don’t think that proves anything,” he says. And so I sit loyally at home tonight, adopting the faithful guise of loons.

Comedy, Translated and Defined

On page 167 of his translation of Inferno, Anthony Esolen gives the following definition: “A comedy is a song written in the humble style wherein the main character begins in grief and trouble and ends in happiness.”

Wonderful, isn’t it? Who wouldn’t wish to be scooped up in such a Commedia?

But this Esolen, though he aims to be helpful, can be both pushy and pious. I had a boyfriend once just like him. This boyfriend used to get me in the car and start playing cassettes of motivational speakers. At certain points, he’d pause the tape and say, “See? See? That’s what you’re doing wrong.”

This is exactly how Esolen uses his commentaries on Dante. Everything Dante says he uses for some heavy-handed moral point he wants to make.

On the other hand, it seems very appropriate to argue over Dante, who was, after all, the world’s most artful picker of fights. Not once in the one hundred cantos of his Commedia does he say “Why can’t we just get along?”

There’s something to be said for an argumentative version. So I read Mandelbaum for beauty, Hollander for the notes, and Esolen for arguments.

Brain Surgery

Last night a man questioned me about the odd bald patches on back of my head. Very gently he asked, “Did you have some sort of operation?”

I told him the truth--what a missed opportunity! Henceforth, I will lie. I will quietly and matter-of-factly admit that I have had Major Invasive Brain Surgery. (How large should I say the tumor was? Enormous, undoubtedly. Biggest they ever saw!)

And, when I have stepped from the room, one person will say to another, “Now I understand completely.” “Me, too,” says the other. “Sure he’s odd, but give him a break. He’s had Major Invasive Brain Surgery!"

Everyone will be relieved. Especially me. At last I make total sense.

Beginning (Standard)

I wanted to write an advice column. But then I thought: there is nothing I do well.

I do dumb things. At dumb things I am quite good. You could even say I am a master. As far as foolishness goes.

And, as perhaps you have already discovered, sometimes foolishness can go very far indeed.

Beginning (Devotional)

Oh Bhagavan, oh beginning-less and endless Paramapujimapa. Many respectful pranams, candles, clouds of smoke, cookies in crinkly packages, piles of oranges, et cetera.

Gentle reader: on this path there is no error into which this devotee dog has not fallen, no ditch of iniquity unvisited, no spot of shine untarnished.

Nevertheless this worthless das, this miserable slave, has, by the abiding grace of the Mother In Charge of the Universe, been suffered to persist!

Therefore, oh earnest seeker, oh venerable sister, oh brother, I will speak as I can of the tangles and the briars on this path, that there might be fewer thorns to pierce your beautiful feet.

Welcome to Firenze

From the outside it looks small, one room, postcards and olive oil, but from the back another room extends, canned goods mostly, frozen fish. From there a corridor, portraits showing hairstyles which may be available and then more rooms: party supplies, keys and shoe repair, erotic novelties, live fish.

What sort of shop is this anyway? What did the sign say? A little courtyard with overgrown roses leads to a very narrow corridor. A man coming the other way mutters, shoves past scowling. Maybe you shouldn’t be here at all.

When the next man comes you make yourself as small as you can. He winks and grins so gorgeously, so lasciviously, you just about lose consciousness.

What kind of place is this anyway? Do you need a ticket, a hard hat, a condom? One room leads inexorably, improbably, to the next. What was it you were looking for? Meanwhile, here is another room --

Monica Hates Giotto

“I hate Giotto,” says Monica, when we are alone in her shop. “You’re not supposed to say that. And I know he changed everything, perspective, et cetera--but I hate him. I had him for nine months in high school. Do you have any idea how hard it is to be an Italian high school student? History! Two thousand five hundred years of history--though of course of modern times nothing is said. Twice a day at least they must tell you that the best times were seven hundred years before you were born. If you are unlucky you get a teacher who wants to do a whole year of Dante. Not just six months--a year. Or Leopardi, the most depressing writer ever. I know you say you like these things--but imagine you are in high school. Imagine it is Spring!

"Your teacher announces, ‘And now we will study Giaccomo Leopardi’ and you think, ‘That is it. I am going to kill him.’

"As for me, I keep my own opinions. Of course I sell whatever calendars but if the customer asks me a question I am like, ‘Giotto, who?’"

# ?

OK, I am 35 and here is Italy and this is -- what, life number five?

Willow: a small true story. Illustration by Akemi Shinohara

Swish

Recently, God spoke to me again.

(You've got to give God credit: she really does her level-best to make things simple for me.)

"Do you work," God said "And don't swallow poison."

To which I replied, "Of course I won't swallow it. But is it okay if I swish it around in my mouth?"

The small demon who commands me to write essays has become increasingly difficult to manage.

Therefore, it is no longer possible to type up what I write each day.

Please stay tuned in the next few weeks for at least four more essays: "Evaporative Acts", "Compassion Runs Amok", "Hunger Looks So Fun, At First" and "How to Live a Life of Vice", as well as revised versions of the essays already here.

Why am I writing all this? The little demon refuses to say why. Thank you for your patience and please stay tuned.

Tokyo gone, the glass doors open to Bangkok and I feel at once the world rush to comfort me--heavy midnight air, bottle of Tiger, bored waiter, Chinese broccoli with preserved pork, boy security--all assurances that life persists, real touch look life, persists, persisted even while I was away in Tokyo.

Holy Books of Guttersnipe Das

Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works

Six months ago, I got into the habit of losing my mind. No day passed without some evidence of madness: depression, compulsion, mania, panic. Nothing helped--least of all the gray city where I live. One morning while reading this book, I felt my mind click back into place and I knew I would be all right. Since then, the Essays have been, for me, a touchstone of sanity. There is something about their boundaryless curiosity, their open admission of human frailty and mess, that pulls me back every time. It's a book of ideas that never forgets about blood, sweat and semen. Every day I sit with it there is some useful treasure. Today I was grateful to be reminded, "It is not victory if it does not end the war."

Or how about: "No quality embraces us purely and universally. If it did not seem crazy to talk to oneself, there is not a day I would not be heard growling at myself, 'Confounded fool!' And yet I do not intend for that to be my definition."

I distrust Montaigne's opinions on women and God--but to be right about mankind and life on Earth is a lot. As heavy as it is, this big book is always in my bag. Spend some time with it--it will help you stay sane.

Family Travel 12, illustration by Akemi Shinohara

Read Family Travel

(please click to the second page and begin with Family Travel / 1)

Willow: a small true story

When he was fourteeen he went skinny-dipping at the farm pond, guarded by an enormous willow tree, whose delicate green branches reached almost to the surface of water which was as warm and dark as coffee.

As warm as the water was on top, his feet kicked up a chill, which rose to nuzzle him under the balls and, though he liked to be naked in the water more than anything, he always kept moving and thrashing for fear a small mouth bass might dart up and nip the tip of his dick off.

Better to be careful. So he swam on his back and admired the tree. The willow, he was convinced, was an extremely important personage. In charge of the farm at least and possibly much of the state of New Hampshire. The willow told him its secret name. And, unlike a ruling man, the willow was generous and never in a hurry.

He believed this the way fourteen year old American boys believe, in a small room in their brains, a small room surrounded by scorn, but in that small room still believing.

Eventually the boy tugged his pants on, grew a beard, and became disappointed. The willow, meanwhile, became increasingly active and involved on the local level, hosting barbecues and church events, presiding over the ceremonies of Eagle Scouts.

The young man worked in cities where he could step outside and not see a single thing that was green or alive and the only thing not covered in cement was the Moon.

The young man was careful: he thought, contemplated, considered, weighed all the options, and over and over again, he chose wrong.

The willow began to officiate at weddings. Meetings were held beneath the tree and it was often on the news, shown with local and state politicians and dignitaries. Sometimes, at home in his gray city, the young man even caught the willow on TV. As the tallest member of the assembled party, the tree stood in back but there was no question that it was the power in charge, with its dark curving trunk and its sensitive leaves.

The young man was cautious and reasonable. He did what he thought he was supposed to do. He did not distinguish himself or destroy himself. He did not become happy.

He was stunned the day a flyer reached him in the mail, showing the willow tree and a certain junior senator who was running for president and might, to everyone’s astonishment, actually win.

The photo, he supposed, was a sort of endorsement, on the force of which this young senator might attain the presidency.

In his gray city the man who was no longer young understood. He’d been careful and still he’d been wrong. He had been a reasonable man: he moved cautiously from one disappointment to the next.

He was wrong about everything, he saw now, except for his most childish, absurd, and ridiculous notions, none of which would ever do him any good, but which had turned out, in some astonishing way, to be absolutely correct.

Owl.

The Prizes for Turning 100


Within the 23 wards of Tokyo, a small prize is offered to residents aged 100. Of course this is not such an uncommon occurrence anymore, and so there is a system, a pre-printed letter and full-color pamphlet mailed to residents aged 99.

Residents aged 99 may choose from the following:
a) a gold vest
b) a gold cushion
c) a vase
d) a statue of an owl

Nanako admitted that her mother didn’t really like any of the choices but, since there wasn’t a box for saying ‘I am 99 and have all the presents I need, thank you’, both mother and daughter considered that a vase was the least of evils.

(To tell the truth, Nanako’s mother did express some curiosity about the owl statue, but acquiesced readily enough when Nanako gently directed her otherwise.)

Unfortunately, Nanako’s mother died shortly thereafter, a few months shy of her 100th birthday. Nanako wondered if she ought to write to the city, but never got around to it.

Nonetheless, she soon received a letter from the municipal offices informing her that the city had learned of her mother’s death (and therefore sent its most heartfelt condolences in this time of grief) and notice that the prize must, regrettably, be cancelled.

Sorry, no vase. The city, the letter admitted, could not afford to send prizes to survivors of residents aged only 99 and a half.

"Gentlemen, as long as one poor cockroach feels the pangs of unrequited love, this world is not a moral world."

--William James, in an aside to his students at Harvard, as quoted by Robert D. Richardson

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.

THE RESCUE OF PRINCESS MASAKO

an optimistic fiction

The Life and Adventures of Randy Mesmer

THE NAKED HOLY MAN OF UDUPI

In Udupi, Krishna’s city, Randy Mesmer discovered a naked holy man ducking around the Tata buses at the station.

Randy pursued at once, tailed the sky-clad renunciant through the crowd, following his big flat feet, his smooth brown bobbing ass as he strode among the middle-class Indian mamas and their dull polyester-clad mates, all of whom carefully avoided looking at him.

How stunning to be naked out in the world. This must be how it feels, Randy thought, to tell the whole truth for the first time in your life.

Randy followed the naked holy man into the vegetable market, where an old woman offered a fistful of long beans, which the holy man took without saying a word.

The naked holy man walked like he knew where he was going—and with good cause. This was not an ash-smeared old man, nor a fearsome Saivite with bloodshot eyes. The holy man was young, his body lean and supple, and Randy had glimpsed his enormous Cadbury chocolate eyes. Better for him to keep moving: folks were bound to come up with creative uses for doe-eyed buck naked holy man.

Such radiant displays of holiness would elsewhere not be permitted, but this was Udupi, Krishna’s city, where the god at the temple cross-dressed every Friday and required all male devotees to be shirtless in the inner sanctuary. This was a city ruled by a god with a rare sense of delight and appreciation.

Still, what a burden beauty must have been to the holy man, like a chronic backache or an aged mother. Like the Tibetan nuns Randy had seen in the Himalayan foothills, who hurried along with their eyes on the ground. Renouncing all vanity and worldliness, these unlucky women shaved their heads, abandoned paint and ornaments, and wound up drastically more beautiful than they’d been before.

Decay is unstoppable, death too, but blooming also intrudes and insists upon itself.

The holy man turned now to look at his pursuer. Randy in his faded ragged clothes, skinny from six months of dysentery and beans, his face shot through with longing. One of those well-fed foreign children who run away to India to live like beggars and careen about in manic Technicolor delusion, chasing now an elephant, now a swami, now a buck-naked holy boy standing among the marigold garlands and the cabbages.

It is said that a pickpocket in a crowd of saints sees only pockets.

Randy, likewise: here was no pious wizened saint’s prick but a generous fleshy welcoming member of the sort a philandering sensualist might pray to be equipped with.

Desire pinned Randy’s feet to the dusty earth; the holy man turned and fled into the crowd of pilgrims.

NYTimes. "In Myanmar, Fear Is A Constant Companion"

"ALL THAT THE HUMAN HEART WANTS IS ITS CHANCE." -- William James

Why Do You Always Write About Such Embarrassing Things?

Obviously I would rather write about cancer, about nice people having affairs, about the Immigrant Experience, or growing up on a farm. I would prefer, of course, to write about writing professors who sleep with insatiable teaching assistants, about the sordid underbelly of creative writing programs in these United States of America.

Unfortunately these subjects are already taken; the quota is full. Everyone wants to be a writer nowadays!

What’s left is humiliation, shame not feigned or artful but smelly and sulking. Bad sex, waking up with the clap, sitting in the public STD clinic waiting to have my urethra swabbed by a nurse who remembers my name—this space available!

Obviously I would rather write about Nice Homosexuals. But you know how it is—the Nice Homosexuals are all taken. What’s left are a few bitter-faced members of the International Sex Army: men with sour hearts and bad breath. On retrovirals. Drunk.

The men who make mistakes occasionally—they were taken long ago. Ditto the men who often make mistakes. What’s left are a few men with unpleasant personalities and unremarkable genitals who make mistakes more or less constantly.

Obviously I would much rather write about cancer. But I do so want to be a writer—and there are so few spaces left available.

And so I devote myself, my heart and living hours, to smallness, humiliation and degradation, to everyone no one else wanted. (I myself cannot claim to like them.)

Bitter-faced, small-dicked, petty-minded queer army: accept me as your humble representative.

Reality

From center stage, with a blue wig and gold eyes, Le Mado surveys her kingdom and announces, “You can be naked. Of course it is against the law to be naked. And the law is completely ignored. . . Like pot. We smoke wherever we want and nobody gives a shit. So, please: be naked.”

Le Mado on a huge screen hangs above the city. A banner on the horizon: gold blue glittery laughing Le Mado. “Did I just say that?” A playful little gasp. “Did I say that out loud?”

“I am allowed to say anything. Because I am not real. I am a drag queen. After the show I will go back into the valise.”

Holy Books of Guttersnipe Das: Robert D. Richardson, biographer

William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism
Robert D. Richardson

(also: Thoreau: A Life of the Mind and Emerson: A Mind on Fire.)

Richardson’s biographies of Thoreau and Emerson are two of the best books I’ve encountered in my life of voracious reading and this is one is just as wondrous. I cannot read any of these books in public, because they all make me want to weep and clutch my chest and shout, "At last! Everything has been revealed!"

I wish I could explain why Richardson’s biographies are different from anyone else’s. It’s not just an artful piling up of delightful and distressing facts. Instead it’s like the doorbell rings and you have a new best friend: William James. There’s something magical and occult about this. It’s not like he went to the research library, it’s like he drew mystic diagrams on the floor.

Richardson writes that one of James’ gifts was “his uncanny ability to pick up redemptive ideas from his reading.” And it is Richardson’s gift too, to fill each page with life-giving ideas. These biographies are as purely inspirational as a strong Lao coffee with sweetened condensed milk. Reading them makes me prone to fits of euphoria.

Richardson points toward the sources of James’ genius— one of the most important of which was James’ own depression and heartbreak. He writes, “James had a remarkable capacity to convert misery and unhappiness into intellectual and emotional openness and growth. It is almost as though trouble was for him a precondition for insight.” How hopeful that is!

Richardson’s compassion for his subject spills out, somehow, to the reader, and makes one feel that one’s own nonsense and bleakness do not render one disqualified for a whole human life. What more can I ask for?

Up front, let us unfashionably admit. . .

Up front, let us unfashionably admit: it’s a scary holy world. Anywhere you put your ear to it, the world goes WHOOP, WHOOP, WHOOP like some freaky kind of space ship.

And all this fucking is, admittedly, just a way of keeping God at bay.

Because it is a very scary holy world. Like a horror movie when the girl’s alone: all she does is open the refrigerator and scream:

oh holy world!

". . . I want death to find me planting my cabbages, but careless of death, and still more of my unfinished garden." -- Montaigne (CW, 72)

Tokyo Garden

A Tokyo garden. No garden at all. Thirty-seven pots. Not to everyone’s taste. Not exactly tasteful. Thirty-seven pots inches from the highway, tripping up passersby. Mixed pots. Sprigs of this growing in that. Succulents in the ivy. Bamboo grass in the tea roses. Impatiens, marigolds, cactuses. A dull jade tree. A prize winning miniature cherry chained to the curb. Hydrangea. Chives. A little, old lady, not sweet and not nice, everyday solemnly trimming and pruning, refusing to toss out what ought to be tossed out.

If it were all terracotta—

But no. Plastic pots, cruddy blue and white, forlorn white hooks. Who in their right mind would harbor a Christmas cactus--eleven months of the year a collapsed gray green. What else? Even as far as a ceramic gnome, maybe, sleeping it off in the dirt.

The Life and Adventures of Randy Mesmer

PLASTIC AND THE AFTERLIFE

Randy Mesmer died expecting the boy-next-door and the rest of the coveted neighbors. Husband, father, son, big brother. Those sins. Their corresponding punishments. Instead muscled arms and hairy asses just protruded here and there beneath a heap of plastic bottles and coffee cups, beer cans, junk cars, and burger wrappers, in a cloud of monoxide and chlorofluorocarbons.

The angels trailed plastic bags from all night pharmacies. One angel—now grounded due to acid rain-- explained that lust had lost rank in the new list of sins against the body.

“The twenty-first century has transgressions all its own,” explained the angel. ”And they have a helluva lot to do with trash.”

Carnal lust, fearsome as the Bengal tiger, is now likewise direly endangered, and hunts forlorn in scabby patches of jungle. “We can’t get them to mate,” moaned the angel. “It’s something in the water.”

Between heavy metals and depleted uranium casings—nostalgia for adultery now sweeps the heavens. “We don’t worry about wet dreams. We worry about hormone disruptors.”

“Retribution was simple when you just killed a man,” said the angel. “Then maybe his grandchildren killed yours. Now that toxins poison 100 generations down--frankly it’s hard to know what to shoot.”

On the Moment to Moment Instability of Beauty and Ugliness

Someone, I’m sure has written about this. I just haven’t come across it yet. It’s too obvious--and also too unsettling. This scandal: that the beautiful are not beautiful, and the ugly are not ugly, consistently.

That the beautiful are sometimes ugly is a disgrace. That the ugly are, without warning, beautiful is heartening.

Why struggle to befriend the beautiful people? By the time you catch up to them they could very well be hideous.

I am disconcerted. I’d prefer if people just stayed in one camp or another. Beautiful or Ugly. Permanently. The world would be easier to understand then, and easier to prepare for.

Some oscillation, some divergence, can be blamed on late nights, on whether one is beloved or forsaken, on the consumption of salmon, on happiness or unhappiness, and of course on beer—but the greater, more significant change remains a mystery. Does it change with the moon? Is it karmic or atmospheric? Should I not wait so long between haircuts?

Because nowhere is this more disruptive than in oneself. Other people can be forgiven. Here comes the day of the family portrait, it’s date night, and you think, I’m doing okay. Of course, I’m nothing special, but I do make it to the gym now and then. I moisturize.

But you look in the mirror that day and find a haggard aged goblin struggling to contain her eating disorder by means of IV drugs. Aghast at your reflection, you ask: where has this weight come from? Why is my skin this color? Have I managed to die without noticing? Yesterday I somehow imagined I was remotely okay. What happened?

That this happens is well-known. I don’t know why more people haven't written about it.

Conversely, a sudden shift from ugliness to beauty appears to be positive. However this shift is likewise calamitous and generally causes more trouble than sudden ugliness.

Imagine then, this situation. This situation which is very familiar to me. You are not attractive. Your features are unfortunate. Your body sags. Your genitals are unspectacular. You’re getting on in years. And you’ve accepted this.

You say to yourself: now it is time to focus on my spiritual life. Now I will learn to meditate and let go. Now I will study the Collected Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Now I will give back to the community.

Enough, you say. Enough nonsense. Enough vanity.

You no longer seek out mirrors but, then--one can’t really avoid them. You glance and there is a nanosecond of pure astonishment.

Hmmm. I’m not half-bad.

A nanosecond—and then you fall at once to plotting. Because if you look this good, then doubtless there are attractive people somewhere who would not object to sleeping with you. And hadn’t you better give them more opportunities to do so?

There is anxiety in this, heavy-duty anxiety, because you are well-aware that, not only will these good looks be gone in twenty years, they may very well have vamoosed by the next time you look in the mirror.

So you rush back to the mirror. Careful now not to turn on the overhead fluorescent. Still okay. Phew.

And the next moment you’re out in the street, flagging down a taxi on your way to (at best) that overpriced cruisy coffee shop or (more likely) that bar where no one wears anything but boots. Just boots. Nothing else.

Beauty and ugliness alternate back and forth. The Collected Essays of Montaigne remain unread.

The Life and Adventures of Randy Mesmer

CARNAL KNOWLEDGE OF MANNEQUINS

At the age of seven Randy Mesmer became renowned--at least within the family—for groping a mannequin at Filene’s.

Curious Randy clamped his avid hands on the stolid gentleman in turtleneck and corduroys and had to be pulled off by his mother, who shouted when she discovered him in this compromised position and, to tell the truth, never looked at her little boy in quite the same way again.

Thereafter, Randy was designated: the third son, the gimp-legged one. Who gropes mannequins. His family guessed, accurately as it turned out, that little Randy was going to be a world of trouble in this arena.

The cause of this commotion--the mannequin’s nether regions—were lackluster and un-compelling. One side, in fact, was much like the other.

Misinformed thus, Randy managed several respectable years. Until age 13, when he groped his first non-mannequin and discovered a situation more complex and appealing than he’d hitherto supposed.

Of all the excesses that came afterward, his family would only sigh and explain, “What do you expect from a boy who gropes a mannequin at Filene’s?”

Indeed.

epigraph

from Montaigne, our ishta-devata, our pal Michel,
the patron saint of “on the other hand –“:

We are all a patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game.

The Life and Adventures of Randy Mesmer

GREEN LUST

Randy Mesmer was alarmed to discover his lust had expanded, past men and past women and—thankfully skipping the animals—was now headed straight for the trees. The feelings once reserved for “rugged uncut Latino hunk” were now equally called forth by the phrases “stand of white birches” or “big old oak.” Horniness had expanded, somehow, so that now he found himself with a hankering for the whole green world.

Of all the ends to which people had warned his rampant lust would lead him, this one had not been mentioned. A fetish for green. Green, which presses in everywhere, which fills every crevice, every neglected patch of dirt. This devouring, insatiable green.

Funny how, it turned out to be true, the Junior High tease: green means you’re horny.

He learned quickly to beware the sexy pictures that came in brown recycled wrappers from Audobon, Orion, and the Sierra Club. He could easily be sent into a binge and find himself at the end of the weekend with an entirely immoderate number of houseplants.

If one must have this feeling, fine, but shouldn’t it be reserved for orchids, for roses, for high-end botanical woo-woo? But, in greenery as in men, he preferred the more common varieties. It was more than a little humiliating. He was not even above geraniums.

And so many things had to be reconsidered, now that the naturalists had turned out to be every bit as alluring as the naturists. Certainly he’d never look the same way at old ladies gone bird-watching, looking so pious, clad all in canvas within the forest glen. Those ladies, he suspected, were probably getting off hard as a sailor on shore leave.

And, not to flatter himself, but he was pretty sure the trees liked him too. Somehow he just knew. And there was this great benefit: the lightning-struck black walnut did not give a damn how old he was, how clumsy or unshaven.

These perversities, of course, were no more acceptable than any of his previous ones. People were appalled—this ecology goes too far!—when they found him at the party in the corner, in flagrante delicto with a potted palm.

MONTREAL MUNICIPAL SEX LAW: Explanation for Visitors

Visitors to Montreal, bewildered by the vision of so many perfect men, may be overwhelmed by feelings of personal inadequacy. To be just ordinary, just average, may seem a cause for shame. Fortunately this is needless. For it is with this heartache in mind—and the corresponding bitterness, resentment and loss of tourist income—that municipal laws have been enacted which require city residents to have sex every day.

Frequency is dictated according to age and attractiveness. A man of seventy, dapper in his neat white suit and straw hat, is only required to have sex once. Whereas a twenty four year old with washboard abs, puppy eyes and three days growth of beard is required to have sex at least six times. Six times! It is sobering to consider what a strenuous sacrifice the citizens of Montreal have made in order for the city to be as thriving, popular and well-loved as it is today.

The core of this is that, with such tremendous quotas and requirements, even the plainest looking tourist is bound to get swept in occasionally.

Therefore, do not be surprised if you find yourself being offered sex by someone more beautiful than you would be eligible for in any other city on Earth. Do not be bashful or apologetic. That ridiculously gorgeous man is simply attempting to follow municipal law. As a responsible visitor, you should also respect the law.

It is common that residents find themselves, at nearly midnight, still short of their quota. They may call on you to help. You should do so, if humanly possible.

Residents who fail to meet their quota are fined. Habitual offenders must attend classes where they are made to watch porno and consume oysters.

The recent strength of the Canadian dollar—and the corresponding drop in tourism—has meant residents must look even further a field in order to discharge their duty. Tourists may very well be overwhelmed by appeals for help.

Some predictable questions and doubts:

Unlike the laws against public nudity and marijuana smoking, these laws are actually enforced. Violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, etc.

Married couples who wish to remain monogamous may be granted a waiver for religious reasons. It must be admitted that these people are generally looked down upon and may face discrimination in the workplace.

Why are tourists so popular? After all, residents could fulfill their quota by having sex with each other—and leave the rest of the world bereft of inspiration. The answer is simple. When calculating one’s quota, tourists are worth 33.33% more. Fucking tourists is more efficient. Also, residents who welcome visitors receive coupons from the Chamber of Commerce redeemable for exotic underpants, Belle Guelle pilsner and marijuana, all of which are very expensive and highly prized in this area.

Many visitors, entranced by the city’s warm welcome, wish to remain in Montreal for the rest of their lives. Prospective residents must ask themselves if they are up to the demands of the city’s hustle and bustle. Are you willing to have sex every day?

Other visitors may be disgusted—or simply exhausted. They may choose a city where sex is frowned-upon or banned outright. It is unnecessary to name such places. They are legion.

Inconvenienced

Frida Kahlo did not accept her crippled leg and kept it hidden beneath her flowery exotic skirts. “Every year I hate it more,” she said, matter-of-fact and without complaint. I love her for that.

In public I keep peace with my withered leg, its mangled hoof. To inquiries I’ve learned to say, “It’s a birth defect,” in the sunniest possible tone, as if I’d just spotted, in the distance, a bluebird or a cardinal.

Dutifully I strap the foot into its plastic brace, like an aged relative who merits attention even though he can do almost nothing. When I’m alone it’s different—I throw a blanket over it.

Still, it is shameful to be bothered with it, here on the beach at Sihanoukville, where the mine victims crawl, tourist to tourist, across the beach and the rule seems to be that you can't be a beggar unless you’re missing at least two limbs.

I had a lover once who was paraplegic. A Vietnam vet paralyzed below (not at) the waist. He always insisted he was not crippled. Not disabled either, or handicapped. “I am only inconvenienced,” he insisted. “Some of my friends are quads. That’s crippled.”

His arms were extraordinarily strong, especially at night, when, returned in dreams to Vietnam, he grappled in combat and, howling in his sleep, hurled me from the bed.