Slouching Toward Portland

It is hard to look yourself in the eye and realize you are not reinvented, just recycled. Things I’m doing now, decisions I am making, are more or less the same as those I made 35 or 40 years ago. The difference is I now have psychotropic drugs to rationalize with, to make myself feel bold and smart and in control. Take away the drugs and I would become the same unsure quivering mass I was back then, torturing myself over each and every move. Someone asked me not long ago if I could think of one turning point in my life, one moment in which I made a decision or something happened that altered the direction in which I was going. I answered no, but have since decided the correct answer is yes: September 11, 1975, between 1 and 1:30 p.m., EST.

Now I am starting to recognize the patterns repeating themselves. I am letting my hair grow (where it still grows, that is). I bought an expensive pair of boots because I needed a decent pair of shoes. I paid about the same as I did for my first Frye boots, 35 years ago, actually about $30 less. If I spent the equivalent for a pair of boots today it would be about $800; I spent $114, but expect I will not buy shoes for at least five years, so it’s worth it, justifiable, rationalized.

I am trying hard to think of myself as an artist. I draw a lot, and have completed frameable works in the last six weeks, and destroyed one ambitious landscape in black and white. I tried to fix it, but when a drawing needs fixing that also means it can’t be fixed. It either turns out good, or not. If not, it can’t be fixed, is better off gone, destroyed, which it is, no regrets. You have to allow yourself to make mistakes and not grieve over them if you expect to move forward.

For the last several nights I have gone to sleep about 10 p.m. and awakened between midnight and 2:30 a.m. When I wake up I put on the TV, usually some old movie or the Food Network, set the timer for 45 minutes or an hour and wait while the TV empties my brain, stops my thoughts, and I fall asleep again. I wake up between 7:30 and 8:30 a.m. and start my day. Last night I dreamed about the post office, a ridiculous dream of delivering mail on an unfamiliar route, fucking it up totally. When I woke at 2:30 I watched Alton Brown making fried wontons until I went back to sleep. I woke at 7:30 this morning.

Yesterday I bought two books: “Play It As It Lays” by Joan Didion, a novel, and “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair. As a teenager I had read some of Upton’s work in the summer before I started high school. I was totally alone that summer. I have no memories of doing anything else except reading, often late at night into the dawn, alone in my room. I had a list of about 25 books from the high school, of which I was tasked to read 10 and show up on the first day of school with 10 book reports.

I don’t know what the rest of my family did that summer; I don’t recall that we went anywhere on vacation. I don’t remember seeing my brother, mother, or father. My only memories are of reading, being completely absorbed in books, and only at night, when everyone else was asleep. I would go to the kitchen in the middle of the night, make a sandwich and bring it back to my room with a large glass of milk, and read until the sun came up. I didn’t see anyone, had no friends. Anyone I had been friendly with during the school year was off doing something, had plans, vacations. I did not make friends easily; I was different: a loner.

Not much different than now: recycled, not reinvented, probably regressing but maybe not. You have to have moved forward in order to regress, and I’m not sure I ever did, especially now that I am recognizing all these old familiar patterns repeating.

Joan Didion was a celebrated new author in the 60s that I heard of at the time, but did not read until now, more than 40 years later. “Play It As It Lays” is an astoundingly good book, and I am going through it quickly. I started it last night, continued this morning, I’m about halfway through it. Now I know why she was so celebrated. Her style reminds me somewhat of Cormack McCarthy with punctuation. Terse, smart, engaging. I remember her from the 60s because of a title, “Slouching Toward Bethlehem”, a collection of essays. The title is from a poem by Yeats:

The Second Coming
W.B Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Now I get the ominous meaning, full of dread, so fitting in the 60s when she chose it for a title, but I have always just loved the words, and prefer to leave it at that. At any rate this is why I remember Joan Didion, and why I picked up her novel (not her essays) yesterday. After I finish the novel I will probably go back and get the essays.

I memorize snatches of Shakespeare to impress myself and those who listen in extremely rare conversations in which the opportunity presents itself to either recite or identify those few pieces I have committed to memory.

This is from memory:
“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
Until the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the road to dusty death.
Out, out brief candle; life is but a shadow,
A poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.
It is a tale told by an idiot: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Macbeth

This too:
“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility.
But when the blast of war rings in our ears,
Then imitate the actions of the tiger:
Stiffen the sinew, conjure up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard favoured rage.”

Henry V

I memorized those two passages in high school. A few years later I met a friend who had committed to memory Lewis Carrol’s “Jabberwocky” and would recite it with dramatic flair. I was so impressed that I, too, memorized it, and to this day I can recite it, also with dramatic flair. I did just the other day, on request, after saying I had memorized it. It’s another ploy to look clever and smart. I have no memory of the story of Henry V , only one brief passage.

Now I’m working on Richard III: “Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by this sun of York…”

Life is challenging when you have only yourself for company. I have numerous things I like to do, but sometimes want company too. The phone doesn’t do it for me. I want the visceral experience of seeing another human across from me, talking, drinking, engaged.

Thursday I will have dinner with my old-friend-by-proxy, Debbie Garafolo-Bucci-Berry. I know her through Donna, and she knows me through Donna. We have never been alone together; this will be the first time in the 35 years I have known her that there won’t be anyone else with us. I’m curious and nervous to see how well (or not) we actually know each other, if my mental image of her is what this essentially first impression will be.

At least I’ll go to Portland and have a good meal.