Friday, May 19, 2017

Merry Christmas

It was curious and not unpleasing, how Peleg and Bildad were affected at this juncture, especially Captain Bildad.  For loath to depart, yet; very loath to leave, for good, a ship bound on so long and perilous a voyage—beyond both stormy Capes; a ship in which some thousands of his hard earned dollars were invested; a ship, in which an old shipmate sailed as captain; a man almost as old as he, once more starting to encounter all the terrors of the pitiless jaw; loath to say goodbye to a thing so every way brimful of every interest to him,—poor old Bildad lingered long; paced the deck with anxious strides; ran down into the cabin to speak another farewell word there; again came back on deck, and looked to windward, looked towards the wide and endless waters, only bounded by the far-off unseen Eastern Continents; looked towards the land; looked aloft; looked right and left; looked everywhere and nowhere; and at last, mechanically coiling a rope upon its pin, convulsively grasped stout Peleg by the hand, and holding up a lanterns, for a moment stood gazing heroically in his face, as much to say, “Nevertheless, friend Peleg, I can stand it; yes, I can.”

You are in a room.  It is a fairly spacious room, for a bathroom.  The walls are white paint above white tile, the floor is also tile, old brown tile, with old dark grout between the tiles.  Everything in the room is old—not ancient, but, if you had to guess, thirty years old.  A little younger than you are, at the time.  The sink is the kind of sink you’ve been seeing your whole life—it sticks out from the wall, its guts are visible underneath, it has a tiny lip around it that can just fit soap and a drinking glass. It has a mirror above it, and to that mirror you stick, by their suction cups, two plastic animals, an elephant and a giraffe, whose bellies open up to hold toothbrushes.  This is not your bathroom, after all, it is the bathroom of your infant boys. 

The toilet is standard issue.  When you are potty training your son, you spend a lot of time in the bathroom, sitting in front of him as he sits on the toilet, as if he is an idol you must prostrate yourself before.  When the other toilets in the house are all occupied you sometimes sit on this toilet yourself, generally in some kind of wet.

The closet has two louvered doors that open so you can step inside it a little, and look around on the shelves for what you want.  It is more generous than any bathroom closet you’ve ever had, and is a good place, if you’re little, to hide during hide and seek.  A low shelf on the right holds a pile of soft white cotton towels, each with a corner stitched over to make a pocket that will hold your baby’s head.  You have scattered thermometers a higher shelf, and spread Band-aids around on another.  The humidifier on the floor was bought in a humidifying emergency, and will never be used again.

The tub is a very familiar tub.  Every American who is reading these words knows this tub, with its white, sloping, ceramic sides, its once-tacky, worn-down, anti-slip shapes on the bottom, its metal and frosted glass surround, the doors running in a sharp metal track that cuts your arm when you lean over it to hold your boy, to scrub your boy, to fetch toys from the drain for your little boy to play with.  The toys fill with water and then with mold, and are a minor source of dread, since mold is probably bad for babies, but you can’t figure out how to keep the toys, with those little holes in their bottoms, from developing the mold, which then squirts out shamefully when the boys squeeze them during playtime.  Unless you’re just supposed to throw the toys out all the time?  Some people, you’ve heard, wash their toys with bleach.  And some people have net bags that they hang from the side of the tub, into which they load all the wet toys at the end of the bath, but you and your husband don’t do this, you leave the toys in the tub where they lie stranded, once the water has drained out. 

When your son is sick, you two sit on the cool tile floor together in the middle of the night.  He goes to sleep in your lap and wakes up to be sick, and then comes back again to sleep on you.  You sit on some towels, so you will be more comfortable.

The light coming through the window behind the toilet is green from the leaves on the trees in your backyard.

It is really a very pleasant room.  Bath time at night can be hard because your boys don’t want to get into the bath—and then, almost always, when the bath is done, it seems they don’t want to get out of it.  And in the summer, you decide that swimming at the town pool is like having a bath, and put the boys to bed without washing them, which means, I guess, that you sometimes find the whole thing a pain.

But now that you are not strictly and officially in the room, the room is bathed in a heavenly golden light.  The boys are so little, with such slippery, sticky skin.  When they’re a certain age you bathe them together.  You wash first one uplifted, twisting face, then the other.  One time you knock your boy’s loose tooth out while you do this, and he sees the blood and somehow is out of the tub before you can stop him, running around this room screaming and trailing pink blood over the towels and across the tiles.  You clean each boy’s hair by soaping it with a soapy washcloth, then tilting his head back, pouring warm water through it, leaving it shaped into soft clean curls.  You sing to these sons, songs about baths, but you also have strange, unmeasurable periods of time, where they play happily in the water, and your mind is free and untethered to the place where you are.  And you see, although you don’t see this for some time, that this room is a room machine, and you can go there, or leave there, anytime you want.

Friday, March 31, 2017

Going Aboard

“Morning to ye! morning to ye!” he rejoined, again moving off.  “Oh!  I was going to warn ye against—but never mind, never mind—it’s all one, all in the family too;—sharp frost this morning, ain’t it?  Good-bye to ye.  Shan’t see ye again very soon, I guess; unless it’s before the Grand Jury.”

Dentist yesterday.  I sit in the chair—there is a fountain somewhere, but the water in it doesn’t tinkle, it splashes—with my mouth open, and I think, What is the answer to this?  Do I have them pull all my teeth and replace them with fake teeth and then I have only fake teeth and those teeth can’t rot?  But is it accurate to say that fake teeth can’t rot?  And even if they can’t, don’t you still have to take care of your gums and get check-ups for your gums?  So then what should I do?  How can I possibly get out of coming here three times a year, every year, for all my days?  How can I avoid feeling my mouth fill with water until it dribbles over my lower lip?  And involuntarily clasping my hands together in my lap?  And having to stare at the overhead lights and listen to the music that is still elevator music even though it has been upgraded to tasteful covers of famous songs performed with guitars and quavering female voices?  And the answer is, There is no way out of this that you would like.

Wednesday, March 8, 2017

All Astir

For besides the great length of the whaling voyage, the numerous articles peculiar to the prosecution of the fishery, and the impossibility of replacing them at the remote harbors usually frequented, it must be remembered, that of all ships, whaling vessels are the most exposed to accidents of all kinds, and especially to the destruction and loss of the very things upon which the success of the voyage most depends.

Sunday I discovered that Gmail had erased almost all of my sent mail from the last fifteen years and all of my research and writing notes.  It took less than seconds for technology to take on, for me, the guise of a faceless ravening force, not unlike an angry spirit in a Miyazaki movie, intent on devouring everything I had.  Every time I opened my mailbox I could see this force moving messages, thousands of messages, tens of thousands of messages, for its own evil purposes, into the trash and then, as far as I could tell, immediately deleting them. 

I closed my mail app down, quickly, but I had to open it again to check on what was going on and try to stop the carnage.  Every time I opened it I found the spirit there already, awake and active, shoveling everything off into oblivion.  I searched the web for answers.  I called technical support but it was after hours.  I had trouble breathing.  I started to sob.

My husband came in and sat beside me on the couch and looked on horrified at the destruction.  We kept searching for what was lost and trying to locate and save whatever we could but we could only find things from the last few days.  It was late, the children had taken themselves to bed, we had to get up in the morning, but I had the feeling that if I didn’t placate whatever unhappy animus was at work, I was going to wake up to find everything—all my mail, my documents, journals, stories, sketches, novels, photos—gone.  When I finally turned off the light I couldn’t sleep—I lay on my stomach envisioning the malevolence in my computer as it destroyed everything on my hard drive and then extended itself out from my computer to my various back-ups and corrupted them, wiping out every piece of my writing life.  I saw myself waking up in the morning with nothing I’d written left.  What it would be like to have to live without these pieces of cyberpaper existing, except within the current version of myself?  Everything that I hadn’t already absorbed into my body would be gone.  People lose things, I thought.  They lose keepsakes, records, and manuscripts in floods and fires.  They lose their keys and phones to carelessness.  I once thought I’d lost my favorite necklace, a long strand of green turquoise beads that had belonged to my maternal grandmother and that I could wrap three times around my neck, although as it turned out my mother, to whom the necklace really belonged, had taken it back from me without telling me.  But then I had taken the necklace back from her and managed to get it stolen.

You have to go on, but you go on as a different person.  The other day I was looking through photographs and I thought about the time before cameras, when most people only carried with them what they could remember.  Maybe, I thought, it would be good for me to be reborn without things and to have to start all over again.  Maybe it would clarify who I was and what I wanted to do.  Pretty sensibly, I didn’t want that.  At midnight I ran to the computer and checked to make sure my novel was still there.  Finding it extant, I worked on it for an hour or so, making a number of improvements.

In the morning after some searching I found a link that Gmail provides for users to ask for help retrieving emails; as soon as I filled it out Gmail wrote me to say, “Hello, We received your request to recover deleted emails from your account. Unfortunately, the emails were permanently deleted, so we're not able to get them back for you.”  The word “permanently” felt bad.  So I spent the day, except for a lunch date, where I drank down a large, yellow glass of wine, on the phone with Apple technical support.  Late in the afternoon, a tech friend sent me an email from a contact at Google with the link I’d used that morning and directions about how to effectively use it.  After which I received a new email from Gmail that said, “Good news! We are currently restoring your missing Gmail messages.”

I opened my mail again and found that the machine, still a spirit but now almost excessively benevolent, had started giving me back my things.  I watched as it downloaded hundreds, then a hundred thousand emails, pouring them into my inbox and all my other mailboxes.  I was inundated by messages, virtually drowning in them.  I went to bed.  In the morning, happy to have my messages back but feeling an urge to get my inbox a bit more organized, I deleted a big chunk of them.  This was a mistake akin to something a family friend of ours once did: just recovered from a terrible bout of food poisoning and once again hungry, he opened the refrigerator looking for something to eat, and found and ate the clams that made him sick the night before.  The evil spirit stretched its arms and opened its mouth, and my messages started disappearing again, in bulk. 

So I started the whole process once more from the beginning.  Now the messages, are, once again, gushing back in.  I could spend the rest of my life figuring out what to do with them all.

Friday, February 17, 2017

The Prophet

“Look here friend,” said I, “but if you have anything important to tell us, out with it; but if you are only trying to bamboozle us, you are mistaken in your game; that’s all I have to say.”

I reread, just now, work in my novel from the last few days, and I can see that there is something wrong with the way it is written.  I have also, today, been looking at a book called A History of Pictures, by David Hockney and Martin Gayford, and in it they talk about a picture of Caravaggio’s in which all the figures are sort of occupying the same space, but without a real relationship to each other.  It is clear to me that I am doing the same thing, in my writing, but it is less clear how I can correct that.

Usually when I need to figure something like this out, I leave it alone and go do something else.  For a long time what I’ve done is read the next chapter in Moby-Dick and try to write about it.  I have rules about this, namely that I read the chapters in order, and I can’t read the next chapter until I’ve written something about the last one.  My problem, now, is that several months ago I read the next chapter, “The Prophet.”  For weeks I hadn’t known how to respond to the chapter, but one day I went out for a walk and on the way back, in the sunshine, an idea came to me with its first several lines attached, and those lines were in verse.

I don’t normally write poems and I am, in all likelihood, an inadequate poet; nonetheless I was quite taken by the poem that I then wrote, also titled “The Prophet.”  I decided to send it in to the Paris Review.  I knew that it was entirely improbable that the Paris Review, which publishes really wonderful poetry, would publish my poem.  But, as it happens, I was once, myself, employed (barely) by the New Republic to cull unsolicited poetry submissions.  This history made me particularly able, I thought, to cast myself into the mind of the person at the Paris Review who would be reading my unsolicited submission—who was, after all, in some way just a younger version of me.  I still thought it highly unlikely that the magazine would publish me, but at least somewhat likely that I would get someone’s attention.

So I wrote a cover letter that would convey this coded information, and settled back to receive what I expected would be a personalized rejection letter, sent through the years, from myself to myself.  Months have passed without that letter, or any response at all.  During this time, so many memories and ideas have surfaced, and I have put them aside without writing about them.  Today, for example, reading Hockney’s and Gayford’s book about pictures, I remembered the little mirror my mother bought me in sixth grade, when I first got contact lenses.  It had a square yellow plastic frame and it sat on my desk, and I stared into it when I put in my contact lenses every morning.  My desk was covered with all kinds of things I don’t remember, most of them—the clock radio and this mirror being the exception—absolutely without utility to me in my daily life.  But the little mirror was really useful—not only did it perform its contact-lens service, but I liked to sit in front of it for hours, sketching myself in the lined pages of a black-and-white Composition notebook. 

I made one successful drawing of my face.  More by chance than skill, dragging my pen across the pale blue lines, I captured some true aspect of my appearance by drawing my eyes, accurately, as differently shaped from each other.  One eyelid was puffier, and the lashes curled differently, but also I allowed the eyes to relate more to the rest of my face than they did to each other.  In sixth grade this mismatch struck me as a flaw.  In art class we had been taught to draw faces by dividing them into parts and proportions, and when I drew, I strained for symmetry.  Yet there my drawing was, mismatched and unmistakably me.  Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to go on from this.  I kept sitting down in front of the little yellow mirror and trying to draw an ideal.