October 13, 2012

• Closer

  I am going to write because I don’t know what else to do.

  Today I remembered sitting across from a kid named Gene on the patio of a bar in Italy four years ago.  He was drinking a tall Guiness and explained the high price is because it’s imported.  He said it in a way that let me know he was really proud to have bought it.  For the next half an hour Gene told me all the reasons I should join his fraternity, explaining the dues, the events, the lifelong web of connections.  I sat and listened and had no interest in it whatsoever.  But he kept talking, even though I didn’t seem remotely interested in it.

  I fondly recalled this.  It was a time a person had a totally inaccurate view of me, and I knew it.  It is much worse than what I fear most of the time, which is that we tend to think people more or less have the right idea.  

  What does it take to start believing that the presence of others is a mystical thing?  When would you start to feel it?  Drifting along with them, in a rowboat out at sea?  After twelve hours of silence in a hot air balloon?  As one plays an instrument in the street we have never seen or heard of?

  There are so many things that make us less afraid.  The biggest one is the calendar system.  You, like me, separate your life into a series of days, which stretch into weeks and then years.  According to this system, each of us has an age we can readily tell other people.  We can also ask them how their Monday went, or their Tuesday, or Friday.  But all of those things are imposed on our thoughts.  A day in itself is not a feature of reality; the thing we’re referring to is a scientific accident based on meteoric collisions that happened billions of years ago at our specific location in the solar system.  Go elsewhere, and it disappears.  As do all of the other things we use to define our lives; we have no age, there are no years, it is never any specific time.  All these grids are good for are making you forget that you’re born on a random rock in a world of blackness and you’ll die some time after that.  We are each of us like a host of a party, and when chaos arrived as a guest and said nothing we grew uncomfortable and gave him and his entourage names; the rest of the party then went enjoyably, until we died and found out that it was actually we who were the guests.

  I saw a very old woman limping into a bus stop today, the little glass room with the bench in it.  My immediate thought was ‘There is a hobbling old lady’ – and I immediately connected her with every other hobbling old lady I had ever seen.  It was as though all the hobbling old ladies had something in common.  And then I realized what I had done.  I had connected her with this idea, this commonality she had with others, and had made it so that she could very well be any of the old ladies.  But she wasn’t.  She was her.  The differences she has from the other old ladies are vastly more than you would think from this one similarity they have: that of walking at a slow pace from their senility.  

  ‘There are as many emotions as there are people’ I had thought earlier in the day.  That is what is different about her: she had an emotion, the total one each person feels about their whole life, that only she had.

  But I identified her as ‘hobbling old lady’ in my head because I was uncomfortable with the chaos.

  I sat on the porch last night with Alex and he smoked and we talked about writing.  He said he introduces fantastical elements into his writing to represent chaos in relationships; he didn’t try to do this, he said, it just happened.  He has been in more relationships than I, and all the girls were very different; I suppose it would seem like chaos, each of these people coming out of nowhere with their personalities, and then fading away again. Like a new sun rising each day.  I suppose some of my hesitancy to date is fear of the chaos.  We also talked about the idea of poetic memories, the things you remember because they were beautiful; he randomly checked on his first crush recently and she had defriended him.  And wasn’t it a little bit predictable that he would be hurt, or disappointed by this?  Maybe love is what gets us through the chaos.

  I feel like I want to throw up; melancholy is not beautiful.

  I don’t differentiate between friends and geniuses; some humans are more well-known, but each has the capacity to think and reason: maybe the person across from you has truly made a connection no one else has.

  There are things that you’ve written that are good, and there are things that are good to have written.  There are very few people out there who write things that are good; most of us are just resuscitating our sanity.

  When you say you are ‘divorced’ people have an immediate insight into the stress you’ve had over relationships in your past.  But when your heart has broken because of all the friends that have come and gone, there is no word for that, and no way to force people to see it so directly. 

  The other night it was late and we all should have gone home but instead we went out to a restaurant together.  It was very cold and we J-walked in front of a cop on the way there.  At the restaurant we talked about the most depressing things, and we could barely understand one another, but a person on the other side of the wall from our booth kept randomly clasping the etched glass at the top of the wall with their hand, like an arm that suddenly appears in a horror movie.  We laughed until we cried about it.  I think we will remember that more than anything.

  People who are forward-moving people, people who think the past doesn’t matter, have it easy.  It seems their conclusion is evident: the past isn’t here anymore.  Only we’re here.  Talking.  Right now.  So why get hung up on things that are over, that you couldn’t change if you tried?  But in fact the past is here in subtle ways, in our habits, in things we say like our parents, in emotions we won’t let ourselves feel, in things we’ve learned not to hope in: the past decorates and illuminates and spills over into the present moment.  It is very easy to miss, for the truth is a hard thing to find.

  About a month ago I was out to breakfast with a friend when we found a piece of paper of mine that said ‘It is sometimes good to doubt the worth of all your purposes’.  I often scrawl things on random slips of paper, and I had no recollection of this or what it meant.  But I think I am beginning to remember; I have not been calm in some time.  Living in a city means living a life of worry.  There is a perspective that sees all this stress as silly.  It is just hard to wish it on yourself.  

  But that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther … And one fine morning -

  • 2:38 am
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