M.E. Breen

A new neighbor moved into the apartment downstairs. She’s been here a week and already I love her.  She looks a little taken aback by the great beams of love I send in her direction whenever we run into each other in the garden. Maybe her instincts about this kind of thing are good and she knows I love her not for what she is, but for what she is not. She is not the old neighbors.

I won’t enumerate their faults. Bad form! They are gone! My memories of them are like the wool dog blanket they left in the yard, slowly disintegrating in the winter rain.

Like everyone else in this neighborhood, the new neighbor has a dog, a giant puppy named Bella. She’s four months old and nearly as big as Truckstop, who regards her with the sedate disapproval of a dowager at a dance.

At first I thought my neighbor had some sort of television addiction. (I guess I’m the sort of person who spends her time worrying about other people’s addictions. I know I’m the sort of person who worries about whether other people are composting a sufficient percentage of their household waste. So go my dreams of glamor and nonchalance.)

Anyway, after a day or two I figured out my neighbor works nights, and when she goes to work she leaves the TV on for the dog, as well as a nightlight, as well as having her friend drop by to make sure everything is ok. And here I am sitting with a draft freezing my knees because Truckstop has fallen asleep in front of the space heater. I know if I move it closer to me she’ll wake up and give me her look of quiet sorrow and walk into the cold bedroom to be alone.

So where am I going with all this about the absurdity of dog love? Two places, I think. Both have to do with decision making, which is something I seem to keep coming back to. Getting a dog can feel like a decision or not. Before I got Truckstop I made a pros and cons list, but the list was both naive and dishonest. “Expensive??” I wrote under cons. “Friend for the cats!” I wrote under pros.

Adopting Truckstop felt as inevitable, as surprising and mysterious, as falling in love with the right person or writing the right book. I think these things don’t have to do with what you decide, but with what you want. What I wanted when I rescued my dog was to be rescued myself, but you can’t command rescue any more than you can command love or inspiration. I don’t mean that I was in danger or despair, only that my life wasn’t living up to my expectations for it, and that the particular, shall we say, machinery of failure, was invisible to me. I thought I wanted things to be different, but what I really wanted was for things to be more. More fun, more sweetness, more idiocy, more exigency, more rules, more risk, more affection. More outside life, less inside life. Dogs bring all those things. I was right to get her. The cats have forgiven me.

Then there is the other kind of pet-related decision making, the small, everyday kind that can feel by turns steadying and oppressive. Do I have enough of the things you need? Can I feed you and treat your ailments? Where will we walk? How much have you eaten today? Will smoked kippers give you a stomachache? Can I let you off your leash?

I like these questions, even when the answer turns out to be No and I have to hustle up to the 7-Eleven in the rain for emergency canned rations, because they are easier to answer than the questions I turn on myself: Am I happy? Am I honest? Am I generous? Am I successful? Am I doing any good?

Truckstop is like a daily puzzle I am always able to solve. Some solutions may be more elegant than others, but rarely does she leave me in doubt for long. I wonder if that’s why it’s so painful when a pet dies — or, I should say, why it can be painful out of measure. The thing that made most sense in your life is swept into the thing that makes least sense. Taking care of an animal requires kindness and routines and almost no imagination. When the animal is gone, there is nothing to replace the body, the body that was the center of everything.

I have been truanting the studio! I have an excuse. My dog has giardia, a condition tiresome, gross, expensive, and pitiful. In addition to taking her on the many necessary walks and buying her the necessary powder (really a powder, like from an apothecary), I seem to think she’ll be less uncomfortable if I stare at her. I tore myself away for a few hours today to write in the lake room. The sky through the skylight is getting dark. I’m listening to Wu tang on my headphones off someone’s shared iTunes library. I’m sitting in the red and purple pleather recliner I bought off craigslist for twenty dollars. One of a kind! You bet!

Anyway, here’s a story. On the way to the grocery store from the dog beach this afternoon I spotted a dog running next to the highway. This isn’t the most terrifying vision of a highway, but it’s not great. Two fast lanes run each direction, flanking an appealingly garbage-strew median of ice plants. My own dog, back when I still thought she was going to be like her predecessor, Angel-dog, wound up on this median strip, under circumstances too humiliating to relate. Anyway, my dog was fine then, and this dog ended up fine, too, though the rescue involved me swerving onto the shoulder and crawling toward it with a horse biscuit in my hand. I think I looked like Golom.

The dog wasn’t interested in the horse biscuit, but I liked it that the guy who works at the stables off the highway brought it over to help. The guy called the dog while I kept running into the middle of the road and waving my arms like a deranged conductor to make people slow down. My move: raise hands overhead, lower hands slowly to the ground, like I’m pressing the air from a giant air mattress. Repeat. Much honking. But also thumbs up from a big rig driver.

Eventually more help arrived in the form of a professional dog walker who coaxed the dog to safety by laying a trail of Goldfish crackers to the cab of his truck. It was like Hansel and Gretel. The owner even appeared at the very end, all contrite for having married that wicked step-mother.

I felt sorry for the dog, not just for getting lost, but for getting found. Maybe he had a good reason for running away. I would undertake the same Conductor Golom rescue again, don’t get me wrong, but it must be frustrating to be a dog in San Francisco sometimes. No one has any faith in you. No one thinks you have a legitimate doggy life. You’re taken out and walked about and taken home again and fed something free-range, but what about your professional goals? What about your dream of following that old hot dog smell all the way down the road? Maybe that dog would have done a fine job avoiding traffic if I hadn’t interfered. Maybe he wanted to be like the dogs in Russia who ride the subway to the best begging spots.

I’m being silly, but I do wonder why I think everything needs to be rescued all the time. Sometimes I think it’s my own rescue I’m enacting over and over, as though I think wandering is always the same thing as being lost, as though I think it’s always a disaster if you don’t know precisely where you are going.

Maybe that’s why I love the Faerie Queene and Inferno and Robinson Crusoe and all the wandering in Grimm’s woods The narrative is going somewhere, the story has limits, the book is only so many pages long, so I know the wandering won’t take me off the map, but at the same time I get to travel along and see what happens without my intervention. I’d like to see my own story unfold without Lady Rescue Ready leaping from the car at every turn. But even that, that fantasy of watching, is a fantasy of control.  We can never know the minor from the major themes, the red-herrings from the true signs, the middle from the end.

“Those who accuse men of always gaping after future things, and teach us to lay hold of present goods and settle ourselves in them, since we have no grip on what is to come (indeed a good deal less than we have on what is past), put their finger on the commonest of human errors — if they dare to call an error something to which Nature herself leads us in serving the continuation of her work, and which, more zealous for our action than for our knowledge, she imprints in us like many other false notions. We are never at home, we are always beyond. Fear, desire, hope, project us toward the future and steal from us the feeling and consideration of what is, to busy us with what will be, even when we shall no longer be. A soul anxious about the future is most vulnerable [Seneca].”

From Montaigne, “Our feelings reach out beyond us,” trans. Donald Frame

(Title is from another essay, “That to philosophize is to learn to die”)

I’ve been thinking a lot about work and identity lately. Or, to return to an earlier theme, not thinking about work and identity, but noticing the effects of not having the one on the other, much as I notice the progress of the amaryllis bulb in its stony bath on my windowsill. What I mean is I don’t watch the amaryllis growing, and often I forget about it, but when I do see it I feel immersed in its little history right away.

Being out of work makes the days dreamy and slow and unfamiliar and full of wonder and threat.  It’s like snorkeling. You’ve been underwater before with a tube and a mask. You know what to expect, but you don’t know what you’ll see. You come back to the same place again and again, hoping each time it will be different, but not too different. You want to see the usual fish and then some rare and wonderful fish you’ve never seen before. You don’t want a long, gray, toothy fish not listed on the laminated guide to appear beneath you. But it might. You are in the ocean, after all. You cannot feel at home in so much water, or have any sense of mastery over its possibilities.

Having a job, by contrast, is like bobbing on the surface of the water in a boat. The boat might be sturdy or leaky or engine-powered or oar-powered, but it is still recognizably a boat. It has a particular shape and design and named parts: hull, ribs, stern, bow, mast, quarterdeck. Yardarm! Clumsy cleat! (My copy of Moby Dick has dozens of illustrations by Barry Moser. UC Berkeley Press. I highly recommend it.)

Even when I pack a lunch and drive across the city and park four blocks away and hump my computer bag and my purse and my porto-coffee cup and that other bag I always seem to be carrying with who knows what in it,  always a different version of the same bag, a Trader Joe’s bag or a WWF bag with a panda on it or that shrieking bird from the Nature Conservancy or a lion or a poppy or a flowering Art Nouveau vine, even with all those bags and the three flights to my studio and the desk and the kneeling desk chair, even with all that, when I arrive I am not at work. Working hard at what I love,  I am not at work.  I am not in the boat. I will not be kicked overboard if I don’t show up tomorrow. I am the only Human Resource. I mean nothing to the State. I like the adventure and I want it to go on being the same but different, and definitely not worse, and I also know I cannot stay in the water forever.

Here are the first four stanzas of the poem “Diving into the Wreck” by Adrienne Rich:

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it’s a piece of maritine floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

I finished Summertime last week and I’m still thinking about it. It doesn’t get less cruel; in fact, the dead Coetzee’s failures only become more grave, but it does get more bearable, partly because it becomes more of a novel, by which I guess I mean more fictional, more self-consciously experimental. And the people the biographer interviews at the end are more philosophical and have less at stake than those at the beginning, so the whole thing feels less tense. Here’s an excerpt from the final interview that shows what I mean. The person speaking is named Sophie. She was a colleague of dead Coetzee’s at the University of Cape Town. She is responding here to the biographer’s suggestion that she should tell him everything about her relationship with the dead man because “a great writer becomes the property of us all . . . is to some extent public property.”

On that subject my opinion is irrelevant. What is relevant is what he himself believed. And there the answer is clear. He believed our life-stories are ours to construct as we wish, within or even against the constraints imposed by the real world — as you yourself acknowledged a moment ago. That is why I asked about authorization, a question you brushed aside. It was not the authorization of his family or executors I had in mind, it was his own authorization. If you were not authorized by him to expose the private side of his life, then I certainly won’t assist you.

Their competing claims on, or rather, for, dead Coetzee interest me. On the one hand, Sophie seems to be saying the only person fit to write a biography is the biography’s subject, even though that must make it by definition an incomplete story — except, of course, if the auto-biographer stages a fictional death and writes a fictional biography. But how is this so different from the broken, distorted, opinionated stories that strangers produce about any of us? Why is the subject’s own story about himself allowed to be a fiction, while the stories of others require authorization?

I think I find this so interesting because I have never managed to think clearly about how I live my life. I mean I don’t have any sense that I make decisions that lead in a particular direction, or that my life even reflects my values. I know that it does, but it seems an accident, a happy accident, even, that it should. I don’t remember ever saying, I will live in such and such a manner. I will do such and such a kind of work. Instead I drift around in a perplexity of feeling, and somehow I must follow those feelings into decisions and those decisions accumulate into a direction, and here I am. Perhaps what I mean is that my life seems to be defined by a set of longings, some of which are distinct, some inchoate, some small and possibly sweet, some massive and possibly obnoxious. Those longings must result sometimes in my making choices, life requires all kinds of choices, but it’s never the choice that I remember. I hardly think about the past at all, though it shapes my imagination more than anything else. That sounds like a peculiar distinction, but it makes sense, because I hardly think of anything at all. I worry and fantasize and stage conversations, but I don’t weigh options. I arrive at everything crab-wise. I get this worry of Coetzee’s, then, that if you live your life that way you may fail to notice the moments when a direct glance is required, when you really must commit, when the decision is everything, and it must be acknowledged as a decision, and the right or wrong of it accepted. Those moments you can only see in memory, perhaps. Maybe you can really only see them when none of the usual things are at stake anymore. And so comes the temptation to stage your own death, to see yourself from a place where your longings have no force, to enter the heart of another.

On the subject of decision making and how it happens, the Writer’s Almanac sent me Robert Frost this morning. The familiarity of the last three lines make it easy to forget how good this poem is — sort of like if you’ve had the same really flattering haircut for years you forget it’s flattering because you’re so bored of it. But it still looks good!

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.