“The Russian Likes To Remember…

Jun 17, 2021

“The Russian likes to remember, he does not like to live.”  Chekhov

Living is fraught with uncertainty.  Living is fraught with peril.   Living is nothing if not a stew of ambiguities.  Living demands effort.  Living is work.  Living is always poised near the cliff of annihilation even on a sunny spring afternoon of a near ideal temperature.  Living is fleeting, always charged with the dynamic bodily necessities of tomorrow and the day after.  Living involves real other people who are endlessly disappointed and disappointing and who are never quite what they seem, so we are always shaking our heads over what poor judges of character we have been

I think that I may be more Russian than I have ever realized.

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1591 Compton Road

Jun 12, 2021

1591 Compton Road   When you  live in a house, you hardly see it.  Of course, you see it, but you take seeing it for granted,  It becomes a habit.  You see it automatically, but without intention, without attention, without appetite or invention.  It is just there which approximates not being there.  Then you add time and distance, all the accumulated incidents, accidents, passions and pleasures and defeats of living.  It is submerged.  Or better yet, it is buried in your life.   Then a friend shows you a picture he has taken in the far off city of your birth.  A picture of the house, changed but recognizably itself.  The hundred year old elms are gone.  The luxuriant rhododendrons and mountain laurels flanking the steps up to the front porch are gone.  But the house, with its two dour gray wings, one a library, one a screened in porch, is more than reminiscent.    There is a shock  of recognition, like a depth charge in my mind.  Not only is the house reanimated, rescued from the accustomed dullness of habit, but so many memories come flooding back of when I lived in that house and all that I lived in that house.  The house is suddenly living and ferociously so.  I have trouble sleeping the night after I see the picture, this portrait of a being with whom I was intimate.  Or perhaps the tense is wrong : this portrait of a being with whom I am intimate.   I do not simply wander the house and the yard, but also the halls of time.  I smell the... read more

Henri Michoux

Sep 23, 2018

When we lived in Paris in the early fifties of the last century when I was a little boy of six, seven, maybe eight, my father was a mystery.   For me as a child (and perhaps for all the rest of me as well) everything was mystery. It surged before me in sensory immediacy, just as it was, yet always changing, full at once of caprice and the immutability of actually being.   Looking back I see that we lived well as citizens of a conquering/liberating power, even though we had no refrigerator and the furnace worked intermittently.   We were privileged, an anomalous status for people who belonged to a faith whose remnants were just clinging to life and trembling with knowledge of the once and future terror. The Second World War was not truly over.   It raged on in the heads and hearts of so many who were silent, including my father. The dead had met their deaths by combat, by extermination, by accident, by hidden acts of cruelty intimate beyond naming and yet they were not dead because the living clung to them, scrapped desperately to reach them and failed. The living were thrown back on their own minuscule and diminished resources. This was all they had as their dreams in nights of fitful sleep kept reminding them of the radical amputations they had suffered. Three or four times of a Sunday afternoon my father and I walked along the banks of the Seine.   I had no idea what he was thinking nor even did I have an idea of trying to form an idea of what he... read more

Guanacaste, 2017

Sep 21, 2018

I’ve just turned 71. The reversal of the digits from 17 to 71 took 54 long years, 54 short years, 54 inscrutable years.   There is no way to make a map of the way. So many people I’ve loved are dead and gone and yet alive and not gone in my mind. When I was 17 the outer population was greater than the inner population. At 71 it is exactly the reverse – the inner population is greater than the outer population. I don’t have to spill blood libations to court them.   They come in my dreams, looking exactly like themselves from long ago and faraway.   My Great Uncle Manny wears the forty year old blue shoes back again in fashion. He loved them and loved the revolution that brought them back. I loved them because he loved them. That was enough. We get swept up in the currents and eddies of other people’s lives.   That is what love does, also what hate does. But how does the dream machine hold so much – shoes, faces, voices, the banks of the Seine, my father’s pipes and his Latakia tobacco? I appear sometimes as myself with and without a befuddled expression. And women, too, starting with my mother and proceeding from there, I have been listening and listening down the years and down the decades. I have heard voices from outside and voices from inside.   I have heard the voices of some who lived and died before I was born, some long before. Ancients have been my contemporaries. I have tried to make a music of what I have heard... read more

One Note

Mar 10, 2018

In the night he played the organ of sorrows whose vast pipes spanned continents and whose music was time, the sea in which he swam and dissolved to become a wail sounding the deep where beginning and end are one note... read more

Tanzania

Jun 5, 2016

The strangest thing about Tanzania was how familiar it was to me in February of 2016 after a gap of nearly fifty years. 1. I left Tanzania in 1969. When I was there long ago, I was young and Tanzania was young. Now I am old and Tanzania is still young, very young, with a huge portion of its population under 20. It has an enormous and stunningly diverse youthful population that needs an education, work, a sense of purpose and meaning, pathways to dignity and integrity, pathways not so easy to find in the maze of the modern world in which traditions have been radically disrupted. My very first trip to East Africa took place when I was eight. I travelled through the portal of triangular postage due stamps issued by the Nyassa Company of Mozambique, then a Portuguese colony.   These stamps showed wildlife within their escalloped borders. I remember giraffes and zebras, each with a hint of the savannah behind them. These hints conveyed the vastness of the savannah and so, too, the existence of another world in which I was wholly absorbed. I would have loved to own these stamps, but knew better than to ask because I knew we did not have the money for such luxuries. So they remained in their glass case at Halle’s.   In retrospect this was a stroke of good fortune.   The imaginative experience remained free of the weight of concrete possession.   So it possessed me all the more deeply. I recently looked for these very stamps and found them figured on the internet, even as they still figure in my imagination.... read more

Chungwo

Aug 30, 2015

Chungwo, China, Middle Kingdom – but my sense is “Middle Kingdom” may not give the full flavor of the name.   Kingdom that is the center of everything may be better. Or simply center of the world. Bicycles are gone. Urban China belongs to cars in bewildering numbers being driven so assertively that it seems that a twenty four hour game of chicken is being played on the roads.   The pedestrian does not have the right of way and the carnage is considerable. Vehicles collide with vehicles and vehicles collide with people on foot.   You have to be very alert crossing the street.   On the last thirty years China has built a road system that spans the greater part of the nation. This has involved the construction of innumerable bridges, overpasses and tunnels. Much of motor vehicle travel in China feels modern, although there are anomalies.   On a road outside Pingyao a shepherd and his working dog are moving a flock of some hundreds of sheep. This brings to an unhappy halt convoys of heavy trucks headed in both directions. Cars and trucks produce carbon emissions far beyond what bicycles do.   This is not good for the air.   In fact, the air in cities is often miasmatic, obscuring the sky, threatening the health of the lungs that breathe it.   Of course, the burning of coal, often coal that is dirty, is responsible for much of the degradation of air quality. The energy is needed to power development, but it comes with a bundle of costs.   Could development be smarter and slower? “Ah,” says one of our local guides one morning in... read more

Jail

Aug 21, 2015

At the very height of the financial crisis as the sub-prime mortgage bubble burst,the federal government was spending some tens of thousands of dollars to send to jail a patient, let us call him Hugo, who had been involved in a piece of financial chicanery to finance his education.   Hugo was guilty as charged,  although he argued that he had been subtly entrapped. Did Hugo lie about a number of things? Of course he did.   Once the indictment came down, Hugo was deserted by almost all those he thought were his friends and allies. There were a few exceptions, for which Hugo was deeply grateful. But he was terribly hurt by  a shunning that deprived him of his social and work milieux.   A man of frail self-esteem to start with, this shunning was devastating and dangerous. It made him think ill of himself against his own will.   The prosecution and the subsequent incarceration were costly. They were justified on the grounds of the importance of protecting against “moral hazard.”   Less than thirty thousand was involved in the patient’s financial chicanery, not billions.  The little man takes the fall. The big guys smile, apologize, asking for permission to do it again, and move on to do it again. Hugo was fully aware of this.   With a rueful smile of his own, Hugo remarked that he had always been a little guy.   Upon conviction, Hugo was suicidal, overwhelmed by sorrow, shame and dread.   He had grown up in the midst of South America’s most bitter civil war . The dead were a part of everyday experience. He was in... read more
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