Trees and Groves

As I've been reading all things Irish - Irish folktales, Irish history, Irish poetry, Irish fiction - I've been wishing I were Irish (or, in the words of the Library's Grain: "I were Irish, Irish"). I'm not, however, and - as those of you who know me know - I've never been much of anything other than me. No thread or collection or wave of history has ever claimed me as a member. And I've been happy with that. Happy, that is, until recently. Maybe it's the Irish, maybe it's Joyce, maybe it's the almost drowning, maybe it's God - but I've been wanting these past few weeks to belong to something bigger than me. To know that the words that make up myself were written by hands other than mine, and written ages before I was even imagined.

My mother's parents are both from Russia - Jewish and, if I remember correctly, fleers of the pogroms. Neither myself nor my mother know much about my grandfather's parents, but his life was large enough to contain its own history: baseball coach, concentration camp liberator, man about town - he was, at his death, a legend to the many, many people who knew him. My grandmother is, contrary to first appearances, of similar stock. She grew up in Brooklyn where her mother raised her alone and worked as a seamstress. Though her life was more stationary than her husband's, she was no less active: she fought doctors over the care of her daughters, drafted legislation that introduced rights for the disabled, worked with politicians to reform the county libraries - and, at sixty, earned a Bachelor's degree from NYU.

Much of who I am owes something to these two grandparents - and I mean that by way of the most conventional of causalities. Growing up, I spent a great deal of time with them: army reunions, New York museums, libraries, my grandfather's liquor store. I have a strong connection to their lives (and also, as I learned through my grandfather, their eventual deaths), but the arc of their significance begins and ends with them. I know very little of their parents and even less of what lies further back beyond them, and their religion was never mine, nor will it likely ever be so (though it should be said that during my childhood it did not even appear to be theirs).

My father's parents, on the other hand, are a different story entirely. I was never close with them. My grandfather, whose parents came from Austria, was a simple and often cranky man. And my grandmother, in all of my experience of her (and, I would hazard, much of my father's), was a bitch. But it's her family's history that - I learned yesterday - offers the transcendent relation I've been asking after. And, curiously, it's a relation which I have, unintentionally, already been pursuing. Simply put: both sides of my grandmother's family have lived in Bucks County, Pennsylvania since the 1600s. Not only that, but, until her great-uncle's death (and owing to a very unwise marriage on his part), her mother's side of the family was wealthy and owned a decent amount of land.

There's research still to be done here, and there is something unusual about tracing my lineage through my father's mother's side (though, if I were to write more here of my grandfather's life, it would seem less unusual), but for the moment something has suddenly made sense, and my place right now in Philadelphia no longer feels so accidental. As I walk through this city that I have lived in now for eight years, I know that I am but the most recent of those who've shared my blood to walk these paths. Even my father, whose inheritance I have struggled for years to reject - I see myself in him now, see him living in this city as I do and at my age. His steps too are mine. Why has he spoken so rarely of this that we share? And why has it taken me so very long to ask of it?

The story-teller's apprentice

A number of discrete visions circulate amidst each other, none yet subject to the magician's synthesizing spell:

The old folktale in which a farmboy, bewitched by love, leaves everything he's known to follow a dark-haired stranger into the night. My favorite recent rendering in Neil Gaiman's Stardust.

John, Erica, and I dancing on the crowded floor of the Walnut Room. And side-by-side on the sidewalk after: a tiny coterie of fatherless children.

The Irish custom of leaving for the fairies a saucer of milk on the sill at bedtime.

My face in a mirror at Pearl Vision, my eyes framed by a new pair of glasses (the first since Blake misplaced the last pair four years ago).

The most recent in lost or stolen mail: an Oxford Annotated Bible. While walking to Old City alone, my head still drunk with thoughts of John, it occurs to me that I've been the object of some epistolary curse, and that the curse will undo itself when I have ascertained its reason.

Jeehyun in Ithaca where no light obscures the stars and the Gorges and Falls are still visited by spirits. The dark: her torso leaning out a window, the wind dancing in her hair.

The House of Doors 1

I've written frequently here - and once in the margins to The Library's Grain (see #112) - about how the Library functions and what it is meant to be or to be doing. As of now, its readership is woefully small, which is disappointing to me. More than one person has called it opaque - and I've chastised them for it. What obstructs one's reading is not the text, I've claimed, but a certain notion of how reading is supposed to function. I stand by that view, but I've come to accept that those "certain notions" are not open to instant and unaided revision. They require, like so many things require, aid. And so, in an effort to admit what (or who) the Library lacks, I offer here the first part of something like an introduction to that "text" in all its growing multifariousness.

The Library largely concerns seven days in the life of a single character named Stephen. As a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania and as a young man living in Philadelphia, Stephen's day-to-day is predictably open, structured by very few responsibilites and no emotional or physical center. Thus these seven days are not threaded together by any particular narrative or event. Their progression is built rather upon a gradual rising of intensity. Each of these seven days forms a chapter, starting with Monday, October 25, 2004 and ending with Halloween (at least, nomininally) - that is, Sunday, October 31. Each day is built upon a variety of distinct theoretical constructs and occurrences. Day 1, for example, and as mentioned in an earlier post, is conceived around the structure of a map. Day 2 occurs mostly in a library. And day 3 can be read as a meditation on love. None of these "themes" dictates by itself the unfolding of the day - Day 1, for instance, is also about the concept of periphery and Day 3 is immersed in issues of language and ethnicity - but any one of them offers a kind of hermenutic door or anchor for reading.

With each day comes an immensely large and shifting cast of characters, some of them appearing only once and others not even appearing at all (they are merely mentioned). Some have an important relation to certain days: Sarah to Day 3, for example, and Andy to Day 2. One of them appears almost every day, and that is Square, Stephen's best friend and the most eccentric figure in the book. Stephen himself is largely in search of a narrative (and in rebellion from the narratives he's been offered) and Square seems to have happily learned to do without narrative at all. The Days thus proceed (up until Day 6) with Stephen (and sometimes Square) moving in and out of the narratives around them, and the people and connections between people that make up those narratives. A relationship between one of the Adrians (there are two characters with this name) and his partner Blake (formerly named David), for instance, is in the proccess (or is it?) of dissolving. And one of Steven's students, Stefan - to take another example - is writing a paper on Shakespeare. Further in the background lie two important but little seen characters, one of whom has so far been called only JMR. A professor and advisor important to a number of the male characters (Stephen, Andy, Adam, Adrian 1, and John), JMR is (or is rumored to be) leaving the University - and the seven Days take place in the wake (or pre-wake) of his impending departure and the panic it produces. I will not (yet) identify the other "unseen" character here, but his or her identity is not difficult to intuit.

The Library, of couse, poses other problems. Who is the I who writes it and who sometimes takes a personal position within it? What is the relation between the early posts (originally written for a blog titled Verneinung) and those that make up the story proper? How does the Library relate to the novel it prefigures? Will that novel be similarly obscure or will its language be more accessible? How does the time of the present, which the author seems often to invoke, connect to the time of the seven Days? If much of what occurs and who appears is drawn from the author's "real" life, what is the relationship between what is real and what is written?

I can't answer all of these here, nor do I believe that doing so would be helpful or even possible. They are questions upon which the Library itself thinks - and the various answers to them imply various kinds of reading practices. Sometimes I think through them out loud here, often at the provocation of a friend or reader. I welcome and indeed entreat such provocations. I hope this introduction here will make them more common.

Quiet

I am very quiet today. The morning, books, and afternoon. Lunch and a walk with Sara. She eats a chocolate covered pineapple while I pick at a string of fruit lodged in my teeth. Later, Vicki calls, and we speak, two deliberately weak gin and tonics in our hands. I say "grace" and she understands. And she tells me of her mother, whom I forget to wish well as I leave. My own mother calls and talks of dreams. "As a girl, I used to dream that I could fly. Out the window, and there I'd go."

My own dreams are puzzles, riddles, messages, or visions. Andy reaching his hand to me the night I almost drowned. And Michael silencing, with a similar tale of his own, my tale of having fallen off the high school roof. Last night, I dreamt my family - or some new version of it - lived on a small and opulent island, and I walked past the closed eateries to the rough shore, too dangerous to swim in. I took a shower or planned to in the house, white and gleaming. While my father, wealthy and important, bellowed. We were hosting a party that night. And could I put this sliding door back upon its hinges? "I don't think I can, alone," I told him. Awake.

Now it's evening, almost nine, and I am quiet still and calm. The sky is a sea-storm blue, the small lamp on the windowsill circumscribed in orange. I will read, and I will think, and I will follow the wind through the streets if it beckons.

To say what is said

It is Friday. I have been, this morning, reading. Drinking a cup of coffee.

I've re-written the previous posting. The narrative it had contained was an epistolary narrative, written for a particular person. And I have come to believe that the weight and the form of my story finds its proper balance only when prompted by the specificity of another. The meaning, as it is given to Sean or to Erin, to Jeehyun or to Thomas, expands and contracts with their presence. With each it is different while the same. But to tell it to no one, to anyone, to make of flesh a universal concept - that is to assume that meaning is a currency, independent of the hand who receives and passes it. For any who read this and who I have not already spoken to of what has happened, write to me or call me. Let us trade self for self.

Otherwise, I am, each day, afloat. I drift from place to place, from person to person, and I do not question the path this drifiting takes. People call and I answer. My mother visits. Sara and I clean her empty apartment. Erica brings to my place a movie and beer. I breathe. And I sit. I watch and listen. And I hear. There are birds and bells and passing cars. The wind pulsing through the trees. There are children laughing or cursing, walking or running. And there is, sometimes at night, the sound of rain upon the roof, the rumble of thunder, and the parting of sound that is the cut of lightning. A flash.