M.E. Breen

“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.

I’m reading the book Summertime by J. M. Coetzee.  In the book John Coetzee has died and a biographer is interviewing people who knew him when he was alive. So far I’ve only read two of the interviews, about half the book, but one of the traits the women keep returning to is his coldness. He isn’t unkind, but he lacks electricity and he has bad teeth. I admire this book but I wouldn’t say I’m enjoying it, which isn’t dissimilar to what the women say about the dead Coetzee. In other words, I’m intrigued by the book, and I think about it when I’m not reading it, but I find it repellent and half the time when I could be reading it I do a crossword instead. I look at it on the bedside table like I look at the pile of kleenex from last night’s allergy attack. You have the author Coetzee, and the dead character Coetzee, and the women who catalog his faults (sometimes with relish, sometimes in spite of themselves) and the whole thing comes off so naturally, so believably, so very much in their voices, and yet is so self-consciously constructed, it seems it must be driven by either the most cynical and manipulative impulses or else by a self-loathing so sincere I want nothing to do with it. The title seems like a joke at everyone’s expense, because reading Summertime makes you feel as though you are holding the hand of someone whose skin is so cold they might as well be dead.

Now, I am a person who has cold hands all the time, and cold feet, and who is always drinking tea and wearing two undershirts. I take all this as evidence of nothing more significant than poor circulation, but then looking through the Anatomy of Melancholy I came across this:

Fracastorius will have cold to be cause of fear & sorrow; for such as are cold are indisposed to mirth, dull and heavy, by nature solitary, silent; & not for any inward darkness (as Physicians think), for many melancholy men dare boldly be, continue, and walk in the dark, and delight in it: only the cold are timid; if they be hot, they are merry, and the more hot, the more furious, and void of fear, as we see in madmen.

The timid part is what I find interesting. Pretty often when I fail in the get-up-and-go department at least some of the failure can be attributed to cold: feeling cold already and fearing getting colder, or feeling warm for once and being afraid of losing that comfort. We aren’t talking about the kind of cold that’s actually dangerous (I live in San Francisco, after all), but I spend more than half my life colder than I want to be and negotiating with myself about whether to accept or try to change that situation. It’s the kind of self-preoccupation that could certainly register to others as . . . coldness, or at least as an unwillingness to get involved, a preference for self-study and self-calibration. But it also means that when I’m not out doing things in public with other people, I’m doing secret and possibly brilliant things alone at home. Anyone’s secrets can be supposed to be remarkable, and what is more embarrassing than finding out someone you didn’t think much of has accomplished something impressive on their own time? Cold is essential to so many acts of invention.

And this returns us to dead Coetzee, whose preoccupation with vegetarianism and the political importance of manual labor and his own intellectual progress makes him disagreeable to others. There is some idea here that we owe it to one another to be hot and furious and void of fear. When we feel those things, we tend to act, and when we act, people know what we are about. They have the comfort of knowing who we are as we are, meaning they see our lives unfolding and can make reasonable judgments about them.  The women discussing dead Coetzee claim to be disappointed in him and a little sorry for him, but actually they are outraged. How could he keep so many secrets? How could he be so much more than he seemed? What does that mean about me? Is being merry a waste? Do we only have so much heat, and once it is all given away we are used up and can’t make anything? Do the cold know something the warm don’t? Do the dead know more than the living?

I signed the lease on an office today.  I’m the only one who calls it an office. Everyone else I met today calls it “space.” I share it with a woman who makes mosaics and a man I haven’t met yet who does something with photographs and paints behind a partition. It has a paint-spattered carpet and heat and a skylight and a desk-type object but no chair. I have three keys: one for the building and one for the giant warehouse floor and one for the floating square that is my office.

I was nervous about going to the studios. I only figured out two days ago that you can wear boots over your pants if you buy skinny-leg jeans. It occurred to me driving over there that the people who rent studio space probably mastered this trend in 2006. Usually I don’t mind being square but this seemed like the kind of place where I might wish I was more wavy. As usual I was worrying about the wrong thing.  The people wore pants in a variety of leg-widths and didn’t seem that interested in clothes. They were interested in art!

What I should have been worrying about was cost per square foot. Also, somehow I imagined the whole floor would be set up with cubed partitions and desks and chairs. Like, you know, an office. But after recovering from that always-fresh shock of discovering that everyone else is not the same as me, I started to really like it. I had been in galleries, and I had seen what artist’s lofts look like on TV, but I had never seen a real working space with people doing video art and handmade t-shirts for sale and used tea bags in the kitchen and notes about the tricky toilet taped to the bathroom door and walls of windows and paint smells.

So now the problem was that I liked it, but it didn’t like me. The cheap studios were essentially standing room in a hallway. The private studios with windows were essentially a gazillion dollars. Enter Kate. Kate has been making mosaics for twelve years. She showed up at the open house the same minute I did.  We toured the standing-room only spaces together. We were shopping in the same price range.

The floating square was the last space they showed us. It had no windows but it did have a big skylight. The carpet was old but not gross. It was weirdly calm.  It was like a lake of a room in the middle of a bustling town. It cost almost twice what either of us had budgeted. We decided to share. We co-signed.

Kate gets the spot directly under the skylight and I get the desk-shaped thingy. Tomorrow I am going to bring a chair and an amaryllis and my laptop. I can’t wait. And here’s the thing: I committed to something. Quite specifically, I committed to my life as a writer, right now. I’m not a commitment-phobe in any generic sense. I don’t fly around the world like George Clooney and leave houseplants to die. I have a dog and two cats, for Pete’s sake. But I do spend a fair amount of my time thinking about my life as it will be rather than my life as it is. The future life isn’t so different from my present life — basically it is my present life, only with all the sources of anxiety and uncertainty removed. In that life, I know the things I only wonder about now. The good things have come to pass. The worries have resolved themselves. The pets all die quietly in their sleep at age 22.

So signing this lease with a woman I’d only just met felt like a big deal. It meant trusting my instincts, which is nerve-wracking despite the fact they’ve never given me any reason to doubt them (good fellows!). More significantly, it meant taking action in the face of uncertainty. I put things off because I think I can make a better decision when I know everything, in that certain future. But, duh, you never know everything. You can’t wait to know everything. You make a decision and then you know something, and then you get your plant and your computer and you get cracking. Tomorrow I’m going in even if I can’t find a chair. I’ll sit on the carpet. It’s my space.