saw someone today who looked exactly like you; funny how the years go by

Winter blog, it is nearly winter again. Well, no, it was almost seventy degrees today. But the sun set before Prairie Home Companion began, and that means winter in my book. Fuck.

Once I thought I had mastered these quiet Saturday evenings at home, but lately they feel disquieting. I have struggled to focus through some of my favorite things (aforementioned Keillor, Dillard, Fellini) and I suppose this is no different from the summertime, but it is nice to assign some agency to the seasons again; long days always leave me feeling in control of my life, which is really a horrible idea when you get right down to it.

So yes, five months of these garbage evening thoughts. Silly, you just got back from Paris, why are you upset? Ah, five months to explore that, I suppose!

Only now would you long for the ancient boughs:

“That’s what makes me sad: Life is so different from books. I wish it were the same.”

It’s been awhile since I walked all the way through one of Schenley Park’s pedestrian trails, and it struck me how tunneled one is within them in the deep summertime, bent leaves making foliage roofs of everything. When one gets to the other side and is presented with daylight again, it is somehow surprising, as though light is a forgettable thing, like a car key or a memory.

From Agamemnon (AC’s tr.):

O river of home my Skamander
I used to dream by your waters
now soon enough
back and forth on the banks of the river of hell
I will walk with my song torn open

Wasted good silverware on you:

Lately I’ve been considering the variety of options that will be available to me should I fail at this one immediate goal that I’ve been veering my life towards for the past six years (or so). It is not an insignificant question, because I will have saved bunches of monies I had planned to use to continue my immoderate consumption of whiskey and italian cheeses through those hypothetical, lean re-schooling years. I had thought I would take that money and holiday in Reykjavik or Hong Kong, but such adventures would only exacerbate the troubles on my return, the dead-end job and Pittsburghy-ness of it all. Really I know I will apply to silly policy programs and be a boring adult like my father, albeit poorer. But this morning I was thinking I should just move to Montreal, learn a second language washing dishes and drinking wine in parks or frozen hotels, marry some girl with no English. It’s pretty, the future.

In other news, I thought I’d killed a large fly in my kitchen last night, but awoke to find it had crawled out of the trash can and onto the tiled floor to die. Urgh. Later I cut my finger on an overly-sharp Cuisinart pizza cutter. Technology, my finger is not pizza! Now the coffee is done. So long, winter blog.

Terribly behind on this, I know. Do you suppose I could cram all the things I’ve wished to write here the past few weeks into one post? Probably, though likely incoherently. Instead, just a quote I’ve thought about a lot today:

…it’s funny how that piece of see-through [plastic bag] blue he holds to his face looks how I think a future would, waving like that, moving start to finish, leading off into space.

–Jayne Anne Phillips, from her new novel, Lark and Termite.

And so it must seem to the girl narrating that section of the book, but lately I can’t see it like that at all, but instead more the way she sees it later in the passage, as the space cleared by the distance she puts between herself and those around her. There is probably some truth to that; more, anyway, than to the fairy-tale teleology that sings through our minds spring nights, sighing ourselves past sleeplessness.

It’s all a bit too much. Someone flip a coin and tell me what comes next.

When the Regime ordered that books with dangerous teachings
Should be publicly burnt and everywhere
Oxen were forced to draw carts full of books
To the funeral pyre, an exiled poet,
One of the best, discovered with fury, when he studied the list
Of the burned, that his books
Had been forgotten. He rushed to his writing table
On wings of anger and wrote a letter to those in power.
Burn me, he wrote with hurrying pen, burn me!
Do not treat me in this fashion. Don’t leave me out. Have I not
Always spoken the truth in my books? And now
You treat me like a liar! I order you:
Burn me!

–Brecht, undated (let’s call it ‘39)

This has happened once before. I remember with a certain fondness those weeks between Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 when, so completely convinced was I that the civilization was about to topple in on itself from the force of climate change and four more years of the [Former] Occupant [of the White House]–remember him?–that this anguish fell into all my work, making my journals wholly unreadable in their silly concern. Since then I have, rather over-dramatically (as 19-year olds tend to be), destroyed said journals for unrelated reasons, but take my word on this.

Point being, one cannot help feeling that way these days, much as Brecht must have felt in the thirties, watching as his writing hopelessly tried to erect a wall to protect these people he loved from the abject misery he saw set to befall them. Well, here we are, friends–so why do I find everything so beautiful these days? Why am I so very excited that I have new furniture–a study, if you will–and am reading so much poetry and my life has come to resemble that of a character from a Mike Leigh film (sorry) and that in a few weeks spring will begin, fitting and starting as it will in this town?

As you know, being on the internet, there was this gentleman on CNBC earlier this week flipping out re: bho’s mortgage plan, and while we all laughed, I felt a certain kinship with him: how can we, any of us, grasp how bad things are going to get in the next few years? That I am excited about conspicuous consumption or that he fails to understand the way housing value operates (newflash, pal–foreclosure are bad for everyone, not just black people!) in our economy isn’t particularly relevant; it’s symptomatic of a larger human condition, to not see what is around the bend.

But it’s healthy, isn’t it? I certainly don’t wish to revisit that 2005 mindset, and surely it is easier for CNBC anchors to attack the President than it is to admit that even though his plan is The Right Thing to Do, we are fucked regardless and if your retirement plan/life savings/house isn’t gone yet, just wait six months for those Option ARM mortgages to kick in–so we pretend. “I love to pretend,” I say, and surely that is true as ever. I don’t know what will happen, but I can make a pretty good guess of it. I’d just prefer not to, is all.

Had a good quote about collective guilt lying about to end this, but I seem to have misplaced it in my mind. I’ll erase this if I find it; otherwise, I promise to talk about birds next time. Have I told you yet how ornithologists used to measure migrations by taking binoculars to the moon on cloudless nights and counting flocks by hand? No? I’m convinced it’s a metaphor; haven’t figured out for what, yet.

It is cold and dark again; there is some mercy in this, it is February! But earlier this week it was something else, as the first emerging light of the lengthening day revealed itself on a cloudless evening. Riding the bus back from work, I was struck by my little provincial city’s skyline as seen from the Birmingham Bridge. Fairly unusual that it should strike me, and yet! It is a nice time to be coming home, the sunset coming on timed nicely with my leaving (of course I make my own schedule and can/will adjust it to keep this nice feeling for as long as possible), just enough light left for thinking.

The thing about it wasn’t so much that there was light (though indeed that was something–Willam Gass: “…and it is a rare day, a day to remark on, when the sky lifts and allows the heart up”) but the way that it was working across the sky, cleaved and stratified like rock up and down over the horizon. Hues of blue and green were sediment over the skyscrapers and the still-shining sun (at 5:30 PM!) reflected on the Monongahela. Not dazzling, yet, but give it time. An airplane buzzed through the scene, and birds, always birds.

Too unyielding out for reflection-time, these rare moments are nice in their translucence; “the sky is pretty,” yes, obvious and banal, but I am tracking the pleasure one can take in these instances. For whatever else can be said about my successes or lack thereof in these first weeks of the new year, I am keeping track.

On the Occasion of a Fifth Winter:

 

let’s hang the ice

box banner from the eaves, this temperature sizzled

in dull rock and salted concrete, your lips shut

since summer stalled, September or so

I recall.

 

space heaters and space streets

make when they clear themselves of unstarting cars

and those faked dull seasons, no chill

to catch and hold our breath as we hold

our tongues against the unblinking, early-

onset evening.

 

so freeze, then, split like shingles

iced and waiting, want the warmth of “later,” held

up–a telegraphed promise or beacon as we spill

down hills of sub-zero-dawns and slipping-into-

traffic and falling-out-of-

weather.

on provincialism

There is a serious menace to the weather today, so it is probably time for me to update this again. I am not so sure I want to talk about the winter, though–is it not enough that I am forced to live it? A consideration of this week’s reading, the major plays (not my phrase!) of Chekhov, might be a safer bet. Any number of things to pull out of this weathered paperback, as you might expect.

I say weathered, as I purchased this book back in high school or so. But I have been a long time coming to Chekhov–something about his analysis of the tribulations of the provincial bourgeoisie never quite jived with me; lacking the technical proficiency of Nabokov or the measured insanity of Gogol, he has remained on the outskirts of my consciousness, notable only for his frequent appearances in creative writing workshops throughout my undergraduate career (usually accompanied with near-universal eye-rolls). But as this blog is meant to chronicle, I have entered the life of a provincial bourgeoisie myself, and I find Chekhov now agreeing with my sensibilities–*my* problems are of property and work, also!–so here I am

This is all likely to be Chekhov 101, so please bear with me, but I do find it striking the way in which the “philosophical” characters (only in Russian literature) in both “Uncle Vanya” and “Three Sisters” are terribly concerned with what will come of their towns (and in the former instance, forests–to my unending delight) in the next two or three hundred years; it is Vershinin in the latter play that I was particularly drawn to, his impassioned plea for cultural vigilance in the hope that for some future generation “a new, happy life will dawn.” That this is not couched in political/economic terms (as was so often the case with Chekhov’s 19th century counterparts–they know who they are!) but as a matter of taste and scholarship is somehow remarkable to me, considering the times in which the man worked.

Then there are those towns, themselves, and particularly the houses in which the families from these plays life; it is funny and a bit wonderful, really, how attached they are to them (to the point that displacement from these estates is a major, and in “Three Sisters” *the* major, conflict inherent in the plays). I have come to love my little house and suspect I will be a fairly happy homeowner in some provincial town myself one day, and there is an appeal to this affection–as someone who grew up in a series of increasingly sterile suburban box houses (and now finds my father living in the suburban box house to end all suburban box houses, though that is hardly an appropriate discussion for this forum), Chekhov and I find common ground in the imagination required to create characters so attached; a quick glance at my senior thesis will reveal people similarly disposed, for whatever that is worth.

I wonder. It has been a tough week for me for reasons not applicable to the internet, but there is a resilience to my feelings about provincialism in general and Pittsburgh in particular that echoes that sense I had in my last entry. On a train into Harrisburg last week, I reflected on how much that landscape had once meant to me and how different my feelings towards it had become now that it is something more like a vacation and something less like the place where I am from. So much of the wonder in Chekhov’s characters is derived from that sense that these little provincial landscapes are their homes, or as close as they are going to come to such an idea; I am rolling dice on maps and charts these days, trying to find such a thing within myself.

“Sylvia said”:

There is a thing about these winter thaws, the annual warming of Pittsburgh in the aftermath of one or a dozen ice storms, weather moderating into the ever-breaking promise of an early spring and the salty smell of ice melting, like loam drifted out past the breakers and you, standing in that same place: though the air and the ground have warmed and the roofs of houses and tops of gas stations run wild with freed water, there is a thing about the world that is still frozen

I do not believe there is a word for this thing, or if there is it was not encompassed in my liberal arts education. Perhaps it is only in my mind, though I can feel it in my body, too, that hint of returning cold and the cold that, despite all evidence to the contrary, has not really left. Nor is it the wind; it has been a still and yielding day, sunshine peeking out from atop the clouds like a child gotten into some medicine cabinet. No, it is not the weather, or anyway any part of the weather that I know about.

The possibility that most strongly suggests itself to me—if we are to take for granted that there is not some mythic meteorological explanation for this phenomenon—is that my body has caught up to my mind, and now takes these false springs as a matter of course, steels itself for the inevitable return to cold that will last through April, or March now, perhaps, these days. This is my fifth winter in Pittsburgh, a thing that at many points in my life would have seemed impossible—but as this frozen December passes in a manner uniform in pace if not in structure with those that preceded it, I feel a strange confidence in my preparation for these days, as though my body really has adapted to the rhythm of these patterns. I suppose this is as likely a thing as anything else. But it is something to remark on.

I walked quickly through the park today—the path was muddy and unpleasant, and in lieu of any grand natural revelations I listened closely to a John Cale song, “Sylvia Said,” that I had always found pleasant enough. It was these first lines that made me think:

Wish I could sail in a big black boat
with a big white sail over me, and once in the while
I’d pull into port, drink some wine with a girl–but Sylvia said
”Come to bed,
it’s so good to have you here”

This is the precise sentiment that these warm winter days always drew from me, the pull of a dreamy imagined life against the sometimes sad, sometimes lovely one I have lived here–pulled like an abscessed tooth or an oil well–or anyway the cold that returned drew it. So what is there to learn from this year’s hesitance to respond to the capriciousness of the Pittsburgh winter? Perhaps only that I am coming to recognize the ephemerality of this period of my life—I am certainly not convinced that I will spend the rest of my life at my current job or even in this city; I have begun calling these “flyover days” after Michael Martone, persuading myself that in some future cartographic analysis of my life I will think of these days as Martone cynically imagines Palin’s coastal elites think of the Midwest, as a swath of space(/time) one must traverse to get to the real destination.

In the meantime, it is December in Pittsburgh and it is warm, today. Tomorrow or the day after it will be cold, again, and that will be fine; there is no rush to San Diego this year—that I have some control over these things, anyway, is enough for today. “Open and let the heart up” and all that; words are useful for these days.

More on parks next time, I promise. Either that or a discussion of the (mis)use of TARP funds and the imperative for increased infrastructure funding in the new year. Economics!