Zen and the Art of Valve-Control

Too many days in the city, and I am restless, hungry for quiet. My head is filled with "stuff." The greatest temptation of city life, when you are working on a book or your own art work, is to allow "what other people are doing" to fill your head. And numerically speaking, there are just so many "other people" here.

It is the difference between being the subject, or the object, of your own life. Here in the city, information and activity come tumbling over you, whether you like it or not. Someone has the radio on, or the TV on, people are talking talking talking, all the news--gossip especially--fills every space in which you move. You want to walk down the street and pick up a carton of milk, or take the subway to the library or post office, and all of it--in the space of four, five, ten blocks--assaults you. Suddenly, your head is full.

The battle of the city--I am finding, I am recognizing recently--is a battle of valve-control. You are trying to write something, to think something, to make something; your brain must be active, alert, clear, able to move in multiple directions as you work. Once city noise has cluttered the space--if the valve is wide open, information overload has already tumbled in--your mind, your imagination, are boxed in--like alternate side of the street parking days, when people double park and trap you in your space.

If you love city life, you don't experience it as noise or clutter or a trap, but as energy. Wondrous diversity. The world alive and vibrant in one city block, one subway car. Yes. True. But valve-control may be the secret here, too. Or maybe it's more like a Rorschach inkblot test, beauty and chaos moving in and out of relief. There is a zen to this, regardless. It takes work.

Today, it takes a lot of work. Between Mumbai, industry bail outs, and close-out sales on Senate seats... I'm struggling to get out of my parking spot.

On the Other Side of Nov 4

It's been a while.

Gardening and election season took over, for the most part. (And of course various and sundry personal travails.) We ended the summer with about 3 dozen mason jars-full of canned tomatoes, pickled everything (cucumbers, green tomatoes, green beans), some frozen string beans, and homemade chili oil.

The election brought the city-country contrasts to a head. Our country county has typically gone almost 3 to 1 Republican--this is guns and Bibles country. This year of course it was different. Between my house and the county seat, you'd see yard signs like proclamations, house by house. The Obama-Biden supporters staked out their intentions as an act of courage. In the end, the county went 53% to 44% Republican--a tremendous "win" for the Democrats. And, of course, Obama won PA by 10+ points.

I voted absentee in the Bronx and spent three days, including election day, canvassing in PA. Pax put on his Obama-Biden outfit ( a yard sign fitted to his hunting vest) and was a hit. One day I went out with three local women--white women in their 50's, who started out as Hillary supporters but eventually got on board with Barack. One of them was defying her very Republican husband. I learned that this was a common pattern. "You never know how they'll vote," she said, meaning, wives go with their husbands publicly, but once they're in that voting booth...

It was eye-opening, and a privilege, really, to talk to people face to face about their choices and opinions. People were definitely engaged and paying attention (sometimes too much attention--disinformation definitely seeped in); and I appreciated more than I ever have the distances--cultural, social, political--that many people in this country had to cross in order to ultimately embrace Barack as their candidate.

Anyhoo. Here we are.

Snow flurries this morning in the city. Forgot to drain the pipes in the country. Hoping, hoping I won't go back to a pipe-bursting disaster. Winter is here.

Back From Vacation, Discombobulated

Just back from the Pacific Northwest, a family trip. J.'s family, that is. Part of the time spent in the city, part of it on a small island. We all (the fam) fantasized about jointly buying island land and building a family "compound" - artist colony, healing retreat center (accupuncture, Easter medicine, etc), marijuana farm (I know, how groovy), organic gardens, the whole ridiculous healthy-hippie-yuppie shabang. There was a simple and wonderful wood-burning-stove-heated sauna and hot tub at the rustic resort where we stayed, which also got our wheels turning.

Straight from the airport to the kennel (well, just about) to pick up the pup, who didn't seem thrilled about his stay. You can just tell. More of a people dog than a dog dog, I guess. That's my doing, I know. They're looking for extra help, business is booming. Hmm... Krista says it's mostly clean-up work, dirty stuff.

The sun garden plants seem to be thriving, the shade garden plants are spindly and sad. The greens are edible, that's what's important I guess. G. and F. the pup (formerly Brownie) came out for a few days, was fun to share the beauty of the place with city friends; hopefully we can do more of that. F. seemed a little confused, like "Where are all the cars?"

On the drive back, a tiny little faun galloped in front of us in the middle of the highway. I breaked hard and prayed; miraculously, I didn't hit it and no one hit me. But then I braced myself to witness the little gal's violent end - this was a six-lane highway, people driving 65-70 mph. Again, miraculously, she weaved her way across, lightning fast and weightless, and galloped into the trees. I'll never forget seeing that.

Man From Plains

In fact, the name of the tiny rural place in Georgia where Jimmy Carter grew up, where his family farmed, was Archery. The town - it wasn't even quite a town - no longer exists. Jimmy was born in Plains, and he and Rosslyn returned there after his presidential term and still live there.

Just watched the Jonathan Demme bio-documentary on Carter. It's a good one, I recommend. Demme is a fan, of the man and the President, which comes through. Talk about a country boy making his way to the big city; and yet never losing the country in him. Carter is nothing if not a man of place and land, which of course explains his tireless and unapologetic compassion (which has gotten him into trouble) for the Palestinian cause.

It occurs to me that, in this modern world, either you are a person of place, or you aren't. The dividing line between those two ways of existing on the planet is stark. We city people are nomadic, our fidelity is to things abstract. Seems to me Carter's relationship to place and land might be the most defining and driving force of his character, and thus his leadership and legacy.

I'm reading one of his memoirs now and looking forward to Peter Bourne's biography.

Dorothy, Getting Her Bearings

Back in the Bronx, the fire escape lettuces have "bolted," meaning they got too hot too fast and flowered; they're past eating now. Phooey. How did that happen? I go away for a week, and all hell breaks loose... Living things (sigh) do need constant attention.

Where am I? Not in Kansas anymore. The pup and I went for a short run, partway across the Triboro and down to Randall's Island. Our normal park route is blocked off, the whole area dug up. We're told it's being developed into a giant, privately-owned tennis center. We like tennis, but...no more community baseball, no more public access. There goes the neighborhood.

We've been exploring other areas of the Bronx, looking at real estate. In particular, areas near large parks. Pickings are slim. As we venture north, it starts to feel like another planet - 50, 60, 70 minutes by subway to downtown Manhattan. We've been told apartments in the Bronx rarely allow dogs. How odd. I find myself pining for Manhattan, which surprises me. It's a momentary lapse, irrational. Longing for something that feels like "home" or vaguely "comfortable" - but really, there's no such thing (no place called home, my own Dorothy-esque chant), not in the form of real estate anyway.

Waste Not, Want Not

Energy and food crises are finally turning attention toward waste (see Sunday NY Times article on food waste). It takes talent, I’ve realized, to be a good steward of resources, to be creative and smart about recycling and repurposing so that nothing goes to waste. And vigilance, too. We Americans, as a whole, seem to be lacking this talent, mostly because we’ve not been forced to develop it. Once we are forced to, though, it will hopefully become habit.

I’m working on it. Food waste makes me crazy, so I’m paying more attention to quantities – what we buy, what we cook, what we consume, what goes straight to the freezer. Your freezer is your best friend when it comes to food conservation. In the country, we have a compost pile—which also takes talent. Been trying to master the fine art/science of composting, including turning the thing regularly (and banning J. from it, with his manly insistence on throwing hunks of meat and all manner of protein on the pile).

We used to collect kitchen scraps in the city and bring them out with us to the country. But that got sort of icky. In San Francisco, an innovative city-run composting program is getting some attention. How to make it happen in NYC? Garbage disposal is very expensive in NYC, so any financial incentives for people to compost would work, I think. Plus, the city can then sell the compost to small-scale farms and gardeners.

Food

What's happening with food right now is the lynchpin that links city people and country people, all around the world.

As city consumers, we can help set the parameters for what food is grown, and how. Food is something we all consume, our universal connector. Health and a thriving environment are the by-products of how we consume food. The more demand we make for real, healthful food - as opposed to processed, soy-and-corn-syrup based foods - the more of it will be grown. Theoretically.

"Increasingly we can see the wisdom of diversified farming operations, where there are built-in relationships among plants and animals. A dairy farm can provide manure for a neighboring potato farm, for example, which can in turn offer potato scraps as extra feed for the herd...To encourage small, diversified farms is not to make a nostalgic bid to revert to the agrarian ways of our ancestors. It is to look toward the future, leapfrogging past the age of heavy machinery and pollution, to farms that take advantage of the sun's free energy and use the waste of one species as food for another." (Dan Barber, NY Times Op-Ed 5/11/08)

Nature is genius, Nature understands how energy recycles itself symbiotically. Greed, impatience, excessively indulged appetites - these are what threw us off, worldwide. I don't know what's in the mind of farmers, perhaps they felt it was their due to cash in on ethanol as fast as they could; regardless, gigantic subsidized corn-farming is wreaking havoc on both food supply and prices.

City people eat. A lot. Join movements for more small-farm foods, make the consumer demand. Sign petitions to your elected officials when the farm bill comes up, voice against inefficient subsidies which support farming practices that do not benefit health or the environment in the short or long run. Buy real food and cook it. The more diversified farms that can thrive, the more likely you can buy local foods which do not require cross country trucking or international transport (more fuel).

I'm not sure what the right balance is between eating locally and international free trade. If our importing of South American bananas and mangos is helping to keep those countries' economies afloat. The economics of it I find hard to grasp. But at the least, it seems we can buy and eat the foods which grow naturally in our regions from local sources, and learn about the growing practices of the West coast farms from where our oranges come.

It has to get bad enough, I suppose, for the movement towards diversified farms to take a serious turn, and for Americans to change the way we eat and buy food. How bad, I wonder.

What's Growing These Days in the Bronx

On the fire escape, Asian greens are coming up nicely - bok choy, Japanese mustards, gai laan. I'm also sprouting snapdragons for the first time; they're a bit sluggish, but they seem to be reaching for the sun and growing little by little.

Our new super, Z., is well-meaning but apparently not very experienced with plants. He's bought marigolds and something that looks like a mini evergreen for each floor and has set them on the stairwell windowsills with no dishes underneath to catch the water (assuming he will be watering them). Also, the marigolds are mostly sitting in the dark (the stairwells don't catch much light).

I feel sorry for the plants, but not sure how much I can take on to assist; we're still unsure about our future here. An incident involving a chase and a handgun on our block (about 11pm) was recently reported to us by a floor-mate. This neighbor has decided to break his lease as a result--leaving us and one other couple as the only ones remaining from among the original group who moved in when the building was first completed.

Options are slim, though. We're seeking but not finding. And who wants to move. Even with all the hoopla, we kind of like it here. I guess I'll look after the marigold here on floor 3.

Gentrification in the Bx

With the latest incidents here in the Bx - vandalism, theft, etc. - I've been feeling on edge. The situation with our super J. is also a bit shaky; he tends to be drunk a lot, has been letting various characters into the building (the basement has become a kind of "clubhouse" for whomever, and many of us feel uncomfortable when we go down to do our laundry), and doesn't really do his job. But if/once our landlord lets him go, I would not put it past him to become embittered and do who-knows-what. All the locks would have to be changed, etc. And he lives down the block and won't be going anywhere.

Lately when I walk the pup around the 'hood, I feel conspicuous and nervous. More so than before. I am more aware of the men's shelter around the corner. I was told by one of our neighbors in the building that a former sex offender lives two doors down (did you know that you can find out by going to sexoffenders.com? Jeez.). I am waiting for the next incident, the other shoe to drop.

On Saturday we decided to be pro-active, spend some time out in the neighborhood. We walked up to St. Mary's Park, which is a nice hill-top park about 10 blocks north. We've been looking for free public tennis courts and found them there. The gates were locked with a padlock, but the Parks attendant told us that they did that to keep the kids from stealing the nets, and that we could use the courts if we wanted to squeeze through the gap in the gates (so much for "security"). So we did that, and we all (the pup fetched balls for us) got some exercise.

On Sunday, I walked the 15 blocks west to find the nearest NY Times. On the way back, I ran into a woman who was opening up the doors at a new art gallery in Mott Haven. She let me and the pup in, and I learned that she lives on a brownstone block nearby, where there are a number of historic brownstones for sale. She owns two of them - lives in one, rents the other to her daughter. The buildings have been in her family for 80 years, she said, from back when the neighborhood was mostly European immigrants (she's White). She told me about a group of historic-building owners who have been getting together, forming a little community; and that a curator from the Metropolitan Museum just bought one of the brownstones.

Is this good news? She thinks so. I didn't get a sense of racial awareness, though. She seemed to imply that White gentrification is good, no matter what. White = safe. Most of the people who run the gallery are White - Brooklyn and Manhattan refugees, or, like her, old Bronx families returning after a generation away. Hmm...

J. and I are going to check out the brownstones for sale. Just to see what's up. I find it all a little troubling, though.

Rumbles in the Bronx

It's been forever.

Well, I guess it's been a month. I've been thinking about the reality of blogging, and my unsuitability for it. It requires a certain talent for current-ness, for keeping up, for "freshness." Me, I'm all about the old, the outdated, the slow. It takes me a long time to chew on last week's news. It takes me a long time to do just about everything.

But city (keeping up) and country (slow) are still on my mind, still the extreme realities of life. These days, we're thinking about our life in the Bronx, about whether or not/how long we'll stay. It's weird to be a gentrifyer, and difficult in many ways; the double challenge of "should we" (participate in pricing out people who've lived here a long time) and "do we want to" (confront the daily challenges of living in a poor, under-serviced, crime-ridden neighborhood) is where we find ourselves.

The latest: you already know that my car was stolen from the block last summer (at least I got to write off the $400 tow-yard cost on my Schedule A this year as a theft loss). J. has had a number of things stolen from his truck as well. My flower pots have been vandalized, and recently someone (who?? why??) tossed our plastic lawn chairs off the roof. There are currently angry/hysterical warning signs throughout the building posted by one of our neighbors, whose bicycle was stolen from the basement. But the biggie: the other night, someone went around puncturing tires on the block, including all four of mine.

J. and I were out on the street pumping up the tires the next morning, not yet aware that they'd been punctured (the holes were super-tiny), hoping that possibly the vandals just let the air out, for pranks. A guy who works in the neighborhood stopped to chat and asked us what happened. His take was basically this: "Well, you got two ways of looking at it. Since it was a whole bunch of cars, at least you can think, 'It wasn't just me,' and you don't have to feel like you've been targeted or anything, like it's personal. And at least it's just kids playing pranks, you know. Once I had both my mirrors stolen, and when I found out it was a bunch of people lost their mirrors, I felt better. Even though it cost me 500 bucks to replace them. A few years back, one of the tire repair shops was paying kids to slash tires in the neighborhood; that guy's been closed down, though. So consider yourselves lucky, you know. It could always be worse."

Well, seeing as the tires were indeed punctured, we're thinking that old scam may have been revived; and we're not feeling so lucky. How long will my new tires last? Maybe my mirrors are next?

I feel lucky that J. was with me to help pump up the tires and get the car to Maria's Tire Shop. I feel lucky that someone stopped to try and encourage me that I'm lucky. I feel lucky that the car is still running (and that it was recovered by the police last summer). And I feel lucky for my three days in the country after all that, which was good rest & recovery time (it's amazing how porch and sky can heal the soul).

The window boxes are out on the fire escape, I planted bok choy, gai laan, and Japanese mustard seeds. Trying snapdragons for the first time, too. Not sure if I'll put in the time for roof or stoop or backyard plants here; doesn't feel safe.

Chekhov's Humanity... City and Country

Chekhov generally refrained from passing judgment on his characters, playing more the role of objective "witness." Well, sort of. "Man will become better when you show him what he is like," he wrote in one of his notebooks. Often his moral pronouncements are put into the mouths of characters with a deceptive simplicity; as readers, we recognize that the speaker is often both impassioned and hypocritical, sincere and ignorant. And because Chekhov always approached and drew his characters humanely, we can never look at a character and say, "What a hypocrite" or "How ignorant" - because they are too recognizable, too much like ourselves.

Anyway. A couple of stories I recently read with bits of this layered commentary, on city and country life. In Russia, of course, city and country have always been code words for social class - peasants, landed gentry, sophisticated intelligentsia, etc. Many of Chekhov's characters, however, are often in fluid social positions, which allows him to comment on class positions in a more dynamic way.

From "Gooseberries": The narrator is speaking about his brother. Their father was a military man who rose to the rank of officer and came to own a small country estate. As children the two brothers thus lived in the country; after their father's death, all property was lost to creditors, and so they became white-collar professionals.

He was a kind and gentle soul and I loved him, but I never sympathized with his desire to shut himself up for the rest of his life on a little property of his own. It is a common saying that a man needs only six feet of earth. But six feet is what a corpse needs, not a man. It is also asserted that if our educated class is drawn to the land and seeks to settle on farms, that's a good thing. But these farms amount to the same six feet of earth. To retire from the city, from the struggle, from the hubbub, to go off and hide on one's own farm - that's not life, it is selfishness, sloth, it is a kind of monasticism, but monasticism without works. Man needs not six feet of earth, not a farm, but the whole globe, all of Nature, where unhindered he can display all the capacities and peculiarities of his free spirit.

From "On Official Business": The main character here is a magistrate, young and ambitious for a career and lifestyle in Moscow but paying his dues in the provinces.

The fatherland, the real Russia, was Moscow, Petersburg; but these were the provinces, the colonies. When you dream of playing a part, of becoming known, of being, for instance, examining magistrate in important cases or prosecutor in a circuit court, of being a social lion, you inevitably think of Moscow. If you are to live, then it must be in Moscow; here, nothing matters to you; you get reconciled readily to your insignificant role, and only look for one thing in life - to get away, to get away as quickly as possible... and he kept thinking that all about him was not life but scraps of life, fragments, that everything here was accidental, that one could draw no conclusion from it... It occurred to him that since the life about him here in the wilds was unintelligible to him, and since he did not see it, it meant that it was nonexistent.

Both passages express the superiority of city life; and yet both characters are limited in their experiences and understanding. Each bring their prejudices. Chekhov himself summered in the country and eventually settled down on a rural estate; but seemed throughout his life to be dogged by a consciousness of the poor upon whose backs the wealthy and comfortable lived. "As though someone were knocking with a little hammer on his temples," he writes of the young magistrate, who ultimately has nightmares about how the poor "shouldered all that was darkest and most burdensome in life" and how "to wish for oneself a bright and active life among happy, contented people, and constantly to dream of such a life, that meant dreaming of new suicides of men crushed by toil and care..."

As for the man who criticizes his brother for "escaping" to the country, he has similar thoughts as the magistrate after seeing the life of comfort and satiation his brother made for himself (Chekhov even repeats the use of the phrase "a little hammer" in reference to one's conscience), that "obviously the happy man is at ease only because the unhappy ones bear their burdens in silence." But in this story, Chekhov bears "witness" to something perhaps even more implicating: the man's audience, the two other men who listen to him speak of his brother and the revelations he had with regard to happiness and the poor, don't care to hear him speak of it. "...it was tedious to listen to the story of the poor devil of a clerk who ate gooseberries. One felt like talking about elegant people, about women."

Bronx Skies

"We all suffered from the same shortage of vocabulary, as if language itself had fled the Bronx, and curiosity had been bleached out of us. School was of little help. Our teachers had succumbed to the neighborhood’s affliction, a kind of constant, sluggish sleep." From an article in the City section of The NY Times this Sunday, by Jerome Charyn, novelist and Bronx native.

On quiet days when I work at home, I sometimes take a few minutes to sit by the window that looks out onto the street in front of our building. The view is a waterproofing company's warehouse, Bruckner Blvd., the on-ramp to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, billboards billboards billboards... and quite a lot of sky. I can see what kind of traffic day it is; and it always seems that people are driving away from here, as fast as they can.

Sometimes I really have no idea what I'm doing here. Lately I've begun to imagine living somewhere else - a different borough, a smaller city, perhaps even a small town. This morning the pup and I walked under the bridge (a spooky underpass) to the handball courts, where I sometimes take him to toss the tennis ball around; but a shady-looking guy was sitting on the curb there, with no one else in sight, and I didn't feel safe. Ho hum.

This is where I am, for now. Half the time, anyway. When I sit by the window, I think about this: this is where I am. Somehow, I got here. And this is where I am.

It's not much of a pedestrian's neighborhood (shady-looking guys, etc.), so when I'm here, I'm mostly inside. Grocery shopping, miscellaneous errands, these things are accomplished mostly by driving to somewhere else. The other night we stopped in at a Puerto Rican restaurant a few blocks away and flumoxed the two women at the counter with our non-Spanish. I do find delight in seeing the Korean dry cleaners' and the Chinese takeout owners' faces light up when we walk in.

So I learn about my borough in tiny tidbits. It's a huge borough, its history of people groups diverse. But when it comes to writers, the Bronx is very much the un-Brooklyn: writers flock to Brooklyn as the new literary enclave, while they overcome obstacles and flee the Bronx for brighter skies (Delillo, Doctorow, etc. - Mr. Charyn now lives in Manhattan, I believe, and Paris.)

Here's another one, which I ran across I don't remember where. A self-published memoir by James McSherry called A Clean Street's a Happy Street. "A well-crafted and poignant memoir about a chaotic childhood in the Bronx," the review says. The title struck me, because of the garbagey-ness around here. I'll see if I can get my hands on the book.

Pilgrim in Provincetown

Boston or New York embodies our condition in one aspect: We are strangers among millions living in cubes like Anasazi in a world we fashioned. And Provincetown shows, by contrast, that we live on a strand between sea and sky. Here are protoplasmic, peeled people in wind against crystal skies. Our soft tissues are outside, like unearthed and drying worms'. The people in cities are like Mexican jumping beans, like larvae in tequila bottles, soft bits in hard boxes. And so forth. The length to which we as people go to hide our nakedness by blocking sky!

There was a fatal problem. There always is. Provincetown people too, and all people worldwide who could swing it, were also bare tissues living under roofs. An honest way through, all but changing the whole idea, would be a set of interleaved narratives, Boston people and desert villagers. -from The Maytrees, by Annie Dillard

It's been a while. City and country somehow receding as main characters in this day-to-day. But I've just finished The Maytrees, Annie Dillard's new novel (and her last book, she says: "This one just about killed me... I want to change and grow."), and made note of the above for OITB (that's Orchid in the Bronx): Toby Maytree, a Provincetown poet, is thinking about a book-length poem which he will start writing shortly.

Anasazi: "The ancestors of modern Pueblo Indians, about 20 separate tribes living in New Mexico and Arizona. There never was an 'Anasazi' tribe, nor did any group of people call themselves by that name. Anasazi is a descriptive term of Navajo origin. Archaeologists applied the term to villagers who lived and farmed in the Four Corners between the years 1 and 1300 AD." One of many things/words I had to look up throughout the reading of The Maytrees. Along with hoyden, folderol, lagniappe, albedo, howitzer, Algreba, skeg, chert. (Any idea? You are much smarter than I.)

AD's story of love found, lost, found, pondered upon, redefined, undefined is as dense as it is earthy, heady as it is moving. Like everything of hers, it hurt my head to read; she's so damn smart, it actually grinds the brain. But in this one, you can feel her heart fighting for space next to - or at least somewhere near - her mind. As a reader, it's a unique experience - feeling something in your chest swell and tighten as you reach for the dictionary. Bare tissues living under roofs.

And it's definitely a country story. AD has come home to Tinker Creek in a way; this time it's the dunes and the starry skies of Cape Cod. The wind, the sand, the "green sea," "black cordgrass, " "parabolic dunes," "low swale," and "shack gulls" - all constantly in motion, ebbing and flowing like the tide throughout the story. On the one hand, I'm sad AD says she's "done." On the other hand, she's earned it, and I've barely understood everything she's written to date, so it's not like I won't have her work to re-read for many years to come.

V-Day 2008

J. brought me orchids, I brought him roses. Earlier in the day, we had poo-pooed the silly holiday, planned to have no special plans. "Boy, are we suckers," we said, exchanging flora.

A funny pairing, but oh well. I do love flowers.

Transition

Maybe, like they say, P. is just picking up on my emotions and reflecting them back to me. He's not the smartest pup in the litter, but he's definitely a sensitive one. You should see his sad puppy face, hang-down ears, deflated posture, when we load up to head back to the city. He is so bummed.

It's hard to describe/express the extreme-ness of the two places. I am less aware during the cold winter months, because of how much time I spend hunkered down inside. But it occurred to me this morning, when we were on our walk in the 'hood. I took a different route, down towards the water, which is also towards the power and sewage plants. Light industry turns to heavy industry the closer you get to the shore. Closer to our building, there are residents, buildings of modest size (and a tree!). Over there, in industrial land, things become mammoth and scary. Let's just say it's the land of emissions. And in the early morning hours, lots and lots of huge trucks, speeding by, delivering and dumping and hauling. Then there's me and P., trotting along - me scolding him for picking up sidewalk french fries like a psycho-mom.

Three days ago, P. and J. were wading in the river, watching eagles and fly-fishing.

This gal Majora Carter, Hunt's Point native, has been getting a lot of press lately. She founded an org called Sustainable South Bronx. Apparently they are trying to create a greenway - a jogger's and biker's path, along the water, which would come down near us. Boy, that would change everything.

Christmas 2007

I had grander ideas for holiday greenery, but ah well... she'll have to do. Somehow I'm not much for pomp and circumstance this year - not in a bah-humbug way, more in a spare and quiet sort of way.

Happy holidays to you and yours... peace on earth. No joke.

A Tree Grows in the Bronx

Regarding the previous post, I should say that metaphor is metaphor, and life is life. A metaphor is not, strictly speaking, an equation. There are ways in which sitting with a dying friend is very much like and in no way like writing a book. I won't weigh the difficulties of each, it's too much apples and oranges...

J. is on the West Coast for two weeks, sitting with his post-octogenarian father who's just had a heart attack and stroke (recovering slowly, but yes, recovering), and also visiting with an old friend who is in the late stages of liver cancer. Both men are weighing in at less than 130 lbs. J. calls every night, and I sit with him - my friend - as he sits with his father and his friend.

I've stayed in the city, for work reasons and also because of stormy/wintry weather. In lighting out for the country, there are both the challenge of getting there through snow & sleet, and, once there, getting out (have not yet invested in the snow-blower). I am not proud of my damsel-in-distress anxieties, but for now, this is me.

Some news: we have a tree! A lone tree, dormant of course, planted a week ago just outside the building. D. the landlord asked the city for it - part of Mayor Bloomberg's MillionTreesNYC initiative. Go, Mike!

I should say, though, that it took, oh, about a year from the time of the initial request. In an earlier post, I wrote about city time vs. country time, i.e. fast vs. slow, especially when it comes to change. But here in the Bronx, at least, change takes its sweet time. One year for a tree! And literally, it's the only tree on the street. I just made an online request for another one, a few blocks down. This is going to be fun - let's start counting the days until it arrives...

In other good/slow news: there is a stretch of hilly "grass" around the corner, the slope underneath the highway. The "grass" there is 5-feet high, and it's become a thriving garbage dump. The pup and I walk by there every day, twice a day, plug our noses and whince (wait, what am I saying, the pup loves it of course, chicken bones and cat poop galore). For the first time in a year, there is a crew out there today weed-whacking, raking, and cleaning. Huzzah!

The little things, my friends. It's Christmas time, and we who celebrate in the Judeo-Christian tradition await the miraculous arrival of Emmanuel, God with us. This tree - I swear, you have to know this block and this part of the city I suppose to not think I'm a loon - is, feels like, (heck, in child-like wonder I'm claiming it as) something very close to a miracle.

Me in The Lion's Den

A long stretch in the city, and an even longer stretch away from this blog (and draft 3 of my novel as well). I'm not sure what other writers mean - really mean - when they refer to "writer's block," and I'm not sure if that's what I have. I do know that what Annie Dillard said about being master of your work - you are either master or slave - is true. Here is a quote I come back to, over and over:

I do not so much write a book as sit with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

This tender process can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you.

A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the doors to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, 'Simba!'

That fear and dread are a regular part of the writing life is something people don't like to talk about so much. A dying friend, indeed. But it's that sympathy, along with a trance-like drive, pushing forth from deeper levels of consciousness and intellect than what you engage in your regular life - your life of society (urban, suburban, rural) and problem-solving and grocery shopping and bill-paying - it's that concoction of positive (and dare I say mystical) forces that completes the brew. It's a ridiculously impossible balance to maintain, let alone deepen and fortify. And when fear and dread win the day, paralysis ensues.

But enough of that. We get up off the mat. Things are not looking good in draft 3, the disorders seem awfully terminal. Fear and dread. But here is Dillard again, on writing as process, on the work of writing as life:

Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex that it engages all of your intelligence. It is life at its most free.

And a good word from Melanie Rae Thon:

The blank page is a mysterious place where we learn through joy to pay attention.

In a recent interview, artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel was asked which he would choose, painting or filmmaking, if he could only do one. He answered (I paraphrase): "Painting. I paint outside most of the time. I paint alone. Painting is pure freedom."

Ultimately, I am in there with the lion by my own doing. The blank page is the artist's privilege - a glorious, terrible gift.

Campaign Trail - Part One

The political report from the city: we went to see Obama speak at The Apollo in Harlem. A packed house of very enthusiastic supporters; and a pretty mixed crowd (meaning black and white; we were among very few Asians). The production side of things was a bit bizarre - but maybe that's because everything about campaigning and PR is bizarre to me.

You could see and feel the complexity of Obama's positioning in "the black community" (which in itself is a complex and slippery grouping). The first half of the program was heavy on "traditional black community" figures, including the Harlem Gospel Choir (a serious mis-step, I think. The holy-rolling pentecostal evangelism - basically 30 mins of church - was not appreciated by the majority of this audience, black or white or miscellaneous). You could feel how this part of the program - entirely too long - was intended to make a kind of "traditional Harlem" community happy; but it was clear that a much more heterogeneous/ecumenical spirit had filled the room, and so it all felt awkward. It wasn't until after 9pm that things started to really warm up...

...which was when surprise guest Cornel West showed up! As always, West was eloquent and convincing. If you were on the fence before hearing him, you were knocked flat by the time he was done. In particular, he spoke to Obama's character and passion and judgment (West is no dummy, he knows the key words for the next 11 months), his place in history, and the bogus "rhetoric of experience" that's getting tossed around in favor of Hillary. I wish the campaign would bring West on the road everywhere: he's brilliant and inspiring, and he's a terrific showman - he knows how to talk to people and entertain them without dumbing down. I think he knew that he needed to be an antidote to the anti-intellectualism of the Harlem Gospel Choir; and he was.

Just when we thought we'd come to the end of the line - the energy was high, this was surely the moment of Obama's arrival - one more surprise guest took the stage: Chris Rock, who was hilarious as always. His line (speaking to black folk in particular) about "If Obama does win and you weren't down with it, won't you be embarrassed? What was I thinking voting for that white lady?" has gotten lots of media play. It was a good move: West got our blood pumping, Chris Rock deflated the tension and got us relaxed.

Obama himself was predictably impressive. Calm, confident, clear (and very tall). He has a way of conveying intense passion and easy-goingness all at once. When he raises his voice to make a point, he does so with control, and a kind of gravity (an anti-Howard Dean). He also allows humor in to the mix. This is no small feat - in fact, it's no feat at all, I sense it's his real character/personality. Overall, he seemed to me both determined and exhausted - and very serious about this campaign.

The climax of his message (for me), was when he spoke about why he's running. "I never expected to be here," he said, which is another way of saying, "This isn't a long-calculated career move for me," which is another way of saying, "Hillary Clinton is running because she's a politician, and this is what's next for her." This is all campaign lingo, over-simplification to some degree, but I think it's going to be a strong message from the Obama campaign. He's running because of the "fierce urgency of now" (MLK), because he wants to serve/lead and sees a pressing need to serve/lead. "The only way we can win is if we stop worrying primarily about losing." Another jab at Hillary's disingenuous political maneuverings - another way of looking at her supposed "experience," i.e. that her primary strength is in campaigning, obfuscating, deal-making, winning; not leading.

Recoiling & Progress

“I pray that my progress has been more than recoiling with satiation and disgust from one style to another, a series of rebuffs." -Robert Lowell

There's a certain soggy, cold, autumn-turning-winter sort of day in the country which reminds me of rural New England in November. Which is a funny/odd reminder of what drove me to the city in the first place.

I went to boarding school in New England from 9th through 12th grades. My parents had this grand idea - somewhat typical immigrant dream - about their elite-educated children, ivy league and would-be Supreme Court Justices or renowned scholars. I was a morose pre-teen of the suburbs, so they figured it could only do me good to send me off. So off I went. They were strange and lonely years, my introduction to class-and race-consciousness and social alienation on a whole new level. I am grateful for the education, a real love of learning got under my skin during those years; and it is ultimately unbecoming, I realize, to complain about an expensive education. At any rate, when those four years were up, I was more than game for something different - for the big city, for a place where there were many more people in general, and many more people who looked more like me.

So this funny/odd reminder makes me wonder if something else got under my skin during those years, despite my abrupt flight to the city: a certain comfort in solitude, the building up of inner resources in the face of an unwelcoming external world; the beginnings - or perhaps the second bloom (the first being a mostly lonely childhood) - of some breed of vocation for quiet and apartness. It's a simplistic but not wholly untrue paradigm for artistic evolution, I suppose - turning one's basic sense of alienation into a creative state. I learned a preference for quiet over noise, for intimacy over crowds, during those years - as a way of survival.

In my memories, both childhood and boarding school are perpetual autumn. When I conjure up those times, I see and feel only a soggy cold, or a crisp cool; silence or the barely audible rustle of the wind, the crunch of leaves under my feet; gray-ness, muted greens and browns, or rays of light shooting through tops of towering trees in a private forest. I try to recall spring and summer, and I see images, but I see them from without, as if observing another body, another being. For many years during my young adulthood I remember thinking and feeling a kind of animosity toward spring and summer; as if thaw, germination, bloom, brightness, and warmth had nothing whatever to do with me, and I bore them, awaited their passing, like a shrill marching band blasting through. Over the last decade or so, this has slowly begun to change, especially as I've taken up gardening in earnest and learned to love spring and summer on their own terms - for their work of fruitfulness, for their own warm stillness, for the ways in which they open their arms for all manner of living creature to emerge and get busy and propagate (yes, even the BUGS).

In two weeks, it will be one full year, a cycle of seasons, since this city-country journey began (since I closed the deal on the house and spent my first night). Ironically, I will be spending that anniversary weekend with my family in the suburbs. I'm sure it will be an interesting and useful "pause" as I launch into the next four seasons of city-country life, and city-country tales.