Saturday, February 27, 2010

There are pictures of Lincoln taken in the height of his law career in Illinois in the years 1858 through 1860, taken in places like Springfield, Chicago, Peoria and places unknown, before he grew his beard. The Kunhardt illustrated biography gives us a series of them under a heading "Long Photographic Exposure Wouldn't Let Him Smile," on pages 94 and 95. More such portraits you will find from these years throughout the book, one with a rare white coat. He does smile in some of them. You can't quite say he looks confused in them. Adapted to being caught off guard, the photos catch a man of many moods. To me personally, the images of him strike me as ones taken of a bartender asked to stand still in the middle of a Saturday night shift. There are hints of bemusement at the variety of humanity glimmering in these pictures of ol' Lincoln. In some he looks depressed, in some he is distant and far away, maybe cold and professional, as one has to be sometimes.

"What is life about," he seems to be asking somewhere within behind his fixed expression. "Why are we here? What is the point of life?" The job kept him busy. It gave him experience in people. He had questions, not answers.

Lincoln saw people come and go. He saw them die. His mother, his sister, his girlfriend. He'd stare off into space sometimes. Along the way, he learned it's all about kindness. And so he stood for a kindness of a sort represented in the great contributions to science, culture and art, education and governing by the people, for the people, of the people. He knew kindness as a thing one is unlikely to much receive on a personal level. And so, to him, it should be buttressed institutionally. Fault him, maybe, for being cold, aloof, distant, for being subject to internal moods withdrawing him from life. (Imagine, perhaps, being married to the man.) Fault him for many things. A mortal like you and I. Yet, his achievements are rare and heroic for their defense and support of certain good and fair things.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Barman's Dreams After A Long Week

I’ve been at the restaurant Bistrot Lepic every night except one since the Saturday before St. Valentine’s Day, and even that week I only had one night off. Being barman at the upstairs wine bar, I’m the last to leave every single night. We get the late customers, the lingerers up there anyway. I finished up the paperwork, ate my cassoulet with a bit of wine, and got to feeling so tired I put some chairs together in the back wine room to lie down for a moment. One of those odd pulls of muscles somewhere in the upper back between shoulder blades, neck, collar, a knee brace for a knee tender since I ran a bit too vigorously the night of the first big blizzard here, down to the river and back by the Kennedy Center, regaining my stride of long ago, but limping back up through Rock Creek Park. Next thing I know it’s 5:30 AM, so I rise up from my bed of chairs, tidy up the last few things, ice the wines down, take the dirty plates down to the dishwasher in the kitchen, the lights still on down there, find my coat, and get going without changing from my work pants, thank god for a cab coming down Wisconsin with his light lit.

I come in, drink some water, and go straight to bed. I wake up at 2:30, microwave yesterdays’ green tea, feed the cat (who has purred alongside my slumbers in her own pleased wild way), Mom calls, good chat, neck, back and shoulders still killing me and though I make a fresh pot, it’s the couch's turn to bear my weight, blanket pulled over me.

I don’t quite remember the dreams of earlier. Something about a woman keeping me company, but I’ve forgotten what she looked like, a brunette somehow, and she was kind. We walked together in our coats somewhere, as down a street where there is a theater. I fall asleep again, lapse back into consciousness, then go down again deeper.

I dream of little towns somewhere, amalgams of towns I know from Central New York, little towns of sunlight and streams by a winding road, wooded ridges, green meadow fields. I remember, even in my dream, of roads I’ve dreamed of where the bicycling is beautiful, climbing through forests, a river below, and even in dreams I look out for where those roads might be, having a vague idea, enough to search for them and remember as I dream other dreams of them. Searching out a geography of places to explore by elimination. No, it’s not in Frankfurt, not found coming out of a mill town along the Mohawk as I thought before but tried in previous dreams, not some mysterious phantom leg of some quiet thruway through a mystical Vermont, nor down Route 5 West, or 12B South, nor off by Unadilla Forks, nor Vernon, or Knoxboro or Deansboro. The actual land has its limits, and this I know in my dream even as I create new roads and summon my family about me as if into our old ’66 blue Volvo station wagon, our old Yellow Submarine Chevy Malibu wagon, or maybe in some vaguely new and innocuous car, mom, dad, my brother and me, fading in and out as I look out the window as a valley off the main road begins to glow in particular, green, in both Spring and Summer. Somehow a large moose, incredibly large and tall and long, appears right by a bend in the road as it drops, and the moose with his big horns is curious and follows us in friendly spirit his huge quiet snout alongside of us, keeping up with a trot of the hoofs behind us, catching up now and again. And then a bear. Right in front you. Standing. Lumbering slowly off to rub against something.

We arrive somewhere we can pull up to. A house under trees, a forest beyond it. It’s like someone in our traveling party, maybe Anthony Bourdain himself, has made an appointment and we’re coming along as guests. Maybe dining and local produce will be involved. The people, the locals, are garbed in peasant clothing, the young women in white cloth bonnets like the Amish, colorful knit sashes of some Middle European country. I wonder about their clothing, relieved to find there is not some completely strict edict about being a man in woman’s company. This is indeed farmland, of grains harvested, yogurt and cheese and butter churned, of tables set with wooden bowls and table ware and salads, and proudly ripe produce and good water to drink. An old language spoken. Apples. Homemade wine.

I am relieved to find out when dinner plans are announced, that while I might indulge in a local beer, I am spared sitting at the adult table along with Mr. Bourdain and his production crew, and find myself not that hungry anyway, and left in the company of two young bonneted girls, one younger, an infant, and one barely a teenager. Their mom, friendly, subtle and wise to the ways of life, encourages our shy introductions and in their quiet company I go back to dreaming and planning my roads to bike on as I sit beside them, as if I were helping them shuck corn or hold yarn for their knitting, or watching them draw pictures and me drawing my own pictures while talking a little bit. The older one is pretty in a humble way and it turns out we can talk about this and that with happy touches of laughter and learning back and forth. I get a soft feeling in me, the kind that makes you bite the corner of your lips, and savor the time next to her, as the younger one goes off to amuse herself close by. It’s like we’ve known each other forever, and we talk and kid all the long while, the adults dining and drinking wine upstairs, and my Dad coming for us all later to join us at some comfortable time. The girl is kind and understands my desire for roads, and in talking somehow we iron out the great inappropriateness of our age gap and silently agree to be boyfriend and girlfriend for ever for the rest of our lives, which I am happy about as I have never been. We sit together with our sides innocently touching and this is the greatest way to discover, quietly, what life's about.

House cats linger over varnished floors and I look out at the back, and crouching interested and hidden is not a cat but a tiger cub, eyes bright, unmistakable face, soft yellow striped fur and white chest. The girls and I open the door and let the chubby little cub in, who darts in excitedly in attack mode, soon batting and rolling around with the equally matched cats. The adults come and watch the little tiger flopping about with the tabby cats in charges and turns and flips, and everyone gets along. No guilt. Just kindness. The good spirit of peasant mothers who recognize spirits in you and trust you and even encourage you to have your little wife who is too young to do anything but talk to and smile at and sit close to and look into eyes with, and isn’t she pretty in her white Czech top and dark skirt with flowered trim and little sandles. Nothing like a pretty face. And no judgment going on, just acceptance of what is holy and appropriate.

I’ll have to think further of where the dream took me. I woke up about 5. It’s Thursday evening. I feed the cat again, and run the dishwasher, packed full, through. I don’t feel up for going out, though I wish I did. Maybe writing, like brushing my teeth, will help.

There was a sorry note at the end of the dream, a bear’s paw, and one gets sad for animals. I wake before being able to get angry, but still a lasting and reasonable judgmental quality coming forward. There's the intention behind everything, the crucial thing. If you mean something with a good heart, then naturally it's okay. Is that always how the world works? No.

I remember now in the past year I was put in charge of entertaining a well-known French author and journalist. My friend had thrown a big Bordeaux dinner at the French Ambassador’s residence and needed to spend the day after getting things done. So with my high school French and his short English we walked out into cool late morning light down to the National Gallery, a pied, an agreed preference. It happened we were near Ford’s Theater, closed for renovation, but why not, stop in at the ‘House Where Lincoln Died,’ and see the little bed in a small non-descript back boarding house room. It takes two minutes. They stretched him out diagonally. There's a pillow, behind the plexiglass, with bloodstain long faded to sepia brown. (Or did I make that part up?)

On we went after that to the West Wing to tour the galleries. A fondness for the Venetians my friend brought across. He points out where paintings have been 'restored,' which is never good. We looked at a portrait of Napoleon in uniform, which I forget was either accurate or not so, as Michelet points out somewhere. Not the best anyway, but my friend studies it from behind his glasses, as if to say, 'well, not bad.' We talked a little of American History, and agreed to head up to the Portrait Gallery after lunch by Pei’s waterfall underground between East and West Wing. He had barbecued ribs, I had a piece of chicken, and we split a little bottle of California Cab.

Lincoln’s life masks, two of them, were on display, in a small dimly-lit room. There, on the wall, the portrait by Gardiner, a crack going through the lower corner of it, a picture of humor and humility and a lot of wear. One mask before assuming the office, and one close to the end, often mistaken for a death mask, which it is not. Cheeks have sunken, eyes wearily pocketed. The characteristic wart by the corner of the mouth, the strong set jaw, a powerful man aged into old, more skull than the viewer wants to admit, but still old Abe in living skin, eyes closed, tilted up at you upon something like a pillow angle. My friend, the journalist, who’d been held as a hostage in the Middle East for a number of years one doesn’t want to think about, I wondered what he thought as he peered brightly around the room, unfazed, curious, chipper, interested as he was later in who was blue and who was grey in another corner of the gallery. The faces of Lincoln… can you hear a voice? “No, I didn’t want to get old either. I too wanted to stay young and talk to pretty girls and not be old, but I did the best I could, took life as it came, and here I am today, and this is what I’ve got. This is where I am.” He used his image as PR, as a political tool to reassure people of his decency and justness. He would not have been vain about hiding his aging from handsome young fellow into prairie sage and beyond into old age. He wouldn’t have cared to hide that.

Friday, February 19, 2010

Ripple of Hope

Robert F. Kennedy at Indianapolis, quoting Aeschylus, gets one, i.e. me, every time, coming across a short documentary on PBS called Ripple of Hope. "I had a member of my family killed." He didn't say that very often. For those of us who would learn: "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." And he would have known that. He could quote it better than most, better, certainly, than me.

There is a form of Dallas that comes to each of us in our lives. It blindsides us. We live through it. And in doing so, living, t the experience teaches us to re-relate to our fellow beings on the planet, as if something selfish in us were diminished, a certain wry but real generosity to take its place, at least hold on to. The bright light of creation that flooded our beings in the womb swelling us with life and limb shines out again, as you could say it did from Bobby Kennedy, maybe particularly so on a cold night in Indianapolis before a crowd learning themselves some awful ominous news.

It makes you wonder, did Jesus have a troubled childhood? The flight to Egypt was probably harrowing enough for an impressionable kid. We don't get so much of that in a gospel, but maybe there's a source off-stage by which a young man learned, as he learned his wisdom, his humility, his eye for hubris, his 'happy are the meek,' his personal way of relating to people. He saw life differently, different from the habit of accumulation in its purposes. Shakespeare, who lived through greatly harrowing times, the persecution by Elizabeth of those of the 'old faith,' could also identify the habits that waste one's powers.

People get tit for tat. Boys and girls do it. Old and modern tribes do it, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. Oh, you don't like me, well, I don't like you either. He misses her vulnerability, she calls him a creep. (Jimi Hendrix renders it beautifully, 'slams the door in his drunken face,' as if quoting from Buddhist scripture, rhymed to 'disgrace.') Left behind in the escalation the children who like each other, wish to reveal themselves, want so badly to get along, sensing how beautiful that would be. If you come across your own Dallas in youth, then with years to think over what you did wrong and to be sorrowful and not vainly desirous, well, Dallas will come to you anyway, so you might as well be young when it comes, even if you wish you could enjoy life just a little bit before all that which makes you mature.

Or maybe a Dallas is one's own prodigal nature, misspent youth, lost opportunity, another version of Job. Chekov populated his stories with people going through it. Lincoln found joy in writing, enough to get him out of bed, as he went along learning from life in his own gentle way, walking toward his own bullet in the head. To express such things, as are found in 'fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray...', brought him just compensation for living in a world where things must play out in a certain way.

Somewhere you find courage and calm and peace of mind to face a crowd that feels it has nothing to lose in angry acts. A brother echoing the sentiments of his brother, distilled by time and experience and loss.

Monday, February 8, 2010

Nasty Bits

Anthony Bourdain strikes me as the first guy in a long time to make it okay to be a writer. Sensuous, both shrewd and gullible, given to excesses, keeping a sense of humor, his prose embodies the curiosity of those who live and write from experience, telling it as they see it. He is an encouraging sign, helping take down the walls of ostracism erected to cordon off the freaks who see writing as essential to living.

Each time I pick up his latest, I am struck by the real power of his observations and comparisons. They reach far beyond the chef world he portrays, far beyond their argot. I find myself repeatedly with the sensation that I am reading the time-tested wisdom of an ancient. And in a way, I'm not surprised, given the elemental earthiness of the restaurant's professions.

Perhaps writing is compensation for living, doing a lot of things, many of them stupid, many of them huge mistakes, many of them the cause of hangovers and a need to take anti-inflammatory pills, a life as a form of blank tablet to receive wisdom gained through it all. Mr. Bourdain comes across to the reader as an honest fellow, even if he might slightly exaggerate a bit here and there.

Some people, going through traumatic times and times of growing up tend to take it out on other people, doing things that hurt and stymie the innocent. This is not the spirit of Mr. Bourdain, who brings us generosity out of the chef's life, leaving us with clarity and less confusion about who we are and where.

Somehow we still manage to hold on to a gallant ideal, that through all our work and time, that there is, as Sherwood Anderson says, a prince within, struggling against odds, and that at the end of it we will meet up with our princess, who also has been kept a kind of captive, and that we will live finally happy ever after. Reading a good book, that's how one feels.

Mr. Bourdain's world of food and kitchens and late night chef habits have struck a chord with readers satisfying perennial interest. But hidden beneath the surface the tale is as much of one surviving as a thinker, a writer, a poet, and all those other habits that don't immediately pay the bills. We're not too far away from Dostoevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead. (There are, occasionally, reasons to take issue with authority, though of course there's a price to pay.) We're not too far away from the best book a writer will write, that one of how, maybe why, he or she became one. Mr. Bourdain shows us some of that courage.

Writers are, no doubt, deviants. Admittedly. Their work concerns itself with the processes of how people, maybe even they themselves, in a personal way, were made into deviants, pushed from the ranks of proper and polite society. Their work is to salvage the humanity within the wrecks of individual life, to hold on to the decent human being who once was and always will be. Perhaps their work shows the cruel inevitability of a small charge being transformed, through the law of its own movement, into a verdict, a judgment, a punishment. Bourdain lets the rest of see the deviance in the life of the professional kitchen, preserving its humanity as well.

Saturday, February 6, 2010

Monday, February 1, 2010

On Salinger

I was talking to my Mom the other day. J. D. Salinger came up. Usually, she enjoys Verlyn Klinkenborg's little nature pieces in the NY TImes. But she couldn't quite buy the reverence he gave up for Salinger's retreat to 90 acres in New Hampshire. It sounds a little egotistical, don't it, in some way? The way the Press can be, well, maybe you can't totally blame him. There is something dictatorial about the vanishing act.

It seems to me a writer is about observing truths, revealing the way people really are, the way life is. Perhaps a writer is speaking for some early form of human being, the real guts and blood animal with a soul, remembering the creature before modern stuff got shoveled in on top of him and his affairs. It's a writer's job then to come into conflict with general society, and maybe it's worth doing this personally. The person must have these conflicts, these gaps, or claim a real emotion that gets ignored in the vanity and egos of daily lives. These conflicts will occur in a way reminiscent of the Buddhist's 'proper profession, proper thinking, proper relationships, etc.' They will occur where we love the opposite sex, where we try to find a suitable job that hopefully brings in a fair compensation, where we try to maintain our health. It seems there's often someone telling us, 'no, if you really want to get what you want, you have to do this first, or you're not getting any.' Literally.

It's a crude instrument, conflict, and it causes pain. But without the disagreement or the contrary nature, the writer's being is watered down a bit. The things to say have less ambition to be worth noting. The writer, it seems, must rise above that which he suffers in the name of penning truth, and maybe too rise above the question of 'well, who picked you to bring us the TRUTH, aren't you being a bit of an egotist yourself?'

Holden Caulfield is someone who has conflicts. J.D. Salinger retreated, as if to hide his strange ways of conducting a personal life, that seems to have some cruelty to it, though maybe we wouldn't really know. How will that retreat have effect what he can write about? Roth stays with us, to bring us the dirty bastard a fellow really is, and just what an awful thing it is to have testosterone running around in your veins. And that strikes one as honest science, if he hasn't managed his own weird retreat unavailable to the rest of us.

One wonders, perhaps The Catcher in the Rye caught on as a kind of over-sensitivity, that initially seems admirable, but which masks a habit of seeing fault in others and not mainly one's own self. In so doing, putting blame elsewhere, one is never admitting the facts of their own faults and failures. (Maybe an accurate picture to draw of the adolescent mind, after all.) It was a good book for a certain age in America, one of domination. One grew up, in a youthful way, and then went on to a profession, in so doing claiming a right to the fine salary and the nice automobile, the house, the family, the right sort of American life, feeling perfectly justified in everything one does. And so, like his main character, Salinger could retreat into the comforts of his profession, no longer really facing the potential for his own personal failures.

Some writers, it seems, do face being failures and prolonged adolescence, in order to keep discovering, not sitting on laurels. Like a Dostoevsky, a prodigal Tolstoy, a Twain, a Kerouac, and probably, Shakespeare along with all the imprisoned gallants of his age. You fail, and then you drag your sorry behind to a writing desk you can't even probably afford, to discover a kind of beauty, maybe something ringing spiritual, of love.

Who knows... Maybe this was exactly Salinger was up to. Good for him. He kept writing.


After mulling it over for a few days, one cannot feel but a bit disrespectful of the dead to be in any way dismissive of Salinger. A good writer is someone naked and sensitive enough before the Cosmos to feel the pull of the various influences upon the world, the things that cause everything from ice ages to political upheavals, to shifts in consciousness, to wars, to economic highs and lows, but mainly the attitude of the human being. Lincoln achieved his excellence of prose through calling correctly the forces pulling on the people of a nation, as he does so well in the Second Inaugural, understanding that there are offenses that come into the world, that there is a division, that a struggle comes to the world. There's a certain sense of determinism, perhaps, that a rational thinker might take exception to, but who's to say, ultimately? Is it sun spots that cause wars? Well, no one can doubt that things move around up there, that the Earth wobbles in its rotations around the sun...

So a writer, a Salinger, through intuition and his own 'science' comes up with a character, a way of thought, a way of being, and it might well indeed be proper to think of the creation, a Caulfield, for instance, as a kind of oracle of a certain time and a certain place. Who got New York in the '40s better than Salinger, Gopnik points out astutely.

May the dead rest in peace, their time having come and gone, not without leaving something behind to think over.