I. THE UNEXAMINED LIFE

A TV commercial last night for a 4G cell phone that can download a movie in no time. I first saw this the day after the 2010 election, when conservative Republicans took control of the House of Representatives. I was wrestling with despair, and I couldn’t imagine why anyone needed to download a movie to a cell phone in no time. Who watches a movie on a cell phone—and when? While walking to school? While driving to work? Pushing the baby’s stroller? Talking with friends? Though I suspect that people watching movies on cell phones are not so different from people—like me—who become inflamed by politics, and check political websites several times a day. Aren’t we all just looking for distraction? Quite possibly entertaining ourselves is our only human purpose, as we navigate our passage from birth to procreation to death. Just like all the other animals except that, to our dismay, we’re conscious of what we’re doing and we’re capable of remorse.

My therapist, to whom I mentioned this idea, said she thought people watched movies on cell phones and surfed the internet to avoid thinking and feeling. That sounds right—but then what’s so great about thinking and feeling? I enjoy thinking and feeling, but so what? I’m not at all sure that the unexamined life is not worth living. A carpenter, who only thinks about wood and proportions, his tools and his worktable—and food and sex at night—does more good in the world than the self-conscious writer who worries every idea to a frazzle and knows that in the end most of her thoughts and feelings will die with her.

Back on election night Rand Paul, the new Republican senator from Kentucky, came out in praise of rich people. All people are one, he said; rich and poor, we’re all just human. But the rest of us work for rich people, so let’s respect the rich. It’s as if he’s absorbed the lessons of Buddhism and used them, either cynically or not, to justify the capitalist corporatist takeover of our democracy.

LOVE TRIANGLE ON A TRAPEZE

Variete, a 1925 German silent film about a love triangle: Emil Jannings as a trapeze artist, a nice, good man who leaves his wife and son for a gorgeous hussy because he can’t help himself. He and the minx develop a trapeze act and are hired by a great, famous trapeze artist whose partner has died. The three become a team, appearing in a legitimate theater in Berlin and performing on a trapeze above the audience’s heads, and we know the great famous guy is going to steal the hussy away. The suspense—what’s going to happen to our nice, good man?—is excruciating. And I think, there’s no one in my novel for the reader to care about that way. Someone pure of heart. My characters are too sophisticated to be pure of heart. Still, they have desires. What do they want? Waldo, the narrator, wants to know he belongs, and no matter what he does he feels like an outsider. Julian, his idol, the ultimate insider, wants to do his work and disappear. He wants to stop taking everything, just because it’s offered to him.

“Love Triangle on a Trapeze.” It’s a good title for a story. Tell it in three monologues: the good man, the hussy, the sophisticate. But I’m not inspired to begin. Instead I’m thinking about the neighborhood where I grew up, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, in a middle-income housing development surrounded by tenements. So often, when I close my eyes, I see the old neighborhood streets. Walking east towards home there’s the deli, owned by my friend Paula’s father. Next to that a tenement where my third-grade classmate Catherine lived. I visited Catherine one afternoon after school. The place was much smaller than our apartment and a lot of people lived in it. I was embarrassed for Catherine that she had so little—or I was embarrassed to be thinking about how little she had. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to live where we lived, either; I liked it better uptown, where the sidewalks were cleaner and the people wore nicer clothes and the air glistened with money. And yet now, in my mind’s eye, I walk those same streets over and over. As soon as I go past Paula’s father’s deli and Catherine’s tenement, reaching the corner, crossing the street and turning right towards the building where we lived, I feel secure. As if once more I’m the girl I used to be—before anyone expected much of me; before I began making myself up.

II. SUBWAY

The other evening on the subway there was a worried-looking woman, about 40, dark hair, good-looking but for her distress. As I entered she was outside the turnstiles, unsure, it seemed, what to do next; a few moments later she bustled down the platform and sat next to me on a bench. She looked up at the electronic sign saying the next train would come in four minutes and sighed out loud. “Four minutes,” she said.
I said four minutes was no time at all, but her anxiety wasn’t appeased. She said she was used to a train coming every minute, and she had a lot to do. She had to go home and deposit the shopping bag she was carrying, and then she had to make the trek to a supermarket on East Broadway, where everything was half price. She went there once a month, she was on a schedule. I could feel her worry; if she missed a beat something bad would happen, her life would unravel and she would be lost.

When the train came we sat next to one another. She told me about a friend of hers, a spry woman of ninety, in her right mind but fixated on the cost of living, who spent her waking hours going from supermarket to supermarket, checking the best prices—as if she were a cow, grazing all the neighborhood pastures—then phoning her cohort with shopping tips. This information took me by surprise, introducing as it did a character whose way of life I could not have invented. An old lady who haunted the aisles of supermarkets, warding off her demons by hunting for bargain chicken thighs and half-price frozen peas.

My new friend got off the train two stops later, at 14th Street. “We talked, the train came, now I’m home,” she said. It was a thank you of sorts. I could have thanked her in return. She gave me some material, an anecdote; I distracted her from whatever it was that she couldn’t bear to think about.

When I was younger I used to take taxis whenever possible, keeping myself above ground and above the fray. Now I like the subway. First of all there are people from all over the world riding the subway in New York; I consider this a miracle of modern life. Also the subway is a lot cheaper and often faster than other modes of transportation in the city. And there’s a certain comfort in the sheer animal presence of the other passengers; just as my cat, who doesn’t always like to be petted, always likes to lie near me and extend a paw so that we touch, so we passengers value proximity, as long as it comes with boundaries. It’s clear we don’t want to know each other, and so we give ourselves permission to drop our public faces. We sit in identical yellow and orange molded plastic seats and we watch each other eat, read, listen to music, write, sketch, mumble or just sit there; whatever happens in our car, we all see it and hear it and take it home with us. We do this with whatever respect and good will we can muster. Not to put too rosy a face on this, it’s also true that we’re trapped with each other, and if the car is crowded our bodies are squeezed up against each other into a forced, uncomfortable intimacy that we pretend to ignore.

Sometimes I take pictures of my fellow passengers on my iPhone. I do it surreptitiously, holding up the phone, pretending to read this morning’s emails, and then snapping. I take these pictures as if I’m expecting something to be revealed, as if I were conducting a kind of urban nature study. My interim conclusion? Few people look happy in the subway. Snapshots of my friends and my cat are interspersed, in my iPhone photo gallery, with snaps of preoccupied people—exhausted, worried, lonely, dejected—seen in harsh subway-car light.

Once, riding the subway to a party uptown, I became aware that a man across the aisle was sketching me. I pretended not to notice. When he was finished he gave me the sketch, and then I had to pretend I liked it.

For the past few months I’ve been reading Moby Dick on my iPhone in the subway. It’s a big book but the screen is small, and so the pages turn fast and I always feel as if I’ve made progress when my trip is done. The book is terrifying, riveting, and there in the subway, as the train stops and starts, accelerates and slows, and rattles on its tracks, I might as well be on a whaler in roiling seas with an insane captain and a crew of full-blown eccentrics. I heard this somewhere, and it stuck: Everyone is crazy, except the people you don’t know.

III. RESTORATIVE YOGA

The Restorative Yoga class on Saturdays, 5–6:30: you’re instructed to lie down in one posture and relax for about ten minutes, then you switch to another posture. You’re swaddled in towels and blankets, your eyes are closed, and it’s up to you what happens inside. I realized I was trying to do it just right, that I always want to do things just right, and in this yoga class, as well as in life, there is no just right, there’s only the way you do it. I took that away from the first class I attended. Also my shoulders and back and knees felt better. Joan Richardson, a writer friend who’s also a gym friend, said she got that she was only her breath, because if she stopped breathing she wouldn’t be.

RUDY BURCKHARDT

Douglas Dunn hosted an evening of Rudy Burckhardt films at his loft, to celebrate the Burckhardt DVD set that was just being released. Rudy’s films are all short, the majority are black and white, they were made between the 1930s and the 1990s, and they’re one of the ways he made art (he also painted and took still photographs). All of his work was about the world around him, the city mostly, and his friends, many of them painters and poets, and there’s something about them that’s mesmerizing; they’re so plain and ordinary and at the same time magical. One of the films I love the best is called “Eastside Summer.” It’s black and white, eleven minutes long, and seems to have been made some time in the 1950s.

The soundtrack is a Thelonious Monk solo, “Functional.” The melody, which Monk seems to be making up as he goes along, is no melody in particular, just a bunch of blues riffs, and it’s memorable nevertheless. When I hear it now (I have it on a CD, Thelonious Himself), I think about the scenes in “Eastside Summer,” mostly towards the end, of young people, black and Hispanic, going about their business in Alphabet City, hardly noticing the camera. 

The music has dissonant chords and a strong beat—in a sense all Monk’s music is about the beat, the time or rhythm. He hesitates, rushes ahead, pauses, considers, repeats, bangs it out, goes into a dance. Sometimes he crams an amazing number of notes into one phrase, then the next phrase is gentle and the next is percussive—as if he’s thinking on the keys. You can hear him as he stops, senses, then knows what note, what chord, to play next. The music’s energy enlivens the scenes in “Eastside Summer,” and seems to give meaning to them, though the meaning is mysterious. The chords feel as if Monk is trying to come to a conclusion, or a resolution—or he’s creating a resolution out of unanswered questions. The music makes your ears prickle, scrambles your brain, arouses feelings you didn’t know you had. The music is filled with a melancholy joy.

As are the scenes in Rudy’s film and the people inhabiting it, who are poor but young, and have a tenderness about them. The camera is tender, too; recording, not judging. Nothing happens in the film beyond the scenes of New York in the summer and yet it says everything. Here is life, being lived. This is the city I love—the streets, the stoops, the people, the storefronts. The city is home. The film is down with it.

I asked the painter Yvonne Jacquette, Rudy’s widow, how Rudy could manage to shoot all those people without them playing to the camera. She said she didn’t know, he just worked all the time, he went out to see what would happen and he took what he got. And that must be the secret—he wasn’t after anything in particular so he could see what was there. He was gentle and unassuming, and since he didn’t seem to want anything people didn’t pay him much attention. He was just holding a camera and shooting the way someone else might be holding a cane or a paintbrush.

Yvonne collaborated with Rudy on one of the other films we saw, “Night Fantasies,” and she said it was a great experience. The shots of Tokyo neon lights at night are just like her paintings, and, if I understood her correctly, she said Rudy told her to shoot what she liked and black out what she didn’t want to see. She said the experience changed the way she painted.

IV. NEW YORK PIGEONS

The other day as I waited for the #1 train to take me uptown I saw a pigeon on the subway platform, strutting around, pecking the air with every step. I’m so accustomed to seeing pigeons that it took me a moment to register surprise. What was it doing down here? Was it an intrepid explorer? Or had it been in a fight and escaped to the underground to save itself? Without thinking I began to follow it, telling it out loud it ought to walk under the turnstile and fly up the stairs. No good could come to it down here. It could get eaten by rats or run down by a train.

Three portly black women, nicely dressed, sat on the bench near where I waited. I said to them, “The pigeon needs to take the stairs and get out of here.”

One of them replied, “It was down here yesterday.”

The train came; the bird waddled over to the platform edge, either suicidal or curious, then stepped back in time. I boarded the train. The three women continued to sit on their bench on the platform, though the #1 was the only train that stopped at this station.

Now there were two mysteries: why was the pigeon in the subway, and what were the women waiting for? For that matter what am I waiting for, as I alternately stride and sleepwalk through my life?

Is there an essay to be written on New Yorkers and pigeons? There are eight million of us and at least a million of them, and we have certain things in common. We live in tall buildings; they roost outside our windows. Though they’re wild creatures, they walk on the concrete sidewalks we’ve built for ourselves, in fact they seem to prefer walking to flying. And they react like New Yorkers: When they’re forced to fly, when someone walks into their space, you can see they’re really annoyed.

My father told me he came home from work early one day to find two pigeons having sex on top of his bookcase. He said he let them carry on. I try to imagine the scene. The bookcase is solid maple, waist-high. The birds are cooing. Does my father watch, or does he go to the kitchen and pour himself a drink?

The previous tenant in my apartment shared it with a homeless woman whom he’d given a bed. Three years after I’d moved in the woman knocked on my door. She wanted to stay with me, and I didn’t need to worry about feeding her—she showed me the dead pigeon she planned to cook and eat. I convinced her to leave. I never found out where she got the pigeon or how it ended up dead.

Pigeons are our shadows; flocks of them haunt our streets, depending on us to feed them. And they captivate certain people. Is it their boldness, their trust in us, their ability to show affection?

In Washington Square Park a pigeon man sits on the same bench every day around 5 p.m. with pigeons all around him—on the ground, in his lap, on his knees, on his arms and shoulders; a dark-haired man with a big black moustache, a nose that curves down and a face that seems to look inward, ignoring the human traffic in his vicinity. One day as I walked past a woman said to me, “God bless the pigeon man. He just sits there, and pigeons shit on his head.”

Until then I hadn’t thought of him as saintly—in fact I’d imagined he courted pigeons for the attention. But whose attention would that be? People’s, or pigeons’?

A friend of a friend, I’m told, lives in a one-bedroom apartment. He sleeps on a couch in the living room; the bedroom is filled with pigeons. He started out rescuing wounded birds, and once they were in his care he grew attached to them. He felt they’d be in danger if he let them out again, even the ones who seemed totally rehabilitated. Inevitably, as on my father’s bookcase, they began copulating. He tried destroying their eggs, but he missed some of them. Babies were born. He comes home to them every night.

It must have been similar for the Washington Square pigeon man. He must have started feeding pigeons out of kindness. Then he found he liked hanging with them. They didn’t demand anything but a little food—and they were so enthusiastic. As soon as he sat down on his bench they flew to him from all over the park. They perched on him and waddled around at his feet, he was a god in their world.

To us the pigeon man may be a freak, but at least he knows who he is—though surely pigeon man is not the fate he would have chosen for himself, if he’d had a choice.

We humans all stare at him: this is what happens to people who can’t control their impulses.

V. IDEA FACTORY: NOTES TO MYSELF

  1. If you need to write something and you don’t know where to start, or what you want to say, just write something. Once it’s on paper you can work on it. 
  2. In the notebook you’re keeping, write down what it is you need to do next—how a particular character will evolve, or how the plot will turn, or what question needs to be answered. Close the notebook for the day. The next day you’ll have the answer.
  3. Worry some question until you’re in despair over it. Have a sleepless night, convinced you’re no good at what you do and would train for another profession if only you weren’t so old and set in your ways. Finally tell yourself the only thing you can do is forget about it and enjoy the moment. While you’re enjoying the moment the answer comes.
  4. If nothing else works, get to the point where you’re running out of money. You’ll have an idea before you starve. 

MODERN LIVING

At the gym I was on the elliptical trainer, looking out the window at the corner of Varick and Commerce, and I saw a family, an eight-year-old girl, a mother pushing a stroller, a father holding a three-year-old boy, they were almost across the street, and another couple were starting across, holding hands with a balking six-year-old, dragging him across, and all the while the cars and taxis were revving up to move the instant the light changed. The cars and taxis were waxed and polished, the people wore bright clothes, the white lines on the street seemed freshly drawn and the street was black as tar. The windows of the sharp new building on the corner reflected the red bricks of the city recreation center across the avenue. Apartment buildings, most of them five-story tenements, pressed against each other on either side, and in the distance the Empire State Building pointed towards the clouds. From the gym, which is on the second floor, the whole panorama looked like a video game, like a scene made up of avatars, not actual people and things.

Where did all of this come from? How did humans come to invent apartment buildings, and cars, and super-highways, and gyms, for that matter? I never asked such questions when I was a child and I don’t remember thinking about them, though I may have, since I remember almost nothing of what I thought or felt in childhood: only that I wanted to be good so I wouldn’t get punished, so they would leave me alone, so they wouldn’t leave me out. Still, I’m pretty sure in childhood I just accepted the world as a given. But I think about it now. Why did it turn out this way and not some other way?

I like the idea that there’s another planet somewhere that mirrors ours. Everything is the same, even the people, yet theirs is a more advanced civilization. There’s another me on this other planet. I’m intrigued but spooked by her—I don’t even like it when there’s someone else in the room named Maggie. But this other Maggie doesn’t care about being unique, she doesn’t care about her personality. She has compassion for all sentient beings. She’s happy to meet me. “How are things going?” she says, holding out her hand.

INTERSPECIES COMMUNICATION

If animals seem easier to love than people, it’s probably because we don’t expect them to be just like us, in fact their otherness is part of the attraction. Yet they move us the most when they seem to be most human.

  1. A woman took in a malnourished African lion, she nursed it back to health, and when she couldn’t keep it any longer she gave it to an animal sanctuary in Cali, Colombia. Six years later she went to visit the lion, and someone had a video camera. There’s footage on YouTube of the woman approaching the lion’s cage. The lion gets up on its hind legs, reaches through the bars of the cage, kisses the woman’s face and hugs her to its bosom.
  2. A friend told me about a man who adopted a five-year-old border collie from the pound. The night he took the dog home he roamed around his property and the dog followed him, as he picked up kindling for the fireplace. When he had a nice pile of kindling in the yard he took it inside. The next morning there was another pile of kindling in the yard, which the dog had prepared for him after he’d gone to sleep. This story kills me; the dog, with his pile of kindling, saying, “I’m a good dog. Please love me.” 

VI. DON’T LOOK BACK

Don’t Look Back was at the Film Forum, the great Pennebaker documentary that follows Bob Dylan on his first tour of England. I hadn’t seen the movie since it came out, in the late 60s, but I’ve been listening to Dylan most of my life, and it was startling to be so moved, all over again, by his hectoring, plaintive, passionate laments, his urgent delivery—and his youth. For the first time I fully took in the point of Dylan’s voice, as well as its sound. It’s not a conventionally pretty voice, and in fact people make fun of it, yet something about its timbre commands attention—its nasality, its growl, its general idiosyncrasy and unsuitability for song. In the film a reporter questions his singing skill and he assures them he’s a good singer. He is right. You can listen to Peter, Paul & Mary performing “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and their harmonies are beautiful and they’re earnest. Yet their version is nowhere near as good as Dylan’s original, which is conversational, phrased as in speech, and alive with feeling. How many roads must a man walk down / Before you call him a man. In the film Dylan’s voice resounded, filling the auditoriums and theaters in which he sang. “The Times They Are A-Changin’” particularly struck me: I hadn’t thought about what an anthem it was—or is. Now it keeps ringing in my head.

So I used to think I liked Dylan in spite of his voice, when all the time it was his voice that carried his music and his lyrics home. And it’s surprising it took so long for me to acknowledge his voice, when voice is so important to me as a writer and a reader. As a writer I approach and get to know my characters through the way they speak, the sound they make in the world. Often I choose someone I know, or someone I’ve observed, and I imagine that person’s voice inhabiting my character until the character becomes clear. When I write a magazine article or book review the character I create is a thoughtful version of myself, someone who marshals her resources to think something through. In these pages, where I’m talking to myself, there’s no need to construct a voice, only to listen to myself, if that’s what I’m doing.

Of course I’m not just interested in voice, but in the things people say. And the things they don’t say, the things they mean that the reader can sense from the gist of the conversation.

When I hear musicians playing together I think of that as a conversation, too—although my brother Tom, who’s a folksinger, doesn’t seem to see it that way. Then again, being my older brother, he likes to differ with me. Tom, who plays guitar, banjo and fiddle, and his son Ben, who’s a brilliant fiddler, often play gigs together in England, where they live, and I think what a lovely, intimate way to be connected—but this is something I can only imagine by comparing it to what my father, a great talker, used to describe as “creative conversation.” That’s when you’re thinking out loud, and what you say is what occurs to you at that instant, based on everything that’s gone before for you, and with the intention of striking a chord with your interlocutors. Conversational improvisation, in other words—as a form of intercourse it can be almost as transporting as sex.

Tom and Ben are the folk musicians in the family, and I’ve always thought I was more interested in every other form of music—yet Don’t Look Back reminded me of the power of folk music and protest music, of the songs we sing with other people—songs that bring us together, like “This Land is Your Land,” “We Shall Overcome,” “Amazing Grace.” This music lives inside of me the way the streets of New York live inside of me. On 9/11/2001 a small group of us ended up standing on a traffic island in our neighborhood—a spot from which the twin towers used to be visible—singing “America the Beautiful,” and “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” That music lives inside of me, too.

There’s a great scene in a hotel room in Don’t Look Back. Joan Baez is in a chair, playing guitar and singing a traditional song in her piercing contralto. Dylan is working at a typewriter; maybe he’s writing a song. This is what musicians do. They do music. My brother Tom, a living legend in some people’s estimation, will take an instrument with him to any party; he’ll go anywhere to play with other musicians. If he doesn’t have a paying gig he’ll be happy to play for free.

Writers don’t do writing in public, and we don’t usually do it with each other, but, like musicians, we do it all the time. Just now I was in bed, falling asleep, when I had this last thought and I had to turn on the light and write it down on the pad I keep next to my bed.