long tryout

Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.

-- Milton, Lycidas

The Bronx is up but the Battery's down.

-- Betty Comden

I've never lived on this island before. Like any immigrant, I have my dreams but I don't know quite what to expect. My work is already here. Many of my friends are here. A lot of my fantasies are here. They say that if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.

Of course, you're supposed to come here as a tap-dancing ingenue from the stix. But I never tap-danced, and I learned to sing for my supper in other parts of the country. No longer young, I came to the island and got work, and as I worked I learned that I didn't like doing this work any more. So I went to school again and became a pastor, living all the while in the suburbs. Deep suburbs.

I lived in those suburbs on eight and a half acres of woods. I've watched storms that tore off limbs and hurled one trunk at another, leaving the field swathed in casualties. On the other side, I've seen a shoot grow out of a pine stump to three times my height. I knew every tree, the crossings of the marsh, the splittings and meldings of a tiny river and its tributaries. My kitty and I could take walks on the place. How will we deal with the loss? It's a new life, but also a death. The move makes real a fantasy; but it also is a grief, for I leave what I love.

I had a client on the eleventh floor of a building only a block or two away from where I shall live. He was 101 years old and had been blind for a decade, but he told me what I would see if I looked out his window. I might have seen my new home. It's on the ridge of the island, which slopes up gently on the west and down precipitously on the east. In the plain below the bluff, the Polo Grounds once stood, where Willie Mays made fabulous catches. Across the Harlem River used to stand the house that Ruth built, torn down so that millionaires can have luxury boxes. If I choose to reward their vandalism, I might walk across a bridge to the expensive imitation just up Jerome Avenue.

Half an hour from here by subway are the famous museums on the even more famous park. "Is it safe?" the tourist lady asks with two kids in tow. Yes, it's safe: there are shows and games and concerts, and walkers and runners and cyclists, and people cross the park every day, emerging on the other side unharmed.

I've gone to school here, worked here for eight years. I've climbed in and out of subways, mounted and dismounted from buses, and said, "I ought to live here. I feel like I live here. But I don't live here. It will take me an hour and half to get home." Traveling from one client to another on the West Side, I've said to myself, these are my people. Some of my work will now be a few blocks away from my front door. If I go to a show or out to dinner, I can come home and change clothes, take a shower. Leave off my heavy, even heavier-looking, laptop bag.

There's a part of me that's all a-quiver to come here at last. If you make it here you can make it anywhere. As a juvenile I thought I would come here to conquer the stage, looking forward to triumphs in Shakespeare and Chekhov, which were the only forms of showbiz I could imagine succeeding in. But I never came here, since I couldn't imagine how to make a living. Turns out I did learn to sing for my supper, but not here or anywhere close to here, and my songs were a long way from classical, sung in a country where no one knows that actors can live. I stood in for cops and truck-drivers, farmers and befuddled American dads, in commercials and training films and trade shows and syndicated TV. I'm no ingenue hoping to tap dance her way down Forty-Second Street. I'm not a star. I'm not going to be a star. I'm not even in showbiz. But I have made it here: I have a job and a place to live, though like Milton's shepherd I must find "other groves and other streams." After the longest of try-outs, I've come to New York, and I've got a piece of the town. The Bronx is up but the battery's down.

unoriginal sin

Few are guilty but all are responsible.

-- Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets

We don’t choose how, when or where we come into the world. We don’t choose our social locations, they’re not our fault. Heidegger said we are geworfen (thrown) here; and wherever we stop rolling, there we are. Whichever of our faces first sees light, that’s how people first will take us; and we’re reacting before we’ve fully entered the scene.

It’s not that our course is predicted, but that the range of chance is specific to our point of insertion in the world. It’s as if we fall like raindrops on one side or other of a continental divide, and the courses of the other watershed are not ours. But there seem to be many divides, many compartments and containers of our long fall to the sea.

In any case, I’m not to blame for my social location. Nor are you. I am responsible for how I comport myself in my course; but I am not guilty of deciding to be what I am. Just look at me: signally white and male, blond and blue-eyed, genteelly poor, educated beyond utility, mentally precocious, emotionally withdrawn and physically awkward. These are characteristics of the location in which I first appeared, a combination of my genes and my upbringing, too late to be undone now. I can revolt, but the plot of my revolt is chosen, its scenario written. I can improve myself by filling in my deficiencies, but my leading attributes continue to lead.

A friend said, “My presence precedes me.” Wherever she goes, she steps into assumptions. Her part in the scene is already written and other actors are in motion before she gets both feet on stage. She is younger than I and female and black. I wear authority casually, but she wears it deliberately. Our styles matter not: our particular music has been heard before our words and deeds. There will be some who like my music, and some will like hers. But in either case some will not like it. We are both in trouble before we begin.

I once lived in a house that had settled for two hundred years, and all its floors sloped toward the central chimney. You couldn’t put a marble down anywhere -- it would roll down the incline. The world is like that, not fallen as the ancients said but warped by history. There are no level floors. There’s no neutrality; you have to hold the marble in place, or else it rolls. And that’s why justice is so difficult. The goddess is supposed to be blind-folded, but in what world could that work? she must see how the floors are warped before she can make fair decisions.

Abstract equality alone could not liberate my brothers and sisters of African descent. The floors were too warped in favor of people who look like me, who had inheritances and educational credentials and family histories and cultural capital. To keep all the marbles from rolling into their accustomed places, we undertook compensatory practices that go under the name of Affirmative Action. Some of our black neighbors say that these actions did a lot of good; but others are uneasy about mandates that isolate them as particularly helpless Americans. It’s awkward. Nothing we can actually do is exactly right. There’s no progress for oppressed people without special efforts -- Smith’s “invisible hand” doesn’t serve this purpose.

Nothing we can actually do is exactly right. My country is now making choices about intervention in a so-called country called Libya, a scene of murder and violence. None of the options were very good. All were potentially disastrous, politically and morally. Niebuhr would remind us that doing nothing is no escape from unpleasant choices. Doing nothing is just another of the nasty options for which we will face judgment.

And this is what the theologians have so badly botched by naming it original sin -- this feeling that no matter what we do, it’s not exactly right, and could be horribly wrong. Though all of us are commanded to be just, none of us is worthy to represent justice. But we are not guilty of our imperfection. The wrongness of the world is not in us but in its sculpting by what has always already transpired. Our teeth are on edge because of the sour grapes our parents bit into. And they in turn may have done the best they could in a world already set on bias. So on and so forth.

I did not enslave anybody, nor did I lynch anyone, nor ever set out to deny others their rights. I am not one of Heschel’s few who are guilty. But I am responsible. And what is this responsibility? To love kindness, do justice and walk humbly.

If I am to walk humbly, I cannot expect that I will rid the world of injustice. I might help to dismantle a particular racist system, for instance; but I cannot end racism any more than I can end greed or power-lust. The possibility of sin in a slanted world will never disappear; and our souls are in greatest peril when we think we can end sin.

sailing out

. . . And my shining men no more alone

As I sail out to die.

-- Dylan Thomas, “Poem on His Birthday”

The Celts sang of Blessed Isles, where there was no disease or death: but it’s hard to tell in the legends and songs whether those islands were a geographic place or a heaven. Could a brave navigator like Brendan find them by sailing after the sun, and by disembarking live forever? Or did one have to die to get there?

When I was a child ships were transportation, and I crossed the Atlantic twice in Cunard liners. Though my tourist-class family were barred from the ballroom where freds and gingers danced and dined, we ate from the same kitchen as the upper crusties, and the same thirty-knot breezes blew us off course as we shuffleboarded on the open deck. For a boy of nine it was a great romance, but the romance ended in a real place where time resumed. We knew the day, the time and place of disembarkation.

Long before fred and ginger, when ships had to drive bargains with the wind, sailing out of harbor was an aweful project with no firm timetable – and no ballrooms. The voyage was an eternal poem of life itself, its danger and uncertainty. It’s not a bad figure of speech. We’re all sailing out: we leave the marked-out channel for a wilderness without roads or buoys, and for a succession of other harbors, until one day we drop over the horizon.

I travel a part of the way with people who are sailing out. I learn – that is, I knew before but now know it feelingly – that many have sailed out before me, and some shall go today. I am in good company. I learn to be grateful.

I haven’t made my recent deadlines, but this is still the time of year when light begins its return, having repented its abandonment on a day called solstice. In this still dark time our hope is all before us.

I am grateful to have been set afloat in this sort of a body, with its desires and disgusts, lusts and longings. Outside of Kant’s categories the world might seem very different, but I am happy that I could hear and see, touch and taste and think this side of the wall. Here I can taste bitter beer and stinky cheese, and feel the pressure of the kitty’s feet against my thigh as he lies on the couch. This side of the wall I get to hear the music of Bach, and Shakespeare and Gershwin. I’m proud that I belong to the same species and lived on the same planet as Mandela, Voltaire, Yeshua and Leonardo, whose names and exploits are visible from my location, and who project the transcendent within our categories, speaking what cannot be spoken. Wittgenstein said that we should pass over in silence what we cannot speak. But silence can be very loud, as the poets and bards and prophets have taught us.

In the beginning there was void, and only when certain distinctions were made did form appear. “Where were you,” said the voice from the whirlwind, “when I laid the earth’s foundation?” I wasn’t there at creation, when the dimensions were marked off, “while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy.” So the real question is not, why is it thus? but, why is there something rather than nothing? I find that I’m invested in the something. The voyage is not a bad figure of speech for the something. Both Tennyson and Kazantzakis sent Ulysses away from Ithaca again to “sail beyond the sunset.”

In order to get home, Ulysses had to stuff his sailors’ ears with wax to block the siren song, a song that words can only disappoint, but that we keep talking about. He allowed only himself to hear, relying on others to protect him from his inspired self. “Tie me to the mast and don’t let me go,” he said to his sailors, “no matter what I say. Really. I mean it.” And they took him at his word. At his first word.

But no one seems able to imagine his subsequent domestic life in Ithaca. After all, he had heard the sirens, and was ruined. His son, “centered in the sphere/of common duties, decent not to fail,” could be left in charge. Perhaps that is the privilege of old age, if one is lucky – to leave the spiral of prudence and ambition, and steer a straight course toward voices once heard and rejected. Captain Picard would say, “Engage!”

affective disorder

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.

-- Isaiah 9:2 (NRSV)

April is the cruelest month.

-- T. S. Eliot

I used to go crazy in May. It was a kind of seasonal affective disorder. The opposite of the kind so well-known. Too much light.

For the greater part of my life I lived on the academic calendar. The year began in September and ended in May. The Autumn, when nature dies and falls, was my time of new beginnings, virtuous intentions and clean slates. The Winter, when the poets say nature sleeps under a white blanket, was my time to work, accomplish much, and put my ledgers in the black. Summer, when nature outrages with productivity, was my time to moan and suffer. But Spring, when nature wakes and stretches its limbs, was death for me.

Too much light. In May everything is finished, and the weather is mild, there’s perfume in the air, and it was all far too easy. Everything is done now, the people you did it with are dispersing, and you can’t remember why it seemed worth your effort to do it. You’re losing your grip, but also losing the things you had gripped so fiercely. It’s all coming apart, integrity dissolving, and the members of this body may never be regathered. You’re dying.

In Spring, they say, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love, but there’s nothing light about that turning. One may go mad with love. Or with its lack. The Spring of the Year, according to The Historian, is when kings go out to battle,* but David stayed behind and played those games with Bathsheba that so cursed his family.

Too much light. When I was so young that my parents read bedtime stories to me, the change to daylight savings time was fearful. Shocking that they would put me to bed while the sun hung over the horizon, casting brilliant shadows into my bedroom. How could I sleep amidst such clarity? In a child’s book meant to tell me what kind of thing God was, the illustration was of children running over a hill, under a yellow disc of sun. Framed in my window was that disc. Was that disc God? Was God looking at me in my bed? It seemed a bit much, asking me to sleep under such circumstances.

My bodily economy was set to Winter. Cold and darkness slapped my face in a way that I knew how to refute. So the sun’s retreat was always a joy to me, for I knew that the sun extinguishes all candles. The first Autumn evening when the sun set before I got home from school was a promise – that a time was coming when lights could shine because the Light had disappeared. Those dark evenings were my home.

Now my body chemistry is changing. Experience may override a youthful reflex with history: I know I have survived more than sixty Springs, though some of them I thought I would not. The balance of hormones, nature’s fancy chemicals, changes with age. And I suspect that one of my now daily medications has altered my emotional topography.

I no longer fend off madness as midsummer approaches. But in November, as I see the dark advancing on the day’s routine – the time of leaving the house, the time of boarding the train, the time of shutting down my work, the time of return – I may notice as I climb the steps that I have carried doom as my companion through the day, and the dark outside that window seems a wall. Then I ask myself, what doom is this, and what am I confined to? And there is no answer, because there is no actual message in these images, just a mood induced by chemicals.

In this I have become like many others, who find the time of Advent difficult to bear. I have learned what it is to walk the narrow passage of a Neolithic tomb, into a chamber where the sun will find us only on the day it stops its flight and promises to come back, the day called solstice. In that chamber we learn in a tangible way what the prophet imagined – that the light doesn’t shine everywhere. It shines on “those who lived in a land of deep darkness.” If you don’t find your place of darkness, the light won’t find you.

They won’t hear the good news in the palace. They haven’t got a clue in the palace. In the well-lit apartments of the court, they’re all in a tizzy. They have to ask itinerant wise guys what the buzz is. And the wise guys, once they’ve escaped this pollution of illumination to the place where a new star’s light can be seen – they go home by another way.

If this seems confusing, it’s supposed to be. Get used to it. Go home by another way.

*2 Samuel 11:1

balloon deathmarch

Knock – it’ll be opened for you.

-- Matthew 7:7 (ASV)

I wouldn't join any club that would have me as a member.

-- Groucho Marx

“Keep it light.”

“Keep moving.”

“Have a good time, folks.”

“Happy Holidays.”

So say the cops as we trudge, in the track prepared for us, around the Museum of Natural History. Not that I’m gong anywhere. On my left is the museum’s fence, and on the right are the barricades that keep us from the street. I can’t take an honest step. It will take about an hour to make our way around the museum and back to the subway. But neither can I stand still: I am carried along in a human ooze. Here in the open air, my claustrophobia is activated.

Tomorrow is the big parade. That’s why we’re here.

At the museum’s backside, where it interrupts W. 79th St., the cops direct us across Columbus Ave., then across 79th St. and back across to the museum side of Columbus Ave., just below the point where we left it. Here in this tango of maximum mutual interference, interrupting traffic and interrupted by it, the police exhort us to keep it light, and to have a good time.

On my right, over the heads of the masses, I see twisted limbs of gargantuan balloons, bound against their growing buoyancy. They are the purpose of this pilgrimage. On the backs and shoulders, and in the arms of marchers, are the children for whose joy the pilgrimage was undertaken. Some of the children are crying, some asleep. Some are asking when we can go home. That is what I am asking. Not for a while yet – there’s no easy escape.

Once upon a time this must have been a good idea. The first ones who long ago wandered backstage before the show, watching the gassy figures glacially quicken and rise, ready to take to the air for the morrow’s procession – they got a look at the parade without the travel and the jostling for position and the fatigue, and without the long, taxing escape. Why go to all that trouble, when you can get there first, see the stars of the procession before the vulgar masses do, at your own pace and in an order of your own choosing? It was an insider’s way to the festival. Then the word got out. Then all these other people showed up. I’m one of those other people. It’s not what it used to be.

Television. That’s the ticket. It’ll be on two networks tomorrow morning. Why didn’t I think of that? I can see all the balloons, if I want to, from the couch in my den. I can see them very much as I would from the barricade; but I won’t have to camp out overnight to claim my view.

There are a lot of balloon deathmarches in the world. Things that must have once been a good idea, but now everybody does it and it’s not what it used to be at all. But nobody lets the air out of the balloon. Nobody exposes the fraud. Or if they do, no one believes them. People still pile on, because as far as they know it’s still The Thing. They want it still to be The Thing.

If you’re now hearing about a miraculous opportunity, it’s gone already. People buy the stock after its price goes up. Or take out mortgages on overpriced houses they can’t pay for. Or choose a college based on its reputation of two decades ago.

We bought big into automobiles because of a dream of mobility. We all wanted freedom, which to us meant going exactly where we wanted to go, exactly when we wanted to go there. It’s now obvious, and yet we haven’t learned it, that when everybody tries to go where they want when they want, nobody gets to go where and when they want. We get instead to breathe each other’s exhaust fumes, idling in a parking lot like the California 405.

The Great Lakes are lined with the shacks of people who dreamed of a country house on the lake.

Everybody in the social set I grew up in wanted their kids to go to Harvard. But if everybody went to Harvard, it wouldn’t be any more what makes people want to go to Harvard. That’s why we have land grant universities. That’s why, here in New York, we have City College.

But how can I say a thing like that? I’m a liberal. I’m supposed to say everybody can have the dream.

Well, everybody can dream. That’s their right. That’s the American Way. Everybody gets to wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are, and so we owe to everybody the infrastructure of dreaming. But everybody can’t realize the same dream. When they try, it becomes a very bad dream indeed.

There’s no short cut. You can’t just pile on to someone else’s dream, no matter how well promoted. You have to discover a particular dream, the one that awaits you. It doesn’t have to be an original dream, or a fancy one. It might speak from a very humble thing, like a bush in the desert, burning and not consumed by fire. But if it’s your dream, it won’t leave you alone.

funny dad

Congratulations to those who mourn, for they can be comforted.

-- Matthew 5:4

I have laughed in the face of death. Not my own. But perhaps when my time comes, if I learn by example . . .

It seemed like the thing to do. They had gathered round their father who was dying. And they laughed.

All his children were there: three daughters and a son. When the son said he was an atheist, I said that’s all right, I’m a Unitarian and most people think I’m an atheist too. It went over real big. They guffawed. They thought I was a real wit.

He was only distantly Catholic, and the children were mixed – another distant Catholic, an Episcopalian, a spiritual eclectic – and the atheist son. But they thought their dad should have the last rites of a Catholic.

I explained the options. Because my priestly colleague wasn’t working that day, I could refer to the priest of the hospital for sacraments, but I don’t control his schedule and couldn’t predict when he would come. Or I could do my own ritual of Anointing, from the prayer-book of the Protestant church I was raised in – a measure that even some Catholic families find to be of comfort. One of them thought she recalled that, while dad was in the hospital but had not yet come to the hospice ward, the priest of the hospital came by to give him sacraments. Others of them thought she was confused about this.

They were sharp and educated people, together for a common reason – they loved their father. They argued with vigor but without anger, and reached a conclusion: I would refer to the priest of the hospital, and then as we waited for him to come I would provide my rituals as well.

When I came back, that’s when the real fun began. They told stories. This sharing of memory is what we call in the trade “Life Review,” but I didn’t have to lead it. Their dad had been a funny man. They told jokes that he had told, and then they told jokes about him. Every now and then they would touch his arm. “Did you hear that, Dad?” They showed me pictures of him, at different places and times with differing combinations of them, and in the pictures people weren’t just doing a say cheese smile – they were laughing. So I said You guys laugh a lot, I want to join your family. And they said Come on in, there’s room. And we laughed some more.

And just at this moment in the doorway appeared Father Francis of the hospital. He is young and handsome and, like his namesake, can charm birds out of trees. He was in the mood to do so. We were all glad to see him. And we all said so at once. And we all laughed some more.

And Fr. Francis could see that this particular angel of death had turned out to be a comedian. So he made his way by stages to the bedside, sensing the mood of each grieving child, respecting the reserve of the atheist son, listening intently to their stories and wisecracks, laughing with them and making a few jokes of his own. And very lightly, without making a big deal of it, without quashing the celebration of a good life well lived, asking the assistance of the children when he could, he performed the Sacrament of Anointing for a dying father.

If you don’t do this work you don’t know how many emotions there are at a deathbed, and that only some of them are sad. There are cries and noise, but only some of it is weeping. A deathbed can be a merry place. A deathbed can be a school of gratitude for life.

A miracle does not contradict nature; it is, in the oldest sense, a thing to be marveled at. Faith is a way of facing the future, knowing that though my way of being in the world keeps changing, something marvelous can still happen. I left that room exalted. If my deathbed can be like this one, I shall not be afraid.

Congratulations to those who mourn, indeed. They have comforted me.

moral art

O gods . . .

Come down and redeem us from virtue.

--Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Dolores”

I have my grandpa’s knees. When I stand up, I channel him.

He hiked around his farm pointing to every shed and fence-post. His afternoon’s joy was to walk into banks, warehouses and stores where he was known as a customer or a creditor. “How you doin,’ Mr. C?” they would say.

But he flinched when he stood up from a chair. Bent at knees and waist, he could only shuffle his first dozen paces. Knee reconstruction might have extended his life. They can do these things much better nowadays, and someday I may schedule such repairs for myself.

If you do business in Manhattan and you are not wealthy, you walk. That’s why fewer Manhattans than Iowans are obese: you can’t drive from door to door. On every workday I walk a couple of miles. I go up and down hills. I climb two dozen or so staircases. This is not easy for the man with his grandpa’s knees.

But I will not be downhearted from a bit of ache. There are blue gelcaps available at the pharmacy. And there is of course my skill and discipline of movement.

I took my physical education not as a kid on playing fields, but as an adult in the performance studio, desperate to appear in public without humiliation. I wanted virtuoso skills, but the skills that made most difference were humble ones – speaking with words rather than against them, falling down and getting up, sitting and standing, walking and waiting. Knowing when to do a thing and when not yet. Doing one thing at a time, and completely. Learning that the strongest way is also easiest.

Transferring from the L to the Lex at Union Square, I must climb three flights of stairs before descending one. I’ve lost a few pounds a year for several years now. I think I left them at Union Square.

I look up that flight of stairs, and I know that when the moment comes I must not hold back. I imagine myself already at the summit. I must sweep to the top not in so many steps but in a single impulse. I put my knees and ankles and hips and feet in the same plane, I lean into the task, and launch. This is the way to get it done, rising above obstacles of age, decay and god-given awkwardness. How wise I am, how brave.

But now some idiot has stopped on the fifth step. In a red rage I halt. Nobody gave the order to halt, you bozo!

Sometimes the malefactor is an able young person, dawdling in a daydream, reading her blackberry, lounging up the stairs in what she imagines is a style. But sometimes it’s someone older and more overweight than I. Sometimes the malingerer has a cane and a limp.

Get over it! I’m no spring chicken either. I’m tired and I have places yet to go. I’ve got my grandpa’s knees to deal with, and I was doing a really good job until you dropped the ball. Do you see me halting and huffing and puffing, making a display of my difficulty? But you – you’ve made this worse for both of us. You’ve made my graceful ascent into ten laborious steps. By what right do you sabotage my art?

Such, in the flash of an instant, before civilization comes to my rescue, is my inner text. I learn two lessons in the face of my own savagery. First, that my immortal soul is most at risk as I am trotting out my virtues. Second, that there is a line of difference, below which suffering has no reward, and heroism no traction. If you live above the line, you’re tempted to cut no slack for those who live below it. Why can’t they just suck it up and work harder?

The great hymns to Hard Work are sung by people who have no experience of it. They ride on horseback through deathly fields of labor, work that wrecks the body and breaks the soul, while cheating the worker of his sacrifice’s value. Too big to fail, the riders smirk at those who provide their luxury, imagining that the difference between I and hey you there is one of character. They dream in the saddle that they are self-made.

I am both right and wrong in my moral art of stair-climbing. Right because I ought to transcend my pain rather than fetishizing it. Wrong because others lack the luxury of my choices. For some, there is no return to the right way of using their limbs, no reward for the discipline of climbing stairs, no virtuous cycle of weight loss and vascular gain but only a deathly spiral of unrefreshed fatigue and tissue damage. I ought to carry myself erect, but some cannot. “Another day older and deeper in debt,” goes the song.

I am one of Barbara Ehrenreich’s “managerial middle class.” We are bought off in genteel poverty with a fantasy of mobility, convinced that we have survived so far, and will some day rise above our mortal danger, by talent and effort. That’s the way someone wants it. We’re exploitable. We fear that with a single slip we’ll fall below the line, our floor that is a ceiling for others, below which virtue meets no reward. There are many slaves who work for wages. Imagining that we are in control, we can be cruel to those denied the fantasy.

Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. Shall the truth make us free?