Don’t you wish you could get a haircut? I mean a real one, carefully shaped by the person you finally found after many previous tries, the one who knows exactly what to do with the back so it doesn’t fall forward in that unflattering way on the right side?
I’m pretty good at cutting hair, but now the back’s too long and I can’t see it well enough to figure how much to cut. The careful sculpture has slowly collapsed into a weighty bubble that no mousse, hairspray, or Wind-tossed-texture-finishing-spray can lift.
Slowly, my sense of things is coming clearer. First sense of things: I’m old. No use asking what remedies I could apply at this stage, the fact is, I’m old. I fit the demographic of those who die of the virus if they get it. I got old pretty much the way my awareness of the virus came about. First it was a rumor, then I looked at my hands, their veins beginning to run down toward my fingers like huge swollen rivers. I looked at my chest and arms, little pools of dark pigment connecting to other little pools, to make large pools. I look like a salmon making its last upstream swim.
Slowly, I see how potent and dangerous is the virus. It takes a while for humans my age to adjust our habitual view of the world. Too many years of all-clear to shift overnight. At first I just obeyed the mask rule as a matter of principle, but now it I see in my mind’s eye the clouds of invisible virus swarming through the atmosphere like, well, murder hornets. (Since dismissed as an overkill 😏 description).
Some days I walk to the Bay. The expanse is a great relief. Look how high the water is!
It’s lonely inside for old people. But it’s lonely for young people. My awareness of the rest of the world expands daily. The “rest” have always been there; I’ve read the paper, watched the news, given money, but this isolation has turned my attention outward like nothing else. I can feel in my bones what the abused woman feels as she’s stuck in her apartment with her three kids and her abuser. I can feel in my bones the people living in tents because they’ve been driven from their homeland. I can feel in my bones the gasping for breath of the sick people in the hospital, and the ones who are dying unseen and unhelped at home.
When there’s nothing you, personally, can do, I guess there’s that you can do. You can remember, pay attention to the suffering. Feel it. Because we’re not separate, not for a second.
I am utterly tired of reading—no matter the glorious array of material on our coffee table and on my computer screen—tired of writing, tired of the news, tired of staring out the window at the interminably slow progress of spring. Tired of the relentless little squares of Zooming. But look at me, here writing. Keeping on—getting up, doing my stretches, meditating, eating breakfast, and sitting down to write—is sometimes, like now, simply an act of fierce discipline. Do them because they’re what I do. When reason and motive fall away, the act is itself is what there is.
“How can people think that artists seek a name? A name, like a face, is something you have when when you’re not alone. There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it?”
Another thing about getting old: after you’ve accomplished what could be considered your life’s work, if you’re a writer, you keep right on doing it, as motive and ambition fall away. Who cares if you have another book? Who cares if you win a major prize? Well, you do, but no longer in the way you might think. There seems to be a refining of purpose. More and more, you do it because there is a shape you see that begs to be brought to light. I heard that evergreens shed more cones in their last years. Don’t know if that’s true, but you get the point. Not to be remembered by these immortal (another smiley face with a wink) poems I’ve written. But because the act itself, refined of a lot of its nonsense, rises to the level of the sacred.
Q: What does that mean?
A: I don’t know. There is a swirling, a movement of the universe, that brings forth language, music, art as its voice. Do you think all those people on the Internet are singing, dancing, writing poems, just to stave off boredom? Do you think they just want to have their 15 minutes of fame? I think it is a deep desire, the most gracious (grace-filled) of desires, to make something new out of whatever materials are at hand.
The other sign in the distance says, “You are now leaving the jurisdiction of the ministry of silly walks. Enjoy the rest of your walk. “
I’m sitting here thinking what to say next. Will anything here interest you? I’m saying nothing new, I think. But maybe “nothing new,” coming through me, could be new, at least, in the way one snowflake is new—unlike the others—or one face is new, unlike any other. Aren’t faces interesting?
Unless you have to stare at them all day on Zoom. There’s something about that format that seems to be exhausting. We’re staring in a mirror, adjusting how we look, second by second.
The whole thing is an unnatural kind of concentration with some of the rich, subtle signals, natural atmosphere, and rests removed.
How is reading this any different? I’d say when we’re picking up words off a page, we’re doing a dance with them, between us. There’s the huge spaciousness of our mind unimpeded by being tethered to an image. The tether of the words themselves is plenty.