I.
How quickly the tales we tell ourselves and each other, the small rationalizations, the hopes and excuses, even the snatches of songs and poems, build in our lives not to a crescendo, but into a wall that blocks the view. We sit as in a garden, the walls protect and define the space, but whether we turn to one another or inward to peer at ourselves, these calcified stories impinge our movements, our heads and hips no longer swivel freely. And then one day some bit of story breaks loose, swirls through the body like a fish finally past a dam, lodges in a small crevice of the heart or mind, and brings the novel to an end.
These were my thoughts a few days following a conversation in which it seemed nothing that wanted to be expressed, could be. Or rather nothing that was expressed, was received as such. All sides were left wanting.
The landscape slipped by the train. I felt like that bit of story, hurtling toward and then into the most intimate parts of the city. That evening, in the dark, my friends played music to a room of strangers. They sang,
I am riding, I am riding
Forthcoming from the inside
And I was struck by their reversal of the image I had earlier conceived: my friends’ feelings, from the inside, were exploding outward toward the crowd. Using the story’s own force, they have parried its thrust, and put its power to use. The story is a dynamo.
*
The next morning, I finally give my parents a copy of my book of poems. These poems are the destructive bits of story in my life, swept together like crumbs. In the first one, my father builds a wall, but underground:
Eventually we covered the trench over, and said a prayer
I cannot watch their reaction. I give them the book and immediately leave.
*
In Seoul, Korea, the rain has stopped, we are walking with our hosts after dinner. The small square in the center of this neighborhood is filled with young people cooking on Bunsen burners, playing badminton, drinking beer. The makkoli seller arrives, pushing a gigantic cart stacked with white bottles. “Sake?” I say to B. “Or milk?” he suggests. The makkoli seller spots B., six feet tall, stops his cart and strides up to him. The makkoli seller is equally tall. He addresses B. in a few words of broken Japanese — “Delicious! Healthy!” — and then something in Korean that makes the women in our group laugh. The men are pushing us away. “Taste it! Korean rice wine,” he explains, this time in English. B. shakes his head no. The makkoli seller pours the white liquid into a paper cup, eyes locked with ours. Still smiling, he pours it on the ground.
*
The temptation to write a little each day — the invitation, the promise, the imperative — has often presented itself. Just a little, and by the end of a year imagine how much writing you will have done. But why write so much? Why add to the endless march of days, recorded or not? Why not one page per year; or better yet, one per lifetime. But why that too. Why any page at all. Why add. What wisdom it would be, not to write.
*
Lisbon, some months prior to Korea: walking in the dawn because the bed was too uncomfortable for sleep. Bakeries unlocking their gates. Streets wet, whether from rain or from having been washed I do not know. Wandering, but taking care not to get lost -- tracing the route seen from above, as on a map. I stumble on Pessoa’s favorite café, pointed out the day before. A coffee at the bar: “O melhor café é o d’A Brasileira.”
I realize I have not been wandering. This back and forth across the map — does it not trace a familiar route? There is no war; on the contrary, our travels for music depend on peace, predictability — Spain and Portugal were only added to the itinerary once the Fascists were truly gone. But the refugee’s path is likewise an opportunistic zigzag. Looking for asylum. Longing for a coffee at the bar.
The city awakening. Morning sounds of no fear.
*
Chronology is another temptation, another trap. Why write each day; why write in order of the days. These are bourgeois ideals of efficiency, productivity.
*
The medicine show arrives, and we unpack its carefully collapsed props from a set of nesting crates. All is arranged for transport foremost, maximum effect second. A red top hat packs flat as the plates in the moveable kitchen. A headdress of ostrich feathers is revealed, on closer inspection, to be painted silk and tin. Every material dissembles; even many of the foodstuffs are ersatz, whether for economy, longevity, stage use, or all three. These jars of beans might be stones. A loaf of bread, one slice removed, is in fact paper and paste. This ham is made of wood; but the bacon, equally hard, smells sweetly of smoke. Ambiguity protects the goods from pilfering — who can be sure which hammer bends like rubber, which chair collapses at the slightest pressure, which pot is filled with grease paint and which with cooking fat?
*
Another city with its face smeared in burnt cork. Its noises might be anywhere near the sea: Barcelona, San Francisco, Taipei. A resident would recognize the idle of domestic cars, the type of warning whistle one can ignore. But the visitor falls for them all, without question, without guile. The visitor is an audience.
Once the visitor starts a routine, the city becomes the audience. This is why the performer carries a city with him, packed in crates.
*
How to cut through the routine of received ideas, habits of thought — cut through like a train through the city. Look to the backs of houses, disused lots, community gardens, concrete riverbeds. Don’t look to faces — faces are smeared in burnt cork.
*
We rehearsed in the garden. It was midday, too hot to be outside. Behind us, two men work to erect a backdrop painted with characters — “wind” and “sound” — but the frame they have built is unsteady, it keeps falling over. We feel the heat on our instruments.
*
Go ahead and mention the book you are writing, like Ovid’s writings in exile — he describes the situation of the book, and writes the book, without any disjuncture. Both are the truth. The truth of the situation, and the artificiality of it. The wandering, and the route it traces.
*
I should mention the book I have already written, as well: a book of poems. These poems are the destructive bits of story in my life, swept together like crumbs. In the first one, my father builds a wall, but underground:
Eventually we covered the trench over, and said a prayer
A few months after this was published, my aunt E. — my father’s only sibling — died. The day of the funeral, after we had watched her casket lowered into the ground, my father said to me: “It reminded me of your poem, about the time I hid in the root cellar.” I was confused. Which poem? “The one about the time I hid in the ground and didn’t come out for three days — you know the story.” (I did not.) “When L. left.” (His nanny, sent away when the war started.) “The smell of the earth — it always makes me think of it.”
That day he also said: “There’s no one left, no one who was there.”
*
Clue to the power of silent movies: Clara Bow’s career was ruined when sound revealed her heavy Brooklyn accent. This accent undoubtedly helped her silent performances, however.
*
We crossed Spain, and crossed it again. Cities rose up out of the plain, and fell back again into nothing. We crossed Spain, littered with the memory of cities.
We drive into the center of one, Valladolid. Everyone in the city has forgotten everything — this is because the Fascists had been there, and no one wants to remember them.
How do you sing to an audience with no memory? That night, we try to sing songs like those cities on the plain — rising up out of nowhere, and disappearing just as quickly. Why add to these people’s memories, if they want none.
Singing like this feels like singing into a heavy black void.
The sax player upends a bottle of water into his horn. A watery solo follows: bubbles of air emerge from the mouthpiece, and float up to the ceiling.
I realize I have described this experience, some years before. It was a poem written in the second person, perhaps because I had not yet myself lived it — a memory written in advance of experience. Does that make it a song for Valladolid? I will retitle it now:
Valladolid
Experience of singing is for you an auditory one, you have never sung aloud. You cannot remember doing so, at least. Singing while asleep is possible, even beautiful, the pitch is perfect and breathing effortless. Nevertheless no sound emerges during such performances. The breath you exhale is suspended, little bubbles escape as from a swimmer but there is no room for air, the space inside is completely full with nothing, and motionless. When you wake, breathing is normal but awkward. Your throat is scratchy as if from yelling. Glycerin is useful in lubricating your unused vocal cords. You have been under water a long time.