We wanted everything king size. King size! A kingdom. The tinier we could be. To reach for the table, for the floor, for the edges— the length between one and the other was hallowed. We’d lost a longing and gained it back while we hollowed out the places we fit and felt delicate. Outside the world stayed the same but with our newfound smallness we saw the strongest man in the world, the tallest buildings ever built. We could be lifted and carried to tops of the towers. Somedays we never spoke and let the dead air take up all the space.

Of course if we’d stayed curled in the middle of our things we’d never have noticed. The thickening. Each minute we were closer to passing through doorways and noticing the walls beside. A step aside. A little stumble. Soon feeling hands and knees I didn’t own sidling up my ribcage; we slithered and snaked. Those are the shapes of houses. We grew into it. We shape our houses until they shape us.

So here, for me, is a small inventory of the things that have changed:

1. My hair is three or more inches longer, the longest it’s been in years and years and I have seen many new states
2. I have lived alone for the only time
3. I have a set of new knives
4. I worry in new ways, with less narcissism, wider and more like an anxiety about everyone and how they could be hurt or how I could hurt them. I don’t know if it is the way the claws and cranes come in, stretching you out and teaching you about the biggest ways you can feel or if it is just a small sliver of getting older and pushing down those old strategies for putting yourself in the center of all that is good or bad or the best and the worst
5. I don’t write anymore

*

In August we flew to Seattle with a friend working on his commercial pilot certificate, making our way over the Oregon trees we were lost in on foot a few weeks before. I’d just finished Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, now knowing that the word “lost” comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army. On the plane there were so many ways to prevent you from disbanding, GPS and maps and the constant checking-in over the frequencies, relaying locations along the way with an alphabet stretched to more audible words.

About the last point: it’s true, or very rarely. I never think I am a writer, I think I like to have things accomplished, and to remember, and I like reading and used to be sad a lot. In the air, though, I thought how nice it was that with all the maps and GPS there was still someone from the ground to call to, someone there to tell your plans. All the time above us this is happening: here is who I am, where I am, here is where I am going. I used to do that.

*

In A Field Guide Solnit talks about the artist Yves Klein, who one day with his friends decided to divide the world among themselves: the earth, the air, the sky. Klein signs his name to the sky:

In 1946, while still an adolescent, I was to sign my name on the other side of the sky during a fantastic “realistico-imaginary” journey. That day, as I lay stretched upon the beach of Nice, I began to feel hatred for birds which flew back and forth across my blue sky, cloudless sky, because they tried to bore holes in my greatest and most beautiful work.

We saw a fireworks show from the plane, taking place somewhere right outside of Portland. Everything is well documented, small and still from that high, but this was still miraculous: those fireworks that take up the whole sky from the ground, the whole huge sky, and they don’t take up any of it at all, not even close.

I think about Klein claiming his sky, hating the birds that flew through his masterpiece that he couldn’t fathom the size of, that no one can, not from that one place on the earth where you only are. And I think about all the claims I make everyday- who I was and what was mine- and what a tiny little piece I see. There are days I miss making claims like this, though, sometimes.

People tell him to wait at the restaurants, or at the station or for a call or a message. Some people tell him to wait at the lowest of lows, down the steps, and some people say “go upstairs and wait we’ll be right there.” Others say to go all the way up, up up closest to heaven. Most often he is told to wait just one minute, hold on. He’s got two brown big eyes and he waits with his hands gripped.

He thinks of a good thing when he goes to sleep, as he waits to wake up. You know what it is to sleep waiting? On a little ledge and held-tight teeth, so he is a tired man, the man in Florida.

One day while he was waiting he got his money stolen. It was only a little bit of money, but he came to wait at the same spot as always and the man in brown stole a little money. The man in Florida went to the police who asked him to wait on the chairs that went straight up and down, and the man sat with his fingers gripped and waited. He told the police what the man looked like, where he was waiting, what little money was stolen. A lady put it all somewhere and thanked him for reporting and said we’ll do the best we can. The man thought this was a little good thing.

It took a lot of little good things to make the world go. The man from Florida would wait along the side of the bridge, the bridge that had the spires built to keep the people from jumping. The man got tired of waiting sometimes. He thought about standing on the spires, balanced as a circus act, spinning like a top while those below clapped their hands and waited and watched. He danced on the veil, spinning forever, everyone waiting and watching, watching and waiting.

Last year around now, when I was working all the time too, and someone I barely liked had said we should stop sleeping together which made me feel again like I’d been building little shacks I didn’t want for someone else to blow over, and wasn’t taking care of anyone. Now I’ve got these heavy shovels digging out a basement with most things I want to say too specific or numinous. This is maybe like cracking open a window, that I can redirect what’s been making its way directly to my chest and get back to a good way to know what I mean.  Air out some little things and move on.

*

He said zinnia was “not a flower, it is a constellation of sounds. Don’t ever see beyond the word as a thing, but to another word.” He went on to say, “the extent to which you think writing is about something other than words then you will fail.” He also said, “If I can deprive zinnia of meaning and make it a feeling then I can control it.”

“You are not producing meaning. You are not communicating. You are making time.”

*

-We should play a game.

-Okay. But not with moving. Not in this old bone house.

We sit and look at our hands.

-Swear, I swear they won’t get rid of the houses. They’ll just move them. And they’ll start digging tunnels and filling them up with pipes and sewage. What game, I guess. What next.

-Dad; Dad. I’m think I’m shrinking.

*

All that would go here is perhaps too intimate.

*

But every day we seem to learn new things about the ways our bodies live and die, about mirror neurons and somatization and proprioception and the wider-than-expected boundaries of ourselves, the ways we shape the universe and are shaped by it, the ways we are the universe. In some ways, we’re always at zero degrees of separation. If I watch Jason Kittelberger dance on his neck, or look at Maira Kalman’s picture of Pina Bausch being swung precariously close to the ground, or listen to Peter Wortsman read the gory ending of “An Earthquake in Chile,” it changes my own body.

*

I read in the Wall Street Journal about broken-heart syndrome, that happens mostly to women, post-menopause. I am envious of science more than those people who have all the discipline I lack. Curled I like to imagine the space in between each beat its own distance, four feet, twelve, making up a nice little spot in that time where we can’t be damaged. And then science comes along and actually breaks a heart. While I’m learning all kinds of ways the world changes my body.

*

Here’s one thing about Native American tribe names: the names we know them by are often the names they’ve were given by their neighbors. Cheyenne, for instance: it means red-talkers, something like “people of an alien speech,” because the Sioux people could not understand what they were saying. Learning not to call things by these names.

*

The people who lived here before us

also loved these high mountain meadows on summer mornings.

]]> http://tothesound.com/2010/04/learning/feed/ 0 http://tothesound.com/2009/12/all-of-these-things-are-right/ http://tothesound.com/2009/12/all-of-these-things-are-right/#comments Thu, 17 Dec 2009 04:37:36 +0000 tothesound http://tothesound.com/?p=376 Most of the last 10,000 words I wrote somewhere between Portland and the Bay while Lex drove. Lex is from Croatia and from craigslist and as a European or human being was excited about America and free refills and the state line. This is probably a good thing to spend some hours with sometime. It doesn’t mean we are best friends or will fall in love and get married but means that for a few hours he asked me to read his text messages to him out loud and that we ate at a Pizza Hut with the nicest waitress that exists in the world.

Portland is the most livable city I’ve ever been to. Troubling a little, but all of the things you could need seem within such short distances there it felt easier to keep your priorities straight. Lex moved to the states from Germany where he’s in school and didn’t understand what suburbs were, ending up in the suburban neighborhoods outside of Palo Alto and bored to death. (His mother didn’t understand because she’d seen Desperate Housewives and that’s what American suburbia is.) Portland somehow takes the parts about the suburbs I miss (houses, yards, trees) and puts them in a context that doesn’t mean staying inside would be preferable.

So I didn’t write much while I was there, because I was busy and happy and fairly sure I could catch up. Whatever kind of asceticism I thought the whole thing would’ve taken was completely mistaken; it served mainly as a reminder that I am a regular person with a normal job and no children and a lot of free time, and most days I could live normally and still write 1,500 words by the end of the night. Sometimes I said no to things. Mostly I didn’t.

But I’m glad to have done it, mostly to know that I’m not lazy, and have some semblance of discipline. It’s good to do one thing for some time. It’s also good to know that a sense of story is possible without outlines or any real idea of a plot, that years of story consumption will make something emerge however mightily it may rely on clichés to get there. Better, though, was being a part of the amount of work that went on to make the event run, and watching others do it and hearing stories much more interesting than mine, and knowing how much was happening that would not have otherwise been happening.

This is maybe the one thing I feel as excited for as Lex was about the California state checkpoint.

***

Tomorrow I start moving to San Francisco. Three days after I wrote this post everything changed again to prove there’s no point in planning for anything. I’m going to miss living in Oakland a lot.

This is a picture of my home in The New York Times

Before I left for Portland– when I told my mother I was getting in the car with a stranger for ten hours– all she said was that I only have good people in my life, and she doesn’t expect that to change. It is a weird thing to have someone else tell you: when it is true completely but you’ve somehow failed to realize, and how then I felt I owed something to someone or everyone for whatever luck or circumstance means that my whole life is made up of people who are fundamentally good, and fundamentally good to me.

But so for whatever reason I still place a lot of weight in location, being in a place for a time and the right one, when everything I know says that it is mostly beside the point. In one of the best things I read this year the author asks to imagine if there were a boat upon which you could put only four people, and then everyone else would cease to exist:

Who would you put on that boat? It would be painful, but how quickly you would decide: You and you and you and you, get in. The rest of you, goodbye.

and it is horrible, but how quickly. And this is the point, if it is four people or ten there is no boat but they are here. Here, as a life; not here as a place. Everyday we expect to live out the door and to the end of the block and up the elevator and back home again, and expect that somewhere those people we love to do the same, without thinking or checking while the world keeps moving. They’re there. Someday this isn’t true, and it is its own special kind of narcissism the way I worry that I’ve not said enough to those four people. To anyone.

Someday I would like to build a house and fill it with nothing. There would be rooms and closets but each of them would be empty. In winter I would keep it warm and in summer I would keep the windows open. For months I would search out everyone I’ve every known and invite them to the empty house and many wouldn’t come, but those that could would fill up every wall and corner until it makes sense to own nothing else but everyone in those rooms.

***

This year when so many things stopped working the conversation seemed to turn– more than I ever remember being the case– to seclusion and labor and building a life that exists tangibly in the way you spent your time and the food you put on the table. When being too far divorced from the effects of our actions finally made a lot of rich people poorer and a lot poor people even poorer it seemed maybe nicer to live a little more immediately. But to do it immediately? I’m still making the money I can, buying the things I can. There’s been so little change.

Leah came with us too on the drive to Oregon. She was going home to Eugene for a month before she left for Japan to join a monastery.

So this was how I saw it: I’d sign a lease and go to my job each morning and take all of these good people in all of the time in what ways I could, and somewhere Leah would take a vow of silence, and we could maybe build a balance back in. But it only works if I find a better way to balance growing up and learning how little I matter with mattering more to those people I don’t deserve. In Oakland or here or Portland or on a farm or in Japan or Croatia.

The point of the novel I wrote was meant to be that we don’t own anything, except if we’re lucky someone else or others, and after fifty thousand words I should’ve found a way to mean it.

So far it’s not that difficult to get words on the page but I am also not delusional; two days is not many.

A small quickening. The room responds slightly to being entered. Like a raised blind.

Before 11:30pm at Lucky’s I saw the new Coen Brothers movie which made me feel bad for not being Jewish, sort of, or more the same thing I have always felt at having no well of tradition to draw from. It made me think of “The Conversion of the Jews”, and for the first ten minutes in the theater I was pretty sure I was watching the wrong movie. It’s pretty funny though.

The next day I didn’t leave where I sat except to show them where the roof leaked and then when I’m going to go to this party. The library is on the way and I get this book though it has never occurred to me to want to write like Chekhov.

I only wanted to tell people honestly: look, look at how badly you live, how boring are your lives. The important thing is that people should understand this; if they do understand this they will certainly invent a different and a far better life.

I’d left for the party early because it’s too goddamn sunny in the East Bay; it doesn’t feel like anything is going forward. I sit in a shop and read, then go to the store again to buy beer. I don’t know what to buy but settle on one kind that I don’t like but I feel like people bring to parties. I go and everyone is nice but it makes me feel bad. I remember nothing about the trip home but that it took too long, and that someone’s mother was going to be mad.

I woke up today at 3am to drink two glasses of water and woke at nine to be up. I went to buy used things and paint, went to the grocery store again but this time with purpose. At home I cut so many onions it feels like I have been bawling all morning but I’m not feeling as bad now. The good news is it doesn’t feel good to stop making things. Today I made corn chowder and this picture of a whale. There will either be less good or more good tomorrow.

And: do it, buy stuff, donate. It’s a beautiful thing. Doing and making, world.