The charm

We lie on the bed, nose to nose.

I tent the quilt over our heads,

Drawing a shadow across our faces.

We’re going to close our eyes now,

I tell him.

We’re going to take a rest.

This is our nap fort.

Meh, he says,

Out of the side of his chupeta.

A hand reaches out.

A finger inspects my bottom teeth.

A slow blink, as his long, long lashes

Come to rest on his cheek.

Across the country,

My dad reaches up

And kisses a nurse’s hand.

Undercurrent

you are here | 2002 | NYC by Soledad Arias

Hola! I’ve started taking Spanish, an extension course through Borough of Manhattan Community College. It’s me and several 20something women, many of them au pairs from Germany and Russia and Poland and Croatia, learning at least their third language. Aside from some fumbling high school and college French, I have no second language, which is a ridiculous state of events. And not to speak Spanish after decades of living in Los Angeles is just shameful.

Pero, that’s not what I’m here to talk about.

Today I visited my Spanish teacher’s website. Soledad Arias is an Argentinian-born artist who uses text in pieces and installations that encompass meaning, questions, thought. A few months after 9/11, she created neon tubes, placed in Times Square and other New York City locations, that slowly illuminated to reveal “you are here”—then gradually went dark again. For an “urban intervention” in Montreal, she created pennants that spelled out, letter by letter, phrases from Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing: “What would I say if I had a voice” flapped over a gritty urban park frequented by junkies; “Who would I be if I could be” rustled between two trees in the city’s popular Parc Lafontaine. Their meanings changed with the viewer, the time, the mood.

Also, Soledad teaches Spanish at BMCC. I’m guessing that most of the other students in my class will never visit her website, and never think of her as other than the woman they took Spanish from. Which made me think about how our selves, like Soledad’s art-phrases, shape-shift depending on the circumstance—and on whether we’re defining ourselves or others are defining us.

I know this isn’t an original concept; all of us are multifaceted, different people in different contexts. But I’ve started to wonder if there’s some essential core of who-I-am-ness that doesn’t change. And if so, what the heck is it?

We learned in class that in Spanish you don’t say, as you do in English, “I am a writer” (as in, “I’m one of a million billion writers, all of whom have blogs”). You say, Soy escritora—I am writer! Is that bold, confident creature really down there running things in my engine room? I’m not sure I recognize her.

A long time ago, a cousin of mine said, “You’re not very ambitious, are you?” I was a little insulted—we’re supposed to be ambitious, dammit!—but I couldn’t deny the basic truth of it. It’s not that I didn’t want to work; I love to work. I love to create beautiful, true things from 26 characters. But I wasn’t compelled to get to the tippy-top of a success mountain, or to be famous (it seems like hell, actually), or to make obscene amounts of money.

Between some combination of talent and luck, I fashioned a career that’s enabled me to use my fingers and my brain (more or less of the latter, depending), made me enough money to enable non-starvation, and has kept me ocupada. Meanwhile, my deepest priorities were life priorities: raising the extraordinary Child-who-is-no-longer-a-child, finding my way to My Beloved, making the human connections.

Now I’m at that magical middling age when people lift their heads up from their desks and blink, mole-like, in the unexpected light. “What? What’s going on? How did I get here? And what have I done with my coffee cup?”  

For me (and I know I’m not alone), it’s a reassessment time, a time of thinking, Shouldn’t I be doing something that matters? Shouldn’t I, like a backpacker in Yosemite, leave the campground a little cleaner than I found it?

So I’m slowly working my way toward knitting together the dual impulses that have been at the core all along: the writer who believes that a properly crafted sentence is a weapon and a gift, and the person who believes that the human connection can change everything. I want to use my fingers and my brain in the service of something that I feel in my gut. Something that’s worth it.

It’s a process, it may be murky, sometimes clumsy, but I believe it’s the road worth going down, toward the neon sign that says, “You are here.”

Sketches of Turkey

"NO PITCHAS!"

I lowered my iPhone and walked over to the guard, who'd been yelling at me from 25 yards away and was now shaking his head with disgust.

"I'm sorry. I looked for a sign that said No Photography, but I didn't see one. Where is the sign?"

"You don't need a sign! There's no pitchas here!"

I paused. I spoke more slowly.

"But how do you know not to start taking pictures if there's no sign?"

"I just told you—there's no pitchas!"

Yes, I'm back. Back in New York, land of the free, home of the nutty. God bless America.

My arrest-risking photo, taken in the rotunda of the courthouse where I went to postpone jury duty, caught my eye with its representation of Byzantine justice—a phrase that sounds ironic in more ways than one.

My Beloved and I have just returned from Turkey, whose nerve center, Istanbul, is the former Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire. I think I was at a frat party when they offered Byzantine history in college, so I can't tell you what justice was like in that Empire, but it's not pretty in today's Turkey. Currently more than 100 journalists, 30+ mayors, and thousands of citizens have been thrown in prison by the current government; many of them remain there for years without trial.

The issue hung over us during an otherwise spectacular two weeks in this gorgeous country. It lingers, like the bruise on my knee that I got one late afternoon, walking up (up, up) an unpronounceable cobblestone street in Istanbul, where I waved at an old man on the third-floor balcony of a 19th century building and he waved back and I smiled and he smiled and I walked smack into one of the knee-high stanchions that separate the "driving" portion from the "walking" portion of the impossibly narrow street. The joy, the beauty, the bruise.

We were in Turkey thanks to the generous Aydın Doğan Foundation, who had invited Stan to be a juror for their 29th annual International Cartoon Competition. The competition was founded on the premise that "tolerance is more important than ever and that cartoons rely on tolerance and wisdom, and form one of the building blocks of societies open to differences of opinion and beliefs." I found this a particularly compelling and poignant mission statement, given that many of the competitors and half of the jurors came from countries where tolerance is on something of a sliding scale.

"Does the government tell your editor what he can and can't run?" Stan asked one of the Turkish cartoonists on the jury.

"They don't have to," came the translated reply. "He edits himself." 

"In America," I said in the heavy lull that followed, "the only people editors are afraid of offending are advertisers."

Communication was sometimes a challenge during our week with the cartoonist-jurors. They came from Turkey, Iran, Ukraine, Portugal, China, England—and one single mild-mannered cartoonist from the U.S. Translators spoke Chinese and Turkish...or Portuguese and Turkish...or Persian and Turkish. Or a Turkish woman who spoke no Portuguese and a Portuguese cartoonist who spoke no Turkish would instead communicate in their shared language, French.

It was eye-opening and refreshingly humbling for two Americans to discover that the U.S. is not the center of the universe.

But as My Beloved always says, English isn't his first language, anyway—drawing is. And if there was one thing these cartoonists did with no failure to communicate, it was draw. They drew each other, they drew their translators, they drew the spouses. They drew me!

I might have hoped for a tiny bit more resemblance to Marilyn Monroe, but I am very fond of my caricature by the adorable Turkish cartoonist Tan Oral:

And of the interpretation by Ukrainian cartoonist and architect Viktor Kudin:

 "I look sort of sad, or serious," I said.

"A serious woman is very good!" he said in Russian.

Wanting to show my appreciation, I rummaged through my attic for appropriate responses. I put forth one as if I were offering a too-small sweater.

"Das vedanya?" — "Goodbye?"

The day after the judging was over, the competition organizers treated us to a day sailing on the Aegean—the first and last time I'll ever feel like Jackie Onassis.

We sailed to a serene cove and parked the boat; then the swimmers among us jumped—I was very, very brave, and dove from the top step of the ladder, 8 feet above the water—into the unlikely turquoise-cerulean sea and swam with the tiny fishies who scuttled to the surface in search of bread. Then we sailed to another cove and started again.

At the end of the afternoon, we sailed back to the marina in the coastal town of Bodrum, where the cartoonists met some 12- and 13-year-old art students from the local school. Stan was matched with three boys, and assigned them to draw me while he drew each of them.

One boy had more English than the other two; he was a talker and joker, who drew everything in caricature.

Another was quiet and dead serious; his work was a flurry of erasures and redrawings, until he presented me with this:

The third boy, shy, sweet, and reticent, seemed to be searching for his own style among a host of others. Aren't we all?

"Enter mine in the cartoon competition," said the brash young caricaturist, confidently pressing his drawing into our hands.

We told him the winners had already been chosen for this year—but who knew what could happen next year? The future waits to be drawn.

To see the tied-for-first-place winners of this years International Cartoon Competition (and many others), click here.

The Wave

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Remarkable how it comes over me

Fast, from first prickle

To full clammy rush

Like the swift tide of mortification

In junior high.

At fifteen, I wailed with pain,

Take it out!

I won't have children!

I didn't know

Who was waiting for me

Fifteen years later;

The squeaking package

Who changed everything.

Who made all the mishegoss

Worth it.

Now the package is opened

And, twenty years on,

Rolls her beautiful eyes

At all this.

And this heated rush

Comes in a wave

Of goodbye to all that.

The Weight

-->

We live backwards and forwards.

When the child was three,

I felt the weight of her against my chest,

Her legs dangling, her feet hitting my thighs

As I carried her sleeping form

From the car,

And I thought, Remember this.

Today, she's twenty.

She can lift me.

Sometimes, she sits her lanky self

On my lap,

And I feel the weight of her,

I wrap my spotty arms

Around her skinny waist

And I think, Remember this.

I'm reading Without,

Donald Hall's elegy of

Grief and remembrance and beauty

To his poet-wife Jane Kenyon,

Who died too young.

My beloved is on the phone,

Pacing from microwave to bookshelf

With his coffee cup.

"Yup," he says. "Uh, huh."

I hear his voice all day,

Every day,

Our desks just five feet apart.

Sometimes I, who lived so long in quiet,

Want quiet.

And I think, Remember this.

Let me write a pseudo poem

To hold on to the sound

Of his voice in the room.

There's time enough for quiet.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Thank you to @Kcecelia and @BumbleWard, who led me to Donald Hall this morning.

Seasoned

As Paul Simon said, Yesterday it was my birthday; I hung one more year on the line.

It wasn't a significant birthday, and I spent most of it at my desk dealing with the massive work project that's kept me silent here for lo, these many months. But it was an April birthday in New York City in a season that's been full of gifts. A weird hybrid spring-winter-spring season that's been going on for months, and about which we can only say "global warming" and shake our heads and then gasp appreciatively at tulips and ornamental pear trees coming on stage way before their cue.

A wise friend of mine (and you know who you are, dear M.) once said that when you've been away from your blog for months, you shouldn't try to write the definitive recap. You should post pictures. So here are postcards from a winterspring (wing? sprinter?) in New York, the city that gives me gifts every day of the year.

New York aglow, January.

Public art, Riverside Park, February.

The Hudson River and Hoboken, from the High Line, early March.

The High Line coming into bloom.

Spring on Charles Street, West Village, New York City, March.

Madison Square Park, April.

Still, Here

New York City is a series of gifts that you keep opening as long as you live here.

I'm never not amazed by the city. A mere walk to the post office on a Tuesday can be an exercise in geometry, sociology, aromatherapy, and modern dance. But sometimes you're offered an experience that takes you outside—or way inside—the usual-unusual.

Today's gift: stillspotting nyc, a series of architectural/musical installations put on by the Guggenheim that involved moving among different New York City sites (several of them closed to the public, all of the installations created by Norwegian architectural firm Snøhetta) to experience a moment of stillness amidst the urban chaos, while listening to the music of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt.

Here's how the stillspotting website describes it:

The staging of five recorded works by Pärt gradually transports visitors from the hustle and bustle of the streetscape to an elevated urban experience that makes them newly aware of their sense of hearing. Visitors can experience this confluence of music and architecture at five separate locations downtown that quietly celebrate the city, ten years after the September 11 attacks.  

We didn't make it to the two sites on Governor's Island, but we did visit the three others, starting in Battery Park, where we walked a grassy labyrinth while listening (via iPods and headphones) to Pärt's "Silentium," the second movement of his Tabula Rasa, performed by the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra.

   
What looks like a white comic-strip word balloon at the right edge of the photo is actually a weather balloon; these were the constants in each installation, apparently because they "have a unifying and holistic character and simultaneously create and ignore space."

Like this description, the labyrinth experience was one you could take very seriously or with a grain of salt. Several participants appeared to be in a mild trance...or under the influence. I dutifully walked the concentric circles toward the weather balloon, finding it calmingly mindless; others in our party quickly decamped to a bench and watched the goings-on from a remove. When my three companions were ready to leave before I'd quite finished my trek, I felt sort of guilty at the thought of barging across the bricks that marked my path—so I mimed clambering over a three-foot wall. What can I say? I was under the influence of Arvo Pärt.

We walked north along the Hudson River to the second site: the unoccupied 46th floor of the new World Trade Center 7, the last building to fall on 9/11 and the first to be rebuilt.

The floor was open on all four sides, allowing 360-degree views of the city, the harbor, the Hudson—and an aerial view of the new World Trade Center Memorial.

We were so close to the unfinished 1 World Trade Center (formerly known as the Freedom Tower) that if I weren't so acrophobic I'd have considered swinging across on a zipline.

1 World Trade Center, reflecting WTC7 and the Woolworth Building.

In this case, the drama of the setting and the kind of unnerving privilege of being, for the moment, a part of the new World Trade Center eclipsed any emotion the music tried to offer. The 3-minute selection ("Hymn to a Great City") played on a continuous New Agey loop, with speakers set among yet more weather balloons and plastic folding chairs.

I preferred a slow meander along the four edges of the 46th floor.

Finally, we walked over to the spectacular 1913 Woolworth Building on Broadway, across the street from City Hall. The legendary lobby is closed to the public (a fact that makes my populist-minded Beloved very grouchy), so it's become an object of frustrated desire for many a tourist (and resident) eager to get a glimpse, only to be shooed out by zealous security guards. Even at a private art event, photographs and video were forbidden, so I've borrowed one from the stillspotting website:

Spatial installation by Snøhetta, music by Arvo Pärt. Installation view: To a Great City at the Woolworth Building, September 15–18 and 22–25, 2011. © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York. Photo: Kristopher McKay

We sat on the steps between the marble banisters and the weather balloons and listened to Pärt's "In Principio" for choir and orchestra. I looked up the whole time, trying to memorize the details of the arched mosaic ceiling, the gothic filigree on the walls, the gargoyle-ish faces (one with a snaggletooth), the sculptural caricatures, and the stained glass overhead bearing the names of countries (including Russia and the "German Empire") and the dates 1879 (when the first Woolworth store opened) and 1913 (when the building was completed).

For 19 minutes and 19 seconds, until the last strains of the music faded, I felt completely still, completely mesmerized, and completely grateful for the gifts of this city.