2001-05-22

We dance in a party of hidden eyes: everyone handling cheap plastic cups brimming with beer. Except the dance is still – everyone cloistered among friends and acquaintances. We take off alone and there is no talking, except muttering underneath breath. A walk around the block and we return to the party, to slip in unnoticed. They call us a party plant. You were not aware of my return. You said the conversation grew dry. You said enough talk about work – isn’t there anything else to talk about?

Again, our minds hurdle from spacious consciousness to dream to memory and we can’t really tell where we’re going. We remember the silence of being with somebody who you can be alone with. You walk around in an art museum and you stare at each other and you stare at the paintings, but you do not talk to each other, except for the occasional comment about color and light and form. You go about your business in town together, driving in your mother’s car, and we sit in transparent silence. All we have is a walk through a park and a sit above a creek you used to sit beside. This time in your life seems like the rest of your life, but can you imagine decades of living? I try to imagine living for twenty years and then twenty more years followed by twenty more years. I try to imagine my skin, weathered, my face creased, my stories shaped and spoken.

That’s the thing: that’s what I was struck by. Not only was he a treasure of Americana and a history forgotten, but he had collected so much into his storagebanks and had such a well practiced retrieval system, that the stories he told were spun with such expressiveness and light. He would schpiel. He would start a song and stop in the middle of the song three times to tell an anecdote or a story that reminded him of something in the first verse – and the third time that he interrupted the song, the story he wove lasted almost 10 minutes and when he went back into the song, you had forgotten he ever even sang. What bothered me more than anything was that he was concerned with the same issues, over and over and over, as if he was on storyteller auto-pilot and you just had to wait for him to finish – however, before he would finish, you would, undoubtedly, laugh. As a matter of fact, you would probably laugh several times and shout Amen! or maybe just sit and contemplate the complex layers in the artichoke of his argument. Sometimes, you would dip the same leaf in the butter over and over, replaying the one-liner, and you would laugh every time, as if it was boundless.

But the thing about storytellers is that some storytellers just want to tell stories about themselves. Self indulgent behavior is very common – in fact, I think it may be life’s plague. Conversation in which one gentlemen does all the talking is exasperating. You become bewildered and you shut down, suddenly your countenance grows dim, your eyes sag, you build incredible castles of conversation in your head, and occasionally you listen to what he’s saying. You steal fragments of what is being said, but you the punchline misses you because you missed the story’s crescendo. The food isn’t that great, but it’s okay because you didn’t pay for it. All you had to do was be there and listen to a man babble carelessly about his life and all the things he knows. Sometimes you wonder if they listen to themselves. But other times, you begin to see the connection between you and humanity, and you see that if spewing, spieling, or hogging the discussion is unnattractive in other people, it must, therefore, be unnattractive in you. So you listen to two things: your thoughts and their thoughts. Somewhere in listening to too many things, you are brought to a place of thoughtlessness and the mind grows blank. Your arms fall behind your head and your eyes roll back. And then you can’t remember what you were thinking about any more.

Self indulgent behavior in others may be the most important thing we can give to each other: it helps us see it in ourselves. We wonder if it matters any more that we are self indulgent when so many other people are too. Self indulgent behavior is important because it helps us notice ourselves. For example: eating. We feed ourselves, not just because food tastes good but because we know that we have to put something inside ourselves to stay alive – we can’t just let go of eating – so this requires us to notice what we need. We are taught to listen to ourselves, from the most basic sense, to the more abstract. If we listen to ourselves, we notice our needs and our desires, and we also notice spiderwebs strung into our minds. We pull them off as we walk into them and notice something that triggers a thought or a creative streak. Suddenly, we are off and running with an idea that came out of nowhere. Soon, we want to walk through walls and leap onto tall buildings. We want to listen so hard that we think we can actually do it. we dream the dreams and expect them to build themselves.

A couple of days ago, I saw a man catch a frisbee. His partner kept throwing it high above the ground, and he would catch it using fancy manuvers, for example, trying to catch it with his hands behind his back. He was trying to show off – but his ego got the better of him. And this would lead us to assume that he expected someone was watching him, and that showing off would make him look good. It only exacerbated his wounded ego: he kept dropping the frisbee, for he was thinking about it so much that he couldn’t actually do it. When he returned the frisbee back to his partner, the frisbee stayed just above the brick surface, occasionally skidding before reaching his partner’s hands.

It reminds me of Lispector who says you must write absentmindedly. Don’t think about it – just turn the faucet on and let it drip. Do not edit. Just today, I threw two plastic prescription bottles in the wastebasket. The first bottle was perfectly on target and landed in the trashcan successfully – I didn’t think about it as I threw it. The second bottle landed just short of the trashcan. I realized I was thinking too much about it. I tried to aim it just so. It missed.

So you’re eight years old and you’re sitting in a church pew and the pastor is droning on about something that you can’t remember 20 years later and the only thing you do remember is the the way your body felt as he talked. You remember tensing your muscles and letting them relax and then tensing your muscles again and relaxing them again. And when you let go, you find a peace that is disarming. Suddenly, you are you again, and the song in your head is blaring at full volume.

I don’t know – sometimes those old church hymns speak to me. They speak to me the way antique wooden tables speak to me. There’s all this dust on top of the song, and you can hear the imagination of the writer, and you can hear history. It sounds the way an orange tastes: full and ripe. When the piano creaks just a little bit and the old men at the back of the choir sing just a little bit off key, you know it’s not just a song but a space. It’s a room with lots of people crowded into it, and they’re all looking at you with the same awestruck wonder on your face.

I held a camera in my hands as they showed me through their garden. There were flowers and plants with stems that smelled of aromatic incense. I pulled away and snapped photos. In the cement factory ruins, covered by trees and moss and insects and vines, I snapped photos, always internally thinking more about taking the photo rather than simply being in the ruins. I almost didn’t fully grasp the experience of being in them because I was so detached in my viewing and boxing in of the world. The conversation continued above the din of bird song and trees rubbing, but I don’t remember what was said. Something about the transient nature of the human ego: how these ruined cement walls will not last more than several hundred years, and how archaeologists far in the future will find them and assume they are a giant clock or site of religious worship. Surely, the things that mean anything to me will mean nothing to people beyond me. We pass things on on a personal level, but the most we can do is be for ourselves and give to others when we can.

Sometimes we forget that other people have lives that are very much like our own, with secrets, with stories, with friendships, with thoughts, with opinions – and we forget that they’re living for themselves too.

When I was a child, I would stare at my grandparent’s feet, awestruck. The bunions and callouses and fungal smeared toenails and the twisted bend in their shape: from staring at their embittered feet, I decided I would not wear high heels. But above that, I wanted my toenails to be perfect and smooth, to always as pearly as they were when I was young. However, now when I gyrate my ankles, they crack and moan. Soon, I imagine, my feet will not be altogether different from the feet of my grandparents. One day, a child will stare at my feet with disgust, but they will not be able to fathom the places they had walked in order to be before them, as I was not able to understand the lives my grandparents lived. When I was a child, I did not understand the journey that I had embarked on. I did not understand that the adults around me were at different phases in their journies. Instead, my grandpa would yell at me for jumping up and down in the living room, for fear that the floor would cave in, and I would mutter underneath my breath. We would run outside into the barn and play in the hay, growing itchy and intoxicated with the scent of alfalfa. My parents would yell at us and while they talked about adult things, we would play hide and seek. Where were we then and where are we now? Are we in the same place but with different things around us? Who is yelling at us now? Us or them?

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