Time Bomb

Charles Simic, poet and genius, wrote a piece on aging for the New York Review of Books called "Looking It in the Face". Until days before his 50th birthday, he'd forgotten to feel old; or rather, the notion hadn't ever occurred to him. It's strange, because just last night I was thinking about time--how heavy and important it is, how monumental because it is so fleeting. 

"I go and squint at my face in the bathroom mirror and don’t like what I see," he says of waking at four o'clock in the morning after hours of tumultuous near-sleep. How strange not to recognize oneself in the mirror, to feel so different than the vessel we inhabit. But when does the inevitable morph into the actual? At the sight of the first pronounced wrinkle, jowl, or gray hair? Or does it happen so gradually that quick glances can't register the enormity of our mortality? I imagine it's the latter. The last time I saw my mother ride a bicycle, her helmet sliding over her small forehead and at an angle, I laughed.
                                      "You look like a child," I said.
                                      "We all are," she answered.

Time Warp

I escaped from New York two weeks ago to the quiet of Virginia and slipped back into a world and pattern not so different from the one I left a decade ago. The trees still stood in their places, a little thicker and taller. I'd forgotten some of the road names, but never the routes. Right at Shore Drive still led to the ocean, 7-11 still trusted its patrons enough to leave the Slurpee machine unattended, its swirls of sugary ice so perfectly watery I drank two in a single week. You could wave three times in a parking lot to strangers who held doors, nodded in the heat, or smiled. It was like stepping foot on a set that hadn't cleared once the heavy velvet curtain dropped its weight. My lines came back slowly, the role revised with the alacrity of a method actor who smells smoke for the first time in months, in pangs, with pressure and lightness all the same.

r
  a
   i
    n

fills me like a vessel

 

 

The Relativity of Wealth

I'm not rich.

In fact, I'm teetering quite close to broke these days. I've started selling vintage clothes not just to make room in my overstuffed closet but to add some bulk to my bank account. I don't eat out, strategize the purchase of a monthly $109 MetroCard, and carry a water bottle to avoid dolling out a dollar every time my cells cry for rehydration. Last week, I left a bag of spinach in the work refrigerator and ate from it for the three days I was in the office.

Wealth is relative, though. Just a few months ago I was working as an editor, dutifully setting aside funds for a 401K and still complaining about a lack of cash flow. I ordered steak kebabs, salmon, or sushi five days a week and thought nothing of stopping at Uniqlo for an oversized caftan on my way home.

This year, my tax return went straight to The New School as a down payment for next year's classes. Those funds, numbers on a screen and printed paper, flashed and then disappeared. I never felt their weight; just passed them along.

Yesterday evening I rode to Chelsea in the mist for a few errands and found myself on the hush of petal-strewn 18th Street, home to one of my favorite thrift shops. I browsed through antique end tables, day-dreamed about adding a Lucite bamboo chair to some future writing corner, and poked at the books. (One thing I haven't been able to give up is the purchase of books. And what better place to find them than at a thrift store? Often, the spines haven't been cracked, and you're always certain to pay four times less than what you'd find even at Strand.) I caved at the sight of Anna Karenina translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky--the same pair who unraveled a collection of Tolstoy's short stories that has since changed my life. (Side note to the side note: I never paid much attention to translators until I read this last collection. I was at Barnes & Noble armed with a gift card trying to understand why two copies of the same paperback might vary so greatly in price. I only had to read half a paragraph The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories to understand: Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation captured the lightness and poetry of Tolstoy's work; the other translators' work felt labored and heavy. They might as well have been two different books.) Sure, the cover of this $6 Tolstoy depicts a close cropping of two knees bent which at a certain angle looks like an ass but it's a small price to pay for such a fine story.

There was also a teapot, one I thought might replace the small blue and white one I'd found in my freshman year of college. It had been perfectly small and unassuming with a simplicity of line that always reminded me of Japan. It lasted through the inevitable moves of college, into my first experiment with cohabitation, and on to New York. Finally, one of its cups ruined in a round of parlor games, its lip chipped and handle long-missing, I sent the set to rest. Ever since, I've missed it and the simple domesticity and order it represented. Converse to many other 20-somethings, my living situation has evolved into something less independent and more temporary as I've gotten older. At 18, I lived in a two-story loft all my own. At 24, I shared a bathroom with a stripper on the floor of a Brooklyn brownstone. Now, I live with two men and keep most of my possessions in a storage unit one borough away.  

This teapot was made in Japan of terracotta and glazed in a blue that looks like hundreds of tiny cracks and fragments, like the retraction of a wave on some russet-colored beach. It has two small cups free of chips and a handle wrapped with what looks like vine. I played with its arrangement on the dusty shelf of Housing Works trying to imagine taking it home. In the past, I've always searched in Chinatown for such a pot. There's one place, a huge supermarket with a basement full of utensils and ceramic that I check, hoping I might find something as simple as my old blue and white one. There rarely is. Usually, the teapots they have come in sets, packaged in black cardboard boxes with interiors the same color as the flowers stamped across the mugs. Every now and then there's one that's quite lovely, though it comes with price tag of around $30. That's a lot of money to pay for a thing you don't have space for. That's when I walk away, always a little sad. It's not that I want the thing so badly; for some reason I picture myself in Wisconsin, an older me living a life somewhere that's not New York but surrounded by its remnants. If I don't buy a teapot--or if a tourist forgets to haggle on Canal Street for an I Love NY tee--it's not as though our memories will fade, or that we'll have nothing to prove our experiences. I think it has to do with collecting little pebbles in colors you don't see at home. Over the decades, those pebbles form mounds, and those mounds take the shape of walls and ceilings and floors. We live in the spaces hollowed out by memory, each pebble a little piece of our past.

I bought the teapot which the clerk wrapped in paper and slipped into an I Love NY bag along with two new books. Petals fell from the trees and as I crossed to 8th I couldn't help but feel content. There I was, a young person in spring, free to fill her mind with stories about artists and saints, to drink tea made from ocean waves. It felt like being a bird who in the midst of weaving a nest of jute and saplings braids turquoise string into a tiny opening.

Kabir

 

Wisdom

Images courtesy of www.vivianmaier.com

Divinity

If: in this massive, infinite universe (more interconnected than cursive, than the metaphors we've yet to invent or witness the gravity of)
we are conscious--then how divine, how special.

Is not life to be enjoyed? Savored? Not hedonistically--that would be extreme waste--but delicately, with study, gratitude and perspective.

We Are: conscious, when no other animal seems to speak, nor do they paint, erect pyramids, craft plays or solder iron.

Though man does. Though I am free to witness it, engage with it, create it all my own.
Such a waste to worry, to consume trends, ingest the media, while all around us groundwater absorbs chemicals, icebergs melt, and man tortures man. In the middle path, flowers bloom, words exchange, wisdom grows and the tinkling of birdsong carries through the sky.  

the Tenth

I watched him as he rounded the corner, wiping the edges of his eyes as if dust had settled in the crevices instead of salty water. He flicked the tears like lint, disregarding the weight, its salinity and reflection. His sweater bagged at the shoulders; the plastic hanger in his closet at home at fault for stretching the thin-weave cotton that failed to keep the chill of the wind away at night. The edges of his mind dragged too, weighed down with the worries of those who habitually check their bank accounts online, pray silently as they approach the mailbox hoping for a check to have arrived, some sustenance.

A Well Respected Man

I'm getting old. We're all getting older, sure, but recently--it probably has to do with the fact that I just turned 28 last Wednesday--I've started being bothered by the idea. It never worried me before. I still look forward to going grey. I imagine I'll have whitish silver strands of luxurious hair to frame my wise face and that somehow, despite it all, I'll still feel young, as I do now.

But there are all these things that point to the contrary. I have loved ones close to me who I am forced to accept have passed on to another stage in their own lives. For one brief, glimmering moment all the members of my beloved immediate family were adults together. We lingered at dinner tables, drank wine in each other's presence, listened, attentively, to each other's outlooks and agreed, even if we disagreed, that they made a point.

I'm faced with death each day. I leave my apartment and am reminded--if I hadn't been by Ivan Ilyich, Rumi, or The Kinks--that peril, traffic, and age can creep up on you at street corners. In the week leading up to 13th, I spent a lot of time thinking about maturation and patina. In a city like New York, you're forced to evolve. There are so many aspects of life that can't be escaped. For the majority of us, that means learning how live with tough situations, the things that archetypes are made of. It tests your willingness to be open to the universe when a deranged man screams racist chants from the back of a subway car, but it can lead you to greater tolerance. It can widen your perspective and reveal your own list of necessary self-improvements. I wouldn't trade it for anything, not during this season of my life, but it

it all just seeems to happen so quickly.

"For what is passes so swiftly and irrevocably into what was..."

   

A PSALM OF LIFE

WHAT THE HEART OF THE YOUNG MAN
SAID TO THE PSALMIST
    

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

   Life is but an empty dream!

For the soul is dead that slumbers,

   And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!

   And the grave is not its goal;

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,

   Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,

   Is our destined end or way;

But to act, that each to-morrow

   Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,

   And our hearts, though stout and brave,

Still, like muffled drums, are beating

   Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world’s broad field of battle,

   In the bivouac of Life,

Be not like dumb, driven cattle!

   Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!

   Let the dead Past bury its dead!

Act,— act in the living Present!

   Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us

   We can make our lives sublime,

And, departing, leave behind us

   Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,

   Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,

A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,

   Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,

   With a heart for any fate;

Still achieving, still pursuing,

   Learn to labor and to wait.

 

 

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 

Franny Glass Doth Live in Brooklyn

Franny is laying on the oriental carpet, her head almost hidden beneath the bottom of the sofa that once belonged to her boyfriend’s grandmother.

 

BOY: I don’t understand you when you’re like this.

 

FRANNY: You don’t understand me, ever.

 

BOY: No! Franny, stop it! That is exactly what I’m talking about. How can you swing to such extremes? Just yesterday you were telling me how the cosmos knit together into a “fiber of conscious warmth” and now you’re… despondent.

 

FRANNY: I am.

 

BOY: Oh, my God. I can’t take it. I love you so much, but when you act like this you just push me away. I think you actually enjoy feeling like this.

 

She speaks through her tears.

FRANNY: How can you say that? Why would anyone want to feel this way?

 

BOY: Because you indulge it. Look at you! Come on, sit up. Let’s go for a walk. It’ll help you shake this off.

 

She places a forearm across her eyes like a cold compress.

FRANNY: I can’t.

 

BOY: You read me that article last week, the one about conditioning? It said that over time a depressed mind will come to react to feelings like this as though they were drugs. That it’s almost like you’re craving this feeling and that on some level you get a, a high from it.

 

FRANNY: You probably mean a low.

 

BOY: What? Ok, sure, fine. A low. Come on, Franny, let’s go. Here, I’ll get your boots. We’ll go to the Winter Garden. I bet all those birds will be there, happy to see you. We’ll check if anyone scattered seed today.

 

When he leaves the room, she turns her head to watch him, pausing before exhaling loudly and slowly propping herself up with her elbows as though she’s seeing the plane in front of her for the first time. Her head sweeps across the room before she pulls herself to sit, drawing her knees up. She turns to place her back against the couch as Boy enters again empty-handed.

 

BOY: I couldn’t find them.

 

FRANNY: They’re by the door.

She slides backwards up to the seat of the couch. Boy hovers in front of her, silently willing her to stand. She does.

 

Ok, let’s go.

Franny pulls on her boots, laces them slowly from a crouched position, and takes her peacoat from the coat rack. She does not turn to Boy; she simply closes the door behind her and we see in the mirror as she walks by the lack of any reflection other than her own.

           

this would be the part where I say something profound.

hello
to you out there. hi.
how are you?

who are you?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?




- Mary Oliver

reflection,
suspension,
the ripening of pears.