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Here, unlike on the Boardwalk, everything is real. Here everything is both ghostly and real. Vacant houses. Apartments boarded up to protect against squatters. Eviction and foreclosure papers flap from the doors like tongues. NOTICE TO CEASE, NOTICE TO QUIT, papers keeping the sun out of the windows. The apartment houses rubble away into empty lots pierced by wind and drowned in the shadows cast by shuttered penthouses. Empty lots spontaneously converted for parking, a sign in the windshield of a Saturn: PLEESE DONT TAKE ME. Walking between the Boardwalk and the Professional Arts Building, walking between the Professional Arts Building and my car spontaneously parked in a dirt and, after the rain, mud lot, meant passing the porn store, which, especially if I was making the trip after sunset, meant getting accosted. By men who slept on the beach and spent their waking lives on the street, where there were fewer police and more chances to hustle. Corner of Pacific and MLK Jr. Boulevard. Guy trying to bum cigarettes. Guy trying to bum a dollar for booze. Guy trying to deal to me. “Yo, got coke, yo.” “Molly, molly.” “Got syrup.” Taking my money and not coming back. Trying it all over again the next day unabashed, and then when I told him I’d rather just talk, he got in my face, called me gay, called me a cop. A woman telling me how the check-cashing place would only cash checks made out to people with addresses in Atlantic County by people or businesses with addresses in Atlantic County. Telling me she lived in Georgia, or had once lived in Georgia, and her only hope of returning was this check from her cousin in Camden. “Ain’t Camden Atlantic County?” “No.” “What Camden then?” “Camden County.” “Goddamn.”
i just like this
Maybe it could be a problem of narrative. I was living a story and now the story seems to have stopped and I don’t really care, that’s what it feels like. Like an old ship rusting in a bay somewhere. Or maybe more accurately, just a car accident. I’ve come to a stop, metaphorically. That’s what it feels like. What it looks like is also very much like a car accident.
I don’t know what to do, is the point. What should I do, Kristin? Everything’s all unhooked and I’ve become a hazard.
[...] “Is God Dead?” If the question, put this way, is less in vogue now, Camus still describes so well the way the world feels when it rubs up against our nostalgia for the old meanings: silent. And empty; the “God-shaped hole,” we called it in Sunday school, assuming this must be what the hearts of nonbelievers always felt like. In your case, I guess it would be a war-shaped hole. There are other names: closing time, the end of the party, the desert of the real. Because whatever the story was about — the God you’d get to be with later in heaven, the cause worth fighting for, your country, your art, your masculinity, your heroism (I don’t know what you did those seven times at war) — it always runs out.
YOU WANT A PHILOSOPHICAL PRINCIPLE to give you some motivation to get out of the bay in which you’re an old ship, rusting. You want the clarity, the rigor, and the strength of philosophy to give you a reason to do what you have to do next. But ever since I read your letter I have been thinking about poetry — specifically a poem by Mark Doty called “Visitation.” In the poem, a man hears that a young humpback whale is stuck in a nearby harbor. The man is depressed, grieving something or someone. What he is grieving is unnamed in the poem. The world is “dark upon dark, any sense / of spirit an embattled flame / sparked against wind-driven rain / till pain snuffed it out.” He assumes the whale is experiencing the same pain; it is stuck in the bay, helpless, its ability to navigate its way out confused by sonar or who knows what human technologies and environmental atrocities. [...]
. . . even I
couldn’t help but look
at the way this immense figure
graces the dark medium,
and shines so: heaviness
which is no burden to itself.
And the last lines, which I have been wanting to write to you since I read your letter:
What did you think, that joy
was some slight thing?
I understand, as much as a coddled civilian can understand anything — my rocks are pebbles, kicked up the slightest slope — that it must feel the most compelling thing in the world to continue to choose violence, to your drug dealer, your friends, your mind, your own body. But sometimes we have to do things without knowing. With the body, at least for me, you have to take a leap, have faith that if you can hold on and make it one or two weeks without a constant hangover, you will know things you don’t know now. There is a feeling in the body that is just the feeling of physical well-being and it connects you to all humans and other animals and maybe even trees. The war will always be there, but you have a choice of what to give your attention to. The familiar story, the car crash, or the thing more radical and more frightening and wiser than strength: to grieve, to renounce the story and that paragraph you can’t get past, to make peace with your contingency and interchangeability so you can see the other side of it, to the connections that make it a joy, sometimes, to be alive.
[...] In those moments we can interrupt our speech and call attention to the word being used. It’s the birdsong. Or the appearance of a priest in a church when we’re only there to see the stained-glass windows. That moment in which we perceive another dimension to the thing we’re doing, the object we’re examining, the instruments we’re using. The value of error, this is precisely the value of error. Yes, because the birdsong in the middle of muddling through Kant is certainly an error, as much as when a flesh-and-blood priest appears right beside you as you’re going on about the Baroque. It skews our thought, distracts. And such is the magic of errors: we return from them changed. Like an errant trajectory, suddenly on the wrong street. [...]
it's weird, i remember very little of this peice or how this para fits in but i quite like this bit
And even in the realm of the aesthetic, your patience, you might wish to remind me, is for me a limit. With your patience in mind, I want to assure you that I haven’t digressed as far as I may seem to have, because a coordinate strategy, among the old philosophers, was to turn the problem on its head and argue that in most cases, a rational person doesn’t want free will, anyway. One doesn’t really want a free choice between taking Maple Avenue or Hapgood Drive; one wants to take whichever route is faster. One doesn’t want a free choice between a hempen or a flaxen rope; one wants to be told which is stronger and lighter. Free will, in this understanding, is a last resort — not a boon but a crisis. If a person can afford to, say, hire a staff of researchers to map out all his paths ahead of time and write memos on every crux he faces, thereby allowing him to restrict his exercise of free will to as few decisions as possible, his life will be greatly improved.
Before and during the festival, about fifty films are screened during the day for the press. I saw forty of them. I missed one because of a therapy appointment. (Even though I am a film critic, I hope to be able to have normal relationships someday.) I missed another because I had a hangover and couldn’t face the hour-long trip to Lincoln Center from my apartment in Brooklyn. Two I paid to see, and went on Sunday afternoons after buying tickets using the festival’s complicated and anxiety-inducing website, with its countdown clock.
i love him
I was taught how to read novels by a brilliant poststructuralist critic called Stephen Heath. I have an image in my mind of Dr. Heath holding a sheet of paper—the hallowed “text”—very close to his eyes, the physical proximity somehow the symbolic embodiment of his scrutinizing avidity, while he threw out his favorite question about a paragraph or stanza: “what’s at stake in this passage?” He meant something more specific, professionalized and narrow than the colloquial usage would generally imply. He meant something like: what is the dilemma of meaning in this passage? What is at stake in maintaining the appearance of coherent meaning, in this performance we call literature? How is meaning wobbling, threatening to collapse into its repressions? Dr. Heath was appraising literature as Freud might have studied one of his patients, where “What is at stake for you in being here?” did not mean “What is at stake for you in wanting to get healthy or happy?” but almost the opposite: “What is at stake for you in maintaining your chronic unhappiness?” The enquiry is suspicious, though not necessarily hostile.
[...] When a book reviewer, or someone in a creative writing workshop, or a fellow author complains, “I just couldn’t see what was at stake in the book,” or “I see that this issue matters to the writer, but she didn’t manage to make me feel that it was at stake in the novel,” a different statement is also being made about meaning. The common implication here is that meaning has to be earned, that a novel or poem creates the aesthetic environment of its importance. A novel in which the stakes are felt to be too low is one that has failed to make a case for its seriousness. Writers are fond of the idea of earned stakes and unearned stakes; a book that hasn’t earned its effects doesn’t deserve any success.