Rooting For Plotlines

Walt has a keen sense of certain rituals. When we go to the fire station, he always wears his red plastic fire hat and blue rubber boots. He knows to cup his hands around his face and lean against the glass, but not to knock on the door or yell. He looks patiently at all of the trucks for some sign of movement: a displaced hose, maybe, or fire jackets on the floor next to the engine. If the firemen are out, we will walk around the building to the golf carts in the back, where he will pretend to drive them for a while, and then come back to check one last time. Rare is the afternoon we don't find someone on shift either coming or going, who stops and waves, opens the door, and lets Walt in to walk around the truck, then climb up into the driver's seat and ring the bell. I have on my phone a series of photographs, mostly in focus, that make in the last year or so a near motion-capture of displaced time. Walt's face thins and lengthens from toddler into boy. He sits higher on the chair now, turns the wheel, makes the fire engine noise ("woo-woo!" and not "ee-nah, ee-nah," the sound of the ambulance), and asks the fireman a series of questions to which he already knows the answer, which is how Walt started the conversation yesterday afternoon.

"What this do?" That's the button that turns the mirror. (Smiling, pointing up) "What it do?" Those are the switches that make the hoses go. (Turning the wheel) "What this do?" Well, that turns the big tires down here where your daddy is standing. "Yeah, it turns the wheels, which makes the bus [sic] go, so the fire man goes to the fire, and he roll out the hoses, and get the axes, and smashes the glass, and let out poisonous gases, and put on the masks for the gases and go find 'Help! Help!' for the man on the room who is trapped!" (Pause, to me) Yeah, that's like the best explanation of what we do that I've ever heard by a kid under five. (to Walt) You really know your stuff, big guy. (Smiling) "Now I see axes?"

I recently read Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida. His formula for how a photograph initiates an emotional reaction in the person looking at it, independent or even in spite of the photographer's intention, makes a lot of sense to me. To Barthes, the selective power of certain images to make a disruption ("punctum") is characterized by feeling and scope. The feeling itself is instantaneous and vivd, but also fleeting and impossible to will with subsequent viewings. Instead, the logic goes, we scrutinize the photograph to locate the disruption: to will ourselves toward its location after the fact. We make a ritual of finding the place in order to better remember it, and with time, perhaps even understand it. Barthes makes a whole separate, and subordinate, category ("stadium") for the polite attention of the spectator to the photographer's intention, which he characterizes as stable, common, and unremarkable. Which is to say, unworthy of consideration excerpt perhaps to the photographer him/herself.

A week or so after I moved to Indiana, I walked with one of Katie's nieces to the drugstore. It was hot and late in the day. We walked west through subdivisions and office parks. The industrial air conditioner in the drugstore, upon arrival, was positively glacial. We passed a row of greeting cards, and all the birthday greetings--balloons, smiling monkeys, big script--were iridescent in the fluorescent light. A country song Katie had liked was playing over the loudspeakers. I had just started this blog, for which friends were emailing pictures of Katie. There was this photograph of Katie and her mom on Key Biscayne in Miami, a candid, with the ocean behind them, and when I looked at it in a certain way, for a split second, I could remember every part of loving Katie, in such clear detail, until I couldn't handle the feeling. I became hysterical: floor, wailing, carpet, fists. Ed and Beth heard me from the kitchen and I remember them running in to ask if I was okay. I remember grabbing for a bottle of Afrin--Afrin!--on the counter to try to open things up a little so that I could breath, which I did, and after a while I was fine and the feeling--the bewilderment, the shock--passed. I was calm, stunned. I looked at the photo again, and toggled through the rest of the series. Nothing.

Willie Nelson's "Valentine" was Katie and I's wedding song. On Thursday, May 8th, it will be nine years ago that we danced to it under tea lights in the loft of a barn in Hobart, Indiana. It was our good luck to catch the apple trees in blossom that weekend, which leant even more bucolic Midwestern authenticity and charm to a day filled with tractor rides, homemade cookies, and, well, barn lofts. Katie hated Valentine's Day, so it was a kind of joke between us to choose the song. The humor tempered some of the built-in sincerity of the day, and carved out within it a private space that was entirely ours. I don't remember the dance very well, or the song; only that we chose it and were happy with it. We were coordinating so many details that day, all of which seemed either to go well or not go well. I was thinking about that song the other day, and found the video below. I didn't realize Willie wrote the song for his son, or that he saw it as essentially a children's song until everyone started taking it so seriously, at which point it became a staple in his live shows, where he plays it unironically to this day.

I'm going to miss the American version of "The Office," which concludes its nine-season run next Thursday. It is the last show I remember watching about which I cared more than my own life. I was highly suspect of the show at first. I had loved the UK version and I worried my affection for the one might betray my fidelity to the other. Then, I was bored and lonely, grieving, and easily overwhelmed. I had a lot of time on my hands. I loved "The Office" almost instantly. I watched the first three seasons in a couple of weeks, right up until the season 3 finale, and it was so good, Pam's speech (which I blogged about a few years ago) and Jim's coming back from New York, and Ryan's promotion, and Michael's self-defeating power grab; everyone with the chance to be so happy. Of course, then, I was cheering for plot lines, in spite of myself and, also, in spite of what I knew writing, art, and television, much less life, could be. Which meant that how I watched television changed that year, in a way I'm not sure it's changed back since. Then, I allowed television every kind of indulgence so long as it reassured me that the moral order of convention was not entirely gone from my life: marriage, but also comeuppances, modesty, and continuity. Certain truths, within a spectrum.

I don't have a lot of specific memories of watching television with Katie, but I do remember watching the British "Office" that first year in Miami, on a DVD from Netflix, late at night in the early winter, with all the doors and windows that faced the water open on our first high-rise apartment. The room was, for once, aired out, cool and dry and dark. We were on break from graduate school. Probably, it was around the time of our trip to Key Biscayne. We watched the season right through to the end, to the bittersweet finale in which David was fired, Gareth was promoted, and Tim tried and failed to win Dawn. What a train wreck, I remember thinking. The stakes were so low for these people so, surely, they deserved some consolation. At the very least, I deserved the chance to watch them be, finally, happy. But then, the British "Office," right to the end, didn't soft-peddle it resolutions at the expense of a certain humanity. The series was resolved, on its own terms, to perfection. What came next in the Christmas special was something else entirely, a postscript, to which the rules didn't apply. I remember Katie and I agreeing that there was no logic to such happiness that did not also contradict the pathos that made the show feel real. It was a fake happy ending, not a real one, and we were sure we knew the difference.

In one of his Lannan Foundation interviews, Robert Hass says that it is wrong to have an elegiac attitude toward reality. He means the realm of language, but it's an interesting take on television, which is maybe the most elegiac form of popular entertainment. It fixes a contemporary moment into a near-past, and when a show succeeds, it draws out the gap between present and near-past until the viewers feel safely nostalgic for the moment, and seek constantly its restoration. How easily, in the televised life, sentiment becomes sentimental. Liberal expansiveness becomes conservative nostalgia. The colorful friend becomes the caricature that sells all the better the real suffering of the hero. Perhaps the most glaring aspect of a show's continuing success is how it restores the asynchronous moment within the fluid past. Characters die off or marry. Businesses boom and bust. All the while, circumstances stay in constant flux; they change, without really changing. How American, the Soviets used to say, that American jazz can fix so many creative expressions into the monotonous and repetitive structures of the key and chord. How jazz-like, our ensemble-driven, multi-narrative, single-camera contemporary television show.

My life is not on any screen I'm watching, which is what makes photographing Walt at the fire station so challenging. Even when I get him right, I can only express that success in the broadest terms to anyone else, a picture of something they'd want to see, with the effect of making unremarkable and indistinct the boy I know and love in this fixed, fleeting moment. I feel this way when I write about Katie. It is a kind of un-reality to feel exempt from one's sense of failure; from the certainty I, or we, might have, with time, done certain things better. I have written about Katie for the last six years, and I am trying each time to find a way into and through something that seems to have no clear beginning or end. Even now, I'm fairly certain that what I am describing is not a television show about an office, but instead, a memory, my memory, colored and tempered by my own sense of feeling and need for sense. It would be too neat to say that when we were 26 and watching "The Office" in Miami, I was desperate for those hypothetical occasions that life has since rushed in to tonic with real ones. I didn't know that could happen, then. After Katie died, I couldn't imagine what any continuation of a life would look like. I could not imagine ever being remarried. But, of course, I am remarried. Life has continued, and I do love it. I am rooting for certain outcomes, and keeping whichever memories, however they seem to fit into whatever I know of a life, whatever they might mean, because it is what I know how to do.

Seize the Day

My friend Ben is visiting Chicago this week. We both lived there for three years, more or less, after college and the Peace Corps. Ben is now one of the only Western journalists in the Middle East who speaks fluent Arabic, a feat he undertook deliberately in Cairo, after he left Chicago. Salon has dedicated a page to his reporting, which it republishes on a regular basis, as does much of the web. But then, Ben was always a writer. A few years ago, just after I arrived to the Bay Area, we met in Chicago and spent a valedictory week bowling, drinking, walking the lakefront, going to a Cubs games, hanging out at the Kopi Cafe, the Hopleaf, Carol's Pub. We saw half a Harmony Korine movie at the Music Box one afternoon, and walked around Evanston the next. To us, Chicago had become a prelude: our old, temporary hometown. Then, I remembered Chicago as the place where Katie and I made a life before we married, where my nephews were born and we all played cards in the kitchen instead of getting a babysitter. I taught middle school social studies during the day. Ben tutored high school students for standardized tests. We started a writer's group, and when that collapsed, we corralled friends and partners into a book club that also petered out after a few meetings. The authors we admired were guideposts to a certain kind of future, we were certain of it, we had only to unlock the key and pace ourselves in certain directions.



I am in bed today, sick with the flu. Mostly, I've slept. I watched some television, though the more I stared at the laptop screen, the more my eyes, head, arms, legs, fingers hurt. I've read some of the magazines and books on my nightstand. Mostly, I've laid in bed, nodding off, listening to Cait and the boys upstairs, feeling terribly guilty for getting sick in the first place. This room is so quiet for the excuse of lying very still in it. Still, what an unfair disruption to a family life to spend all day in bed. A little while ago, I took a handful of Tylenols and Advils, in the hopes of standing up, showering, and eating something. The achiness is not so bad, at least, though I am fairly light-headed going back and forth.



One of the books I keep picking up and not reading is Humboldt's Gift, Saul Bellow's wonderful 1975 novel about Chicago, which the book jacket tells me is also a roman a clef about Bellow's friendship with the poet Delmore Schwartz. Ben gave me this book for Christmas a few years ago, along with Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives (I gave him, I think, Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking). I have read Humboldt's Gift in starts and stops ever since. Now, I have about 100 pages left. There is a terrific introductory essay at the beginning of the edition I own, by Jeffrey Eugenides, that I read to re-orient myself every time I pick it back up. I like what he says here:

"A phrase that might also describe Bellow's chief and lasting achievement: he elevated language and, by doing so, reversed the spirit's atrophy. That's what reading Bellow feels like. What makes Bellow's prose better than just about anyone else's is that it is touched, in every clause, by enlightenment. Every clause glows with its own aura. Even the verbs are doing holy work....Almost alone in his generation, Saul Bellow maintained a connection to the vatic role poets had in earlier ages. He did this in a modern, twentieth-century way, tentatively, probingly, with self-humor and a large measure of dubiety, but not outright rejection."

Like all the great American cities, Chicago is easy to love from a distance. It is big, crude, friendly, expansive, and self-sustaining. It doesn't need our affection, which only increases its allure. Chicago might be over-run with beer gardens in the summer, or boarded up and barely open on a Monday night in January, but the city itself presses out along the Lake and continues in both directions all year, for as far as the eye can see, toward the many neighborhoods that accumulate at its edges. It is the city's worst-kept secret that Chicago has no good restaurants in the Loop, where the conventions and hoteliers keep visitors in ballrooms and top-floor steakhouses, watching that skyline light up and not move. Chicago is a static city, which is its great advantage in every season: it generates tremendous stores of energy while keeping very still.




How lucky, sometimes, to transform anything and remember it differently. I don't take much time to miss Chicago and I hardly write about it. But then, I'm not sure I marshall my affections and interests so deliberately. I do miss seeing Ben so regularly. Tonight, I'll neither write nor read, opting instead to run a rash of litmus tests at the hypothetical morning. How high is my fever? Will it break soon? Am I hungry? In pain? If there is a unreasonable limit to reasonably good health, it is the utter neurosis of waiting for an illness to end, and the way the mind alternates reason and distraction as it tries to push through. I'm hoping that by keeping low today I can hedge some of tomorrow's exhaustion (and contagion), get up with the boys in the morning, and be again a reasonable husband, father, and teacher. I like those roles very much and I don't like not being able to do them well. Now is precisely the kind of moment that will seem remarkable until it passes, this all-consuming flu-bout I'm unlikely to either romanticize or miss.

Mailer

My senior year in college, I read Norman Mailer's selected prose collection, Time of Our Time. I was a young writer and a history major, who admired Mailer's precocity, then iconoclasm. If I could avoid any of the vulnerability, risk, and failure that marked that course's middle space, so much the better. I admired and skimmed, re-read and skipped my way through more than 1,000 pages: excerpts, half-stories, partial interviews, long chapters. Even the page count was aggressive and self-aggrandizing. It suggested Mailer had written so much so well that he could not help but select some of all of it. Mailer edited the book himself and signed every edition in the first printing, an effort he explained later required ice and towels to complete. To the end, Mailer made his everyday actions dramatic and heroic.

I bought Time of Our Time after listening to Mailer’s interview that summer on Weekend Edition. Driving students from the summer camp in rural North Carolina where I taught literature classes to the regional airport a little more than an hour away, I would catch NPR crossing the valley. The students sat glumly in their seats, uneager to go home. It always left me a little sad to start them on their way. Leaving the airport, I would roll down the windows, coasting the long downhills, then gunning it across the dip to get up speed for the climb. Scott Simon and Norman Mailer’s chat was vintage public radio: leisurely, measured, conversational. The anecdotes of Mailer's life—bankrupted mayoral candidate, apologetic wife stabber, witness of Lowell at the peace march, enemy of Vidal on television, inheritor of Capote in the jail cell—seemed peacefully at odds with the fair and rational man narrating the launch of Apollo 11 from Merritt lsland, Florida. His "gargantuan idea" was that human beings might not yet destroy themselves if they shot themselves further and further into space. Then Mailer refuted, as though by rote, the familiar criticisms. His voice was elegant and rich, just patrician; marbled a little with fat. I imagined his was the voice of high letters, at the end of a writing life: washed in acid, smooth, certain.

The mark of the mediocre mind is to seek precedent. Mailer said it to give a context for what he felt were unfair criticisms of his talent, but I took it as indictment: to mimic anyone's creative process would only diminish my own talent, however modest, and its eventual achievement. Still, that fall, I devoted myself to reading selectively a narrow, avuncular Mailer. In essays, interviews, and books, I skipped the parts--sexist this, drunken that--that made me uncomfortable. It was an amateur mistake. I admired the author, so I audited the work. I expected Mailer to be as implacable and generous as the ego that compelled him to write. I hoped such ambition and talent might mean that, like all hard work, prosperity and reward inevitably followed. How else to account for process?

The Fight is Mailer's account of "The Rumble in the Jungle," the boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman that took place in Zaire, 1974, and its surrounding circumstances. While it is not Mailer's best book--its excesses are at times decidedly ignorant by today's standards--it is still one of my favorites by him. A lesser moment in the book--Mailer's careful qualification of his mile split when considering a 3am training job with Ali--fascinates me:

            “There was no question of keeping up with Muhammad. His conscience, however (now on the good side of journalism), was telling him that the better his own condition, the more he would be able to discern about Ali’s. What a pity he had not been jogging since the summer. Up in Maine he had done two miles every other day, but jogging was one discipline he could not maintain. At five feet eight inches and one hundred and seventy pounds, Norman was simply too heavy to enjoy running. He could jog at a reasonable gait—fifteen minutes for two miles was good time for him—and if he pushed, he could jog three miles, conceivably four, but he hated it. Jogging disturbed the character of one’s day. He did not feel refreshed afterward but overstimulated and irritable. The truth of jogging was it only felt good when he stopped. And he would remind himself that with the exception of Erich Segal and George Dilder, he had never heard of a writer who liked to run—who wanted the brilliance of the mind discharged through the ankles?” (The Fight, Vintage 1975)

The passage is vintage Mailer--excessive, charming, vulnerable, and yet somehow, entirely serious--as is the seeming aside of his very fast jogging mile. It makes the training with Ali a contest, and by proxy to other writers, a contrast. In a remarkable review following its publication, Michael Wood admired The Fight for what he called “the carelessness of Mailer’s eloquence, the sense that it just came along as a means of saying what he had to say.” Indeed, Mailer's "good time" situates him as a natural athlete; it suggests Mailer might easily best Ali on their job, were his heart really in it. Throughout his career, Mailer spoke in pugilistic metaphors, boxed semi-professionally, and until middle age, challenged enemies to step into the ring with him. Wood calls it “walking parapets.” The threat is as literary as Mailer’s poor conditioning—in a world of non-fighters (writers), the amateur throws a vicious right hook—and more than a little self-conscious. Mailer cannot keep a training regimen, but of course, what serious writer really runs? From which might follow, what serious writer doesn’t box?

Nowhere in The Fight does Mailer make Ali so exceptional outside of the ring as he does in his fantastic interviews for the 1996 documentary, When We Were Kings. In Kings, Mailer’s compliments are deferential and reticent, paying due without simplifying the tribute. It’s a neat trick:

Of course, the documentary was made when Mailer was looking back decades, at a moment whose history he had helped write. For Mailer, after the movie, Ali, Foreman, Zaire, Mobutu, even Plimpton have ceased to move and no longer (if they ever) fight back. When he wrote and published it, The Fight was high literary journalism. Now, The Fight is the testament of a reverent interloper who seems lucky to be in the right place at the right time. Mailer’s luck is to articulate in every register his own wonder and suspicion, until both terminate in the description of Ali’s shocking underdog victory over Foreman. I love that word: interloper. To admit, from the outset, that we make no substantial claim to write, allows us the time and space we need to synchronize witness with understanding. Mailer’s skill at and knowledge of boxing is amateur, just enough to inform the writing. His affection for, and writing about, it is entirely his own. 

By most accounts, Mailer mellowed with age. He continued to make a practice of correcting all critiques, defending to the end his least well-received books and ideas. Which is to say, he knew himself and his work well enough to take on all comers. Perhaps the arguments repeated themselves in narrow and obvious combinations; he saw them coming. Or maybe, in the end, they weren't thrown with all that much effort. I have good copies of his books that I admire--The Executioner's Song, The Naked and the Dead, The Fight, Of A Fire on the Moon--but I wouldn't know many of the rest. My own "selected" project is shallower and narrower than I might have once liked it to be, though for different reasons than I first expected. I enjoy Mailer's late-period interviews about boxing, literature, and himself. I genuinely admire those books I admire. And where it suits my interest to do so, which is much of the rest of the time, I forgive, and even forget, their author.

Smooth

I am fully present in my world. This morning, even the radio was singing it. "You've got the music inside you--don't let go!" a man grunted earnestly from a radio station up the Peninsula and across the Bay. Had we met? Would we ever meet? Transcribing them just now, I had the lyrics wrong. I had to look them up. I remembered him singing, "You can do it! The music is inside you!" but when I checked the station's website playlist against a YouTube video of the song, I made my corrections. What he meant he sang over and over, screaming, in falsetto, in deep reverb, in fragments of words and sentences, in full garble-rock parody mode, until the song itself dissolved into delay and feedback. Maybe the song needed to be a certain length, or he had only written the choruses. Maybe I was meant to be fixed by the choruses because the hook was so good no one really cared about the words around it. The hypnotic quality of the song was undeniable. It said nothing else for any length of time. Did it even matter what else he was telling me? It was the end of the world unless I held onto the music.

My first year as a Peace Corps volunteer, in Bangladesh, the office staff from the capital would sometimes stop in to say hello, passing through on the major highway from the North. I remember once hearing Santana's "Smooth," muffled and from a distance. I was sitting in my cement room, trying to write poems by hand, which never worked. Usually, I just wrote out lines from poems I admired, then went back and tried to change enough of the words until the rest felt like my own. I felt terribly guilty. I had no idea this was how many students of poetry tried to become young poets. The working title of the poem I wrote unsuccessfully all summer was "Etude for the Map-Makers." The poem I cribbed was James Merrill's "Lost in Translation." I don't read German, but I had the footnotes from the powder blue Norton Anthology of Poetry I had slugged across oceans. I was doing my best to turn the widowed French nanny into a reticent professor of astronomy who loved baseball--it was that kind of poem--when a car door clicked opened, Santana played a few licks, Rob Thomas liberated from inside an SUV sang his flat vibrat; looking down from my window I watched the assistant director step out of his glacial mobile palace and into the monsoon heat, his sunglasses instantly fogged. Santana makes anyone's arrival instantly memorable, though probably I was just thrilled at the distraction, a small part of my country instantly conjured to make the day distinct and memorable. I was that kind of American abroad.

I thought at the time that "Smooth" was a pretty corny song. Now I don't know. I certainly don't seek it out, it's not on my iPhone, friends don't bust out late-90s Santana albums at barbecues, playdates, and weddings. But writing this, I have listened to "Smooth" three or four times in a row, and it seems to be the sort of song one has to listen to a few more times to get out of the system. Anyway, our destination was some roadside restaurant recommended by the bus drivers. I rode in that enormous white Land Rover chilled to 60-odd degrees for a good hour. I liked it. I sat on a leather seat and looked out tinted windows, as we crossed the Bangabandhu (roughly: International Friendship) Bridge over the Jamuna River, past towns and food stalls, rickshaws, motor taxis, and row after row of tire stores on either side of the bridge, next to the bus depots. How quickly out there had become in here. From which vantage did I really mean to be looking in or out was still something else I stole from James Merrill, and probably also Robert Frost, at least until the assistant director slapped me on the arm, smiled, and said, "Hey, now isn't this wild! I mean, does Santana know how to rock or what?!"

My nieces recommended Cait and I watch "Pitch Perfect" last night. About five minutes in, Cait looked over at me and said, "I love absolutely everything about this movie!" I liked it, too, but I also kept thinking, "Wait, so that's a thing now?" Meaning, A Capella is a thing now? Mash-up mixes are a thing now? Vomit jokes are a thing now? How exceptionally hard everyone seemed to be working in the movie to have a good time; in that cinematic/montage-y, harmless and friendly, making-an-old-thing-new way, the ideals of friendship and shared purpose cleared all obstacles. Had I ever enjoyed anything in college so un-ironically as the students of Barden University enjoyed harmonizing? Could anything be enjoyed without such complication anywhere except onscreen? Whither now, slacker ethos? Though I'm sure someone asked the same things about Flashdance, Footloose, House Party, Armageddon.

I am ambivalent about the asynchronous tendencies of our contemporary age. They seem derivative, and more than a little resigned, where I might hope we would be, well, hopeful and innovative, perhaps even a little uncertain. Or, at least, a little less aggregated and codified. I think the dissension here is from broad nostalgia: not feeling constantly somewhere and someplace else, however comforting the impulse. When I first came back to the United States from Bangladesh, the Blockbuster video store was stacked wall to wall with copies of the movie, Freddy Got Fingered. I enjoyed my ironic disdain: So this is what I had missed in two years away. Once, briefly, Tom Green was a very big thing. According to IMDB, Freddy is an unemployed cartoonist who moves back in with his parents, then accuses them of sexual abuse when they insist he gets a job. Probably I'll get this wrong, but let me guess that Freddy recants, gets the girl, moves out of the house, and writes a bestseller graphic novel about the whole experience.

A little more than a month ago, I found out that my memoir, Young Widower, won the River Teeth Book Prize and will be published in 2014 by the University of Nebraska Press. It's exciting news. I'm looking forward to sharing the book and seeing it in print. I'm not really sure what having a book published will be like. I've done my best to watch the people around me doing it. One of the great and humbling things about working where I do is seeing so many talented writers have success. It's hard, I guess, to get a sense of scale about expectations in a bull market. More to the point, it's sort of mind-boggling to approach what seems like the first significant marker of a writing life. Everything that was one hypothetical is becoming both linear and tangible; I will hold the book in my hands, on or around its publication date, when people will read it, at which point it will sit on bookshelves and library racks with other books. Then, it's what to write next, and how. I always imagined my first book would be a collection of poems. I never imagined I would have the occasion to write the memoir I did. The shape of my own writing life has not changed very much in the last fifteen or so years, even as the life that sustains it seems distinct, even fragmented away from any sense of a sequence. But those lives sustain each other, which I suppose is a kind of fortune; certainly, at times like this, an occasion for gratitude.

Empathy, Not Outrage

In the wake of the Newtown murders, I need to believe my sons will be safe at school. This is the minimum of what I expect from my free society. I have that expectation because my sons cannot yet protect themselves in the public spaces where they learn how to understand and love their neighbor. They need those spaces to complement the worldview we try to instill in them, to learn diversity but also to test our indoctrinations against the world they will one day inherit. I expect my boys to attend public school in the United States, that great egalitarian social institution where they will learn something about how to become neighbors, friends, colleagues, confidantes, and enemies. At home, with my wife and our families, we will teach them how to become adults and men.

I understand that a school is a place where magnificent violence can happen between students, or between a teacher and a student, even habitually and secretively, over a long period of time, between predators and victims, bullies and the bullied. I taught for three years in a public elementary school in Chicago, where students were subjected to periodic body searches and, every now and again, they walked into school through metal detectors. The point was to contain the potential for violence between students because they were not yet mature enough to always make good choices about feelings, actions, and consequences. At that school, we had no contingency plan for a grown man who might walk into the school wearing combat gear, firing an assault rifle and handguns into roomfuls of children.

I fear the pattern I see emerging in our society to become a new norm: random and sporadic violence without consequence or response. A man at a university kills his peers. A man at a theater murders strangers. A man at a rally shoots a Congresswoman in the head. These are acts of terror committed by someone else’s boys.

I cannot say what happens in someone else’s head when he shoots a stranger. But the fact that it keeps happening, and with increasing frequency, means that something we do not approve of and cannot contain thrives. It is equal parts arrogant and pointless to speculate beyond that.

I can help to control how these circumstances are mended. And here, I think, is a point of consensus. A society agrees to grant, and then recognize the rights of its members, who suffer various penalties when they choose, individually or collectively, to deny those rights to each other. No right can be greater than our right to nurture, protect, and socialize our children. Schools must be safe public spaces for children to negotiate their relationships with the world, each other, and adults. We have an obligation as a society to make and keep those spaces safe.

Being an adult means sometimes feeling unsafe and vulnerable: to disease, to other people, to the natural world, to society. As a society, we contain that fear. Our children should not be forced to face their inherent vulnerability before they are mature enough to understand it and make choices for or against it.

In a parenting book I admire, I am encouraged to help my sons express their terrifying and extreme emotions in reasonable terms by using “you wish” phrases. It sounds like you wish you could keep playing with that toy rather than share it with your friend. The most basic acknowledgment of anyone’s wish is an expression of empathy, and empathy diffuses anger, hatred, fear, and suffering.

This is a time that requires extreme empathy. Whatever conversation begins or continues, let’s work to improve it. Whomever the vested interests and constituents, our talking to each other must not devolve into minor arguments about policy, health, lobbies, and tactics. Our circumstances are not beyond repair. Not yet, at least. We require some measure of restitution. Let’s start instead by saying, over and over, what we wish for each other, then listen to each other and hear whatever rings true in our hearts. I wish that our society will again become one in which our children are safe in public, in our schools and classrooms, from the particular violence of unreasonable adults. I wish that this tragedy will exist in words we only say once.

Unanswered Prayers

I secretly love "Unanswered Prayers". It is the song I listen to again and again when I want to remember what I loved most in my marriage to Katie, or when I haven’t felt sufficient to the situation of grief in my continuing life.

“Unanswered Prayers” is Garth Brooks’s paean to loving the one you’re with, accepting the hand life deals you, and not sweating the small stuff. Because, as Brooks explains at the end of every chorus, Some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers. Writing that last sentence, I feel a certain ironic contempt creeping into this summation. I’m not sure I like it. “Unanswered Prayers” does deal almost exclusively in aphorisms of sentiment. It is, by most measures, a pretty corny song. It is also beloved, widely, in a way that few artists of any stripe or quality might expect their work to reach a huge audience. You know, artists like me.

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Country music is, by tradition, a rigid musical genre. The chord progressions don’t change; they often build to crescendos and major key choruses. The lyrics, like the themes, stabilize around a few common themes. Listeners expect a certain transparency borrowed from political conservatism: show us the best reflections of ourselves—modest, humble, short on cash, true to family, God, and country—we, who work hard all week, drink hard all weekend, and pray hard Sunday mornings. Unlike rock or hip-hop, very much like pop, country-music outsiders start at the extremes and work quickly toward the middle. Those who don’t find their way initially in Nashville—Brooks, but also Dwight Yoakam, Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris—drift to other cities and genres, or leave the scene all together. Country music fans are intensely loyal. They know what they like. They buy many, many records.

 All the country music Cait enjoyed on our cross-country drive to California four years ago was new to her, a hodgepodge of songs Katie had once used to initiate me into the genre. As we took turns driving across Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, and eventually the Sierras, one of us sat in the passenger seat, toggling the playlist, “KT Country,” on my iPod. We sang along to most of the choruses—Whiskey for my men, beer for my horses! and Wheeeeh-White Lightning!—which we knew pretty well after a few listens.

I did not play “Unanswered Prayers” on that cross-country trip. I’m fairly certain Cait has yet to hear it. In this way, I have kept something back, another kind of secret, perhaps, whose confidence insulates neither my memory of Katie nor my affection for her. Still, the song is one of the few remaining bridges between that former life and this new one. As only music can, “Unanswered Prayers” revitalizes a whole range of emotional details in memory that might otherwise seem entirely absent in the present. The unconscious, Freud says, is timeless. The processes of the unconscious system are not ordered temporally, are not altered by the passage of time. “Unanswered Prayers” persists, risking no contradictions. 

Why, then, is my affection for “Unanswered Prayers” such an emphatic secret? Partly, it is a matter of privacy. I am a little selfish, ungraciously holding back something that I want to remain only mine.

But the larger share of my hesitation comes down to matters of taste. I am embarrassed to like the music. I wish I didn’t enjoy the song’s corny reassurances and pseudo-religious consolations. However I distinguish the practice of faith from the gnawing reluctance of secular adulthood, I still see a pernicious, even condescending suggestion in the lyrics. Who wouldn’t know what is best for him/herself? Why would God constantly second guess certain intentions (high school girlfriends, prayers) but not others (cluster bombs, Alf)? More to the point, I know good writing. “Unanswered Prayers,” by that standard, falls pretty short. It misses rhymes and rhythms throughout. It abbreviates verses in the service of nailing down its wobbly hook. It stops and starts dramatically as it walks up and down the pentatonic scale, following Brooks’ hokey vibrato. Worst of all, “Unanswered Prayers” looks falsely forward with the great hesitancies of schlock, before turning back to complacence as a form of virtue, which is to say it resists reticence and encourages blind non-thinking. Like most of Brooks hits, “Unanswered Prayers” works hard, but, to appropriate the old retort, so do washing machines.

I think of some writing as a kind of self-healing work ethic; that, if I write toward a complicated feeling, or an uncertain memory, I might understand it. I write toward an expectation of what a poem or essay might become, and hope, ideally, it could also mean that to anyone else.

These last few weeks, I have worked out the chord progression of “Unanswered Prayers” most of the way through the song. I have sat with the guitar in my lap, staring earnestly at my infant son, singing to him sotto voce, subjecting his reptilian mind to rot. These are unimaginative chord progressions, I tell myself, matched to terrible arguments you do not believe. No doubt, I compel my infant listener to be persuaded. Just as I reward his smiles with more attention, and hold him when he cries, so I cannot help but barely sing my way through more than the first chorus without choking up. Listening to me sing as I try to sing like Garth Brooks, my baby is learning to associate joy with sorrow, and maybe also to confuse them. I make him complicit in my non-secret, at least until Cait enters the room to my crocodile tears and his bubbling smile, which maybe she mistakes for simple affection crossed with a father’s overwhelming pride. It is what we both want to believe. In that moment, who am I to correct her?

Nixonian

All the post-election hand-wringing about the uncertain future of the GOP seems, to me, a tad premature, just as, right up until he won the thing, the rumors of Obama's demise were clearly exaggerated. According to pretty much every wonk and pollster except Nate Silver, I woke up Tuesday morning to a nation dominated by rich and powerful white rural populist conservatives who looked finally to sway the electorate against Obama. I went to bed Tuesday night an important part of a new and powerful governing coalition dominated by women, minorities, and academic elites, that also, with the curve of history and progress, looks forward. The party of the large tent is apparently become the party of sexists, bigots, homophobes, and prudes, while my Spendocrats are newly the party of pragmatic solutions to immigration solutions, deficit reduction, and the gradual expansion of human rights to all citizens. The new narrative says Obama is not Carter, Obamacare is generous and fixed, the Tea Party is feckless fringe, Boehner-Obama is the new Reagan-O'Neill. Whereas 2008 seemed to have so many implications for progress and reform, they say, it was really this election that ratified that promise and made it, at least in legislative terms, pretty longstanding. The age of children has ended. The era of adults can finally begin. 

I have not been able to shake the sense of a missed opportunity during this election. In the end, I know I voted as much against one candidate as for another. Something about Mitt Romney bugged me--his wealth and unrelenting sense of entitlement pitched as a kind of work ethic--until it terrified me to imagine him as commander-in-chief. Saturday Night Live got this right when, asked why he was running at all if he was willing to say anything to anyone, the caricature of Romney quickly replied, "I have no idea." So, Romney was a lousy candidate. But I also felt very strong feelings about very prescribed and impersonal candidacies. Which meant either I had a very keen sense of Romney, or I bought into a caricature because it was so well-drawn. Put in slightly different terms, to see a Tweeted photograph of Barack Obama hugging Michelle Obama just after his reelection, and to assign authenticity and warmth, cheering on the palpable relief both seem to feel after winning, is to believe on some level I am a proxy to a personal moment. But I know the moment is not personal. It cannot be. I am looking at a campaign photograph.

To paraphrase Barack Obama, who paraphrased Dick Cheney four years before that, elections have consequences. A republic elects its representation. A democracy yields to consensus. I voted for Obama because I thought TARP worked, the economy was turning around, student loans were cheaper and expanded to more recipients, the auto bailout seemed like a savvy move in retrospect, Obamacare made a bunch of reforms I agreed with, troops were withdrawn from Iraq and scheduled for same in Afghanistan, CAFE standards were doubled in the reasonably near term, and Obama appointed two women to the Supreme Court including the Court's first Hispanic. I see near-term strides for marriage equality, which I support. 

More than that, I believe national elections are directional. Consider that nine years ago, President Bush called a press conference in the Rose Garden to announce that a Constitutional Amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman was a key part of his re-election campaign, and eventually, his party's platform:

The GOP ran same-sex marriage bans as state amendments in 11 states. However the issue boosted conservative turnout, only Oregon and Michigan voted to approve the bans with less than 60% of their electorate's support. Voters across the spectrum, including Democrats and liberals, approved those bans.  Even four years ago, Proposition Eight was a new California state law. However profitable its advocacy--and I do think there is a significant fundraising advantage to being progressive on the issue--it is shocking to me that anyone would oppose the equal right to marry. And here is what seems to me the missed opportunity I mentioned earlier. Social issues, so now the advantage of the Democrats, yielded in this election to economic and political ones. I would like a candidate to appeal well in excess of fear to my moral sense. Obama had the advantage here, but he did not push it outright. And I'm not sure that doing so would have been expedient--would not have backfired and painted him as a caricature of "liberal" to alienate independents--which says that, however certain I am of the long-term liberal trend on social issues, we might be as precariously balanced, left to right, as ever before.

In a sense, we've been here before. An aloof, unlikeable, and ideologically uncentered Republican is trumped by a singularly gifted, if vain President who runs a flawless campaign. We cheer his aggressiveness for standing up finally to the rich and crafty right. In decisively losing an election he might have won, the New York Times declares the GOP candidate has "ruined his party for a long time to come." The soul-searching, for all, must now begin: how and why the GOP misunderstood the electorate so profoundly, and also, what to do with all these old white men. For his part, the President assures us these are hopeful times of long-needed reform. If Obama does not quite suggest they are "the most hopeful times since Christ was born," nevertheless substantial issues seem finally about to be solved with great liberal solutions embraced by a vast majority of Americans, and checked by a new coalition of voters who look to vote blue for generations to come. Sure, the analogy might go, there are vexing foreign policy concerns, born of a deeply flawed approach to fighting insurgents in a faraway place, but the President's severe tendency to moral judgment, coupled with his street-dog political style, means he must know something we don't know. Surely, we think, the quality of his long-term rationale exceeds that of his obvious, short-term mistakes. 

We forget 1964 was both the cusp of the Great Society and that moment just before those programs were underfunded, then mostly hollowed out, as the nation readied itself to vote, in another landslide, for Nixon. I admire Nixon, and after him Bush and W. Bush, for what I hope I will one day admire in Romney. How each is rehabilitated, after the fact of politics, and proves helpful to the people who succeed him. I think only Clinton could so well understand Nixon to eulogize him so eloquently, just as only Clinton could rehabilitate him in his time to make him seem both relevant and useful to the electorate. Nixon's legacy is now the EPA, reaching out to China, and finding bipartisan solutions toward American prosperity. And, as Clinton notes, writing, memoirs and books, but especially letters to his successors. Apparently, no one advised Clinton on Russia like Nixon. Which is to say that history doesn't work so well in the microwave. Its instant narratives turn out overcooked and undernourishing. We are moving forward, yes. Where else should we go?