Wanting to Make Art

I woke up this morning with a feeling I never had before. I wanted to make art of something, anything, but I'm not sure what art looks like, sounds like, feels like.

On the subway to my college art history class, a painting popped up on my phone, "Flaming Summer Meadow" by Brazilian artist Janaina Tschäpe. I really like it, it made me want to paint something like that myself. But when I showed it to my art professor, who won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, he said, "Where's the art in that painting?" I didn't know how to answer him. What could I say? The sheer human emotion that I saw in it? The radiant colors that brought together what people and nature have in common? I didn't say anything becuase I was sure my art professor knows more about paintings than I do.

Then I went to the park to meet my best friend for lunch. My friend is one of the most educated, worldly people I know. He knows something about everything. While I was waiting for him, I was reading Jon Fosse's Septology. What an interesting book, I thought. All stream of consciousness, one long sentence over hundreds of pages. It made me want to write a book myself. When my friend arrived, he said, "Don't tell me you're reading that timewaster. I see you're almost finished part one. Don't bother with the other six parts. It's more of the same. Seven hundred pages of emptiness." I didn't know what to say to my friend. But on the subway ride back home, I thought about it. I realized I could have said for me the book was a deep examination of what it means to be alive, to create art in absolute isolation, to choose a life of solitude, to be a deeply self-examining Catholic, to survive troubled family relationships and lingering suicidal thoughts, that if art were life as life really is, then this book is a consummate work of art. But it was too late, and I didn't want to call out my friend on his judgment, because his friendship meant too much to me and, after all, he has read more books than I ever will and probably knows better about Fosse's book than I do. Maybe I'm just misreading it.  
.
When I got home, I told Alexa, "Play 'Tití Me Preguntó' by Bad Bunny" as I lay in my bedroom. I am not a big rap fan and don't understand Spanish, but I like the swing of this song and I've memorized the lyrics in translation. I can't get that songe out of my head. Maybe that's what I should do, write lyrics for some rapper. I think I'm a pretty good writer, and I completely get rhythm and meter. No sooner did I think that than my father knocked on my door, more like pounded on it, and shouted, "Turn off that garbage. Why don't you ever listen to real music?" It's his house, and I'm living on his dime, so I can't argue with him. He’s entitled to his opinion, especially since he’s always playing sonatas in the living room on the Steinway piano he inherited from his father. Makes me wonder, how did I end up with no talent? So down went Bad Bunny. And my father did get me to think. Maybe “Tití Me Preguntó” isn’t real music. If art is forever, then he has a good point when he says that the music of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven has lasted nearly three hundred years and all the stuff I listen to disappears in no time.  

Now it's past midnight. I can't sleep. I'm in bed thinking what a weird thought I had this morning when I woke up. How can I make art when I don't know what it is. I hope the same thought doesn't waste another day tomorrow.

Living in the Past

You say I live in the past, but how can I not when I'm with you? When I'm alone, I'm in the present, preparing that Greek salad, washing the toilet, mowing the lawn, or buying groceries. True, when I leave out an ingredient, when the toilet isn't spotless, when I miss a section in the lawn, when I forget to buy an item, it's because I'm living in the future, imagining what the trip to Maui will be like, or how I can get the best possible price for a flight to New Orleans, or where we will stay when we travel to Miami. But I'm usually in the present when we're apart. 

I have known you a long time, most of the years of my life. When you lie in bed with the veins in your legs throbbing in pain after twelve miles of hiking, please don't interpret my smiling at you as a sign of indifference. I'm thinking about how those legs have walked thousands of miles with me through trails in the Grand Canyon, Arches, Mount Rainier, Yosemite, Yellowstone, Great Smoky Mountains, and Acadia, and the streets of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Athens, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, Helsinki, and Valletta. When I laugh apparently out of nowhere, I'm recalling your reactions when your father or mine said something inappropriately yet wickedly funny during family gatherings. When I seem distant as you talk about something we need to get done, I'm not shirking a responsibility. I'm reflecting on the many accomplishments and setbacks we have shared, and how all these events have brought us to his beautiful place. And when tears well in my eyes at the end of Casablanca, Death in Venice, Paris, Texas, El Norte, Cinema Paradiso, or Central Station, I cry not for the fate of the these fictious characters but for losing family members and friends who can no longer share their radiance with me, for those poor, humble, kind people who have served me and will never reach my status, and for those who have helped me throughout my life, who have changed my life for the better, without receiving more than a thank-you from me.

So tell me, what's so bad about living in the past? Don't you?

A Walk in Greenwich Village

You are eighteen, your first day walking in the city alone. At 9:01 a.m., you emerge from the dark subway staircase of Christopher Street/Stonewall into the light of Christopher and Seventh Avenue South. Awaiting you at the top of the subway staircase stands an ancient man, stooped, both arthritic, spotted, wrinkled hands on his cane. He smiles at you, his few brown teeth rattling, He says no hardship will befall you with him beside you. You surprise yourself by nodding affirmatively, and he accompanies you, right hand holding the cane and left hand holding your right. But the walk will now be far slower. As you head north, you notice every detail, the doorframes and cornices on the buildings, the Rainbow Pride flags draped over the black iron fencing of the Sheridan Square Viewing Garden, the commemorative plaque on Stonewall Inn, the clothes passersby wear, as the ancient man shuffles beside you.

Crossing Seventh Avenue South is painfully slow with the ancient man, but he assures you the traffic will wait patiently. Not one aggressive honk comes from the bus, taxis, trucks, and private cars. You finally get to the west side of Seventh Avenue, in front of Little Ruby's Café, which occupies the southern point of the triangle bordered by West Fourth, West Tenth, and Seventh Avenue South. "This place used to be the Riviera Café," says the ancient man. "It was around for forty-eight years. When they opened in 1969, I took my wife there. We were their first customers." You want to ask his age, and whether his wife is still alive, but you don't.

At Tenth Street and Seventh Avenue South, you turn west past Small Jazz Club. "I play there every now and then when they have jam sessions," says the ancient man. "I'm a pianist. Do you know Warne Marsh? Red Mitchell? Stan Levey? I jammed with those guys when they needed a pianist back in fifty-seven. I played with lots of other guys too." You look at his gnarled fingers but have no reason to doubt him.

You think this will be a long walk, an endless walk, a walk that will age you. You begin to feel with every step that the ancient man is getting younger and you are getting older, that he is sucking your youth from you. You want to get away but you know this ancient man knows something you need to know, nothing your father knows, your older brother knows, your teachers know, your friends know. But you get to West Fourth and Tenth, and the ancient man gently steers you east, back toward the Christopher Street/Stonewall Subway Station. He asks you to take him back to the top of the staircase where you met him.

That final one hundred-meter walk down the block and across the street to the station seems a lot faster those first steps. The ancient man has quickened his pace, his cane not touching the ground, until he is leading you, and you are having trouble keeping up with him. He jumps onto Seventh Avenue South against the Don't Walk sign with traffic rapidly speeding downtown toward you. He pulls you up on the curb of the station entrance as if you were a small child. In fact, you feel like one now.

"I told you no harm will come to you," says the ancient man. He lets go of your hand, puts both hands on his cane, stoops, and stares down the staircase, just like when you met him. You stand there, winded, looking at him for guidance. He signals for you to return to the subway below. You planned to be in the Village all day, but you do as the ancient man tells you. You get to the first landing and look up at him. A young woman ascends the staircase past you. She and the ancient man exchange some words that you can't quite make out, she stakes his hand, and they disappear from sight.

It is 9:25. As you turn toward the next flight of steps to the subway platform, you realize that while you are only eighteen, with a lifetime ahead of you, you still must make better choices.

A Window

I am looking at the window that I have looked out at for the past thirty-seven years. From this window, I have seen seasons change, the morning summer sun spreading across this room as an invitation to join the world outside, the early afternoon autumn leaves fall from the dogwood and the grass browning like a defeated old man succumbing to his sorrows, the late day snow creating a soft blanket of hazy forgetfulness on the lawn, and at dusk the white flowers bloom on the dogwood promising life to an awakened spirit.

But, as I said, I am looking at, not out, the window. Its wooden frame, once stained a walnut matte finish but now overpainted white. I can still see what it once looked like and still long for the darker look. What was I thinking? But I no longer possess the ambition, patience, or skill to strip the paint, sand the wood, and restain the frame to its original appearance. So white it shall stay.

The single-panel double glass pane, its weatherstripping still holding after all these years. I have seen the unsightly consequences of air entering the space between the two panes, causing a cloudy appearance. I have spent years, off and on, worrying that such an unpleasant situation would befall my windows. I am pleased to say that all this concern was entirely unnecessary. But why is so much air passing between the sash and the casing? Why is it so cold in here? I see no daylight, yet something must be wrong.

But those ornery lift bars. Only half an inch separates them from the stool, making it challenging to lift the windows. Don't push them down too quickly or your fingers will get jammed between the bar and stool, likely breaking some bones. Who thought of such an impractical design? Doesn’t the manufacturer do usability testing? Aren’t there laws such dangerous mechanisms?

No wonder I’ve been looking out, and not at, the window these 37 years.

Lost and Found

Have you seen the things I've lost? Just asking. Thirty-four years ago, I lost my high school senior ring when my house was burglarized. I know you and I have never met, and I know the burglary was a long time ago, but that ring must be somewhere, right? Maybe it ended up in your possession by way of a garage sale, a visit to an antique store, a find on the street, or some other way unfathomable to me right now.

I am also looking for Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. I know I lent those three books to different people, though I cannot remember who, and at different times, though I can't remember when. Actually, I have a good suspicion of who borrowed the Csikszentmihalyi book, but I dare not ask him out of embarrassment because he has gifted me so many books over the years. Sometimes I will bring up this matter in a conversation with him, saying something like, "I'm still trying to find that Csikszentmihalyi book but can't for the life of me find it." I get no response from him, which makes me wonder if he has lied to me about many other things throughout our long friendship. I still want to look up things in those books, but I refuse to buy another copy in the hope that someone, maybe you, might return them. One point I should make about the Rukeyser book. My wife insists that I never owned it, that it was just a wish list book. But how can she know all of the thousand or so books I have owned? Plus, I recall like it was yesterday thumbing through Rukeyser's poems, feeling alternately helplessness,  numbness, hopefulness. How could I have not owned that book? For this and other reasons, I have stopped lending people books. They never return them unless I ask for them, and I cannot bring myself to ask. 

Now you might be thinking if I cannot bring myself to ask people I know to return the things I've lent them, then how could I possibly ask you, a total stranger, to return something in the improbable event that they ended up in your possession? I would say you've got an excellent point, I would thank you for raising it, and I would reflect on that fine piece of logic, as I also ponder all I have lost. But, believe me: even though I have no proper answer for you, I will still ask if you have them. And who are you not to answer?

I Am Forever

I can see nearly forever from here, but not quite. Everyone I know is beside me. Everyone I ever met but do not see any more is behind me. Everyone I have never met but will is before me, but even if I look ahead, I cannot see them. 

I look beside myself. Those beside me see what I am seeing, some beyond my range, some before my range. Some of them I agree with about what I see. Some I disagree with but understand why they see what they see, and they understand why I see what I see. Some I disagree with but understand why they see what they see but do not understand why I see what I see. Some I disagree with and will never understand why they see what they see, but they will understand why I see what I see. Some I disagree with and will never understand why they see what they see, and they will never understand why I see what I see. 

I look behind myself. Very few of those behind me ever met can still see me. Those few who can still see me see someone different than what I now am. Those many who can no longer see me still carry me with them without knowing it, so they are different than they would have been if they had never met me. I too carry them with me and I am different than I would have been if I had never met them.

Although I cannot look before myself, I try. I imagine that some of them will pass by in an instant and move behind me for good. Some will stand beside me for a while and then move behind me for good as well. Some will stand beside me and stay with me until I move behind them for good. Those will expand the range of what I can see. 

There are also those who may seem to be before me but will never stand beside me or move behind me. But the more I think about those, the more I see that they never were and can neither be nor will be. 

Then there are those who can no longer be beside, before, or behind me. Those I still see, sometimes  more clearly than those still standing beside me, even though I have changed because of those beside me.

Finally, there are others too, but I have no way of placing them beside, behind, or before me. Because of all those beside, behind, and before me, and maybe those someplace else, I am forever.

It's an East Coast-West Coast Thing

If you are looking for a quintessential distinction between the east and west coasts, read the text in the image on the left. I found it earlier this month in the Rockridge Public Library in Oakland, California. The content appears on what the Immigrant Legal Resource Center calls a red card, with one side printed in English and the other in Spanish. I started seeing signs in restaurants and other businesses around town proclaiming "ICE IS NOT WELCOMED HERE" or "NO ICE ACCESS IN THIS OFFICE," admonishments to United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to keep out without a judicial warrant. Upon my return to the New York metropolitan area, I found no such signs in local libraries, area restaurants that employ workers from south of the US border, or anywhere, for that matter.

Then I thought about how the Bay area has been collecting compost for years, but New Jersey does not. Nor does New York State, except for New York City. Also, you are more likely to see "Black Lives Matter" signs in California than in New York.

What can you surmise from these observations? That California is home to more Latinos? (It is. Latinos represent 40 percent of the state's population, as opposed to half that percentage in New York.) That California is more socially liberal? (Some indicators say so, such as the liberal values of Hollywood and Silicon Valley compared to Wall Street.) That California is ecologically aware than New York? (Not so. New York has reduced fossil fuel emissions and manages energy more efficiently.) That California is more confrontational toward the federal government? (That's a toss up, as both ends of the country proactively legislate against the federal government on issues such as immigration, education, justice, and environment.) That California's priorities are simply different? (Yes. California has more farm workers, hence its quest to protect them; the financial sector driving New York looks more toward efficiencies and profit.)  Say what you want, but you've got to admit: California and New York, liberal though both be, are vastly different.