This afternoon, I’ll be riding a metric century, down around Salem. It’s a hundred kilometer ride. It shouldn’t be too hard, the course is pretty flat. I haven’t done a ride this long since before I was sick this winter, so I am nervous in spite of myself. But when I biked 100 miles before, I had only ever done forty, and my most recent long ride was about thirty, and I got through that last one all right. I’ve packed my Larabars and my butt’s all covered with chamois cream (which I really am not sure I need, but why not?). Anyhow, wish me luck.
The neighbors’ fight
The neighbors’ fight this time was violent. There was lots of noise and yelling. Even banging and stomping. She could hear it through her closed door. She turned her music off.
He lived across the hall and one door down. She couldn’t sit still. He looked so large and unmanageable. He didn’t keep himself clean. Would he hit her? The girl was screaming. His girlfriend, she recognized the voice, a little mousy one, she’d been around, always squinting. Hadn’t she been gaining weight? Could be pregnant.
With her door open, it was louder. She should confront them. But out in the hall, they seemed to be quiet. Maybe just write a note. She shouldn’t get involved. Back in her room, she wrote on a card. If there’s anything I can do, and the number of a crisis center. Just put it under their door. Then they’d do whatever with it. Out of her hands.
Maybe stick it in the crack? But then what if it made him violent. She didn’t want that thought. Don’t they do everything to isolate? And he might get her worse!
Outside their door, she heard something else. She blushed and went home. Don’t even know what to think.
She saw him that week, in the basement. He had a grin, his eyes going side to side everywhere. Large purple yellow and brown bruises on the palms and bakcs of his hands, which he rubbed together and nearly ran into her, as she got her mail.
Music changes
What is it about music? It makes me feel good. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that.
I went to a show last night, first time I had seen live music in a while. I can see in my thoughts how my happiness unfolded: at first, it was kitschy. Older men, basically a standard five piece outfit: a drum kit, a synthesizer, guitar, bass, and the vocalist had a hand drum; only they added a guy who can play the saz and the oud, and they called it traditional music. And even I could tell the singer’s pronunciation was terrible, whether he was singing in Armenian, Turkish, or Arabic, and didn’t they even realize the differences between the traditions? The dancers on the floor in front of them, so pretentious! What did they imagine they were doing? I was, in a word, defensive. Over-critical.
But: could have been the low light, the heat, the noise, could have been the girl with the beautiful tattooed arms dancing near me, my mood changed. I started thinking: After all, well aren’t they singing traditional songs, with traditional melodies and lyrics? So what if they are using different instrumentation, if they westernize it. What’s the big deal, and where’s the gain for the purist. They had good energy, people were enjoying themselves. It was good to hear the melodies, and when they played Western rock, it was good to hear it transformed this way.
Music is all about change, and variation. Alteration and identity, their marriage and the conflict between them: isn’t that what makes a melody or a harmony. A tune is a thing that unfolds, changes over time while remaning the same; and a harmony is differences that added together make a whole.
I don’t think Oidupaa’s music is less authentically Tuvan because he uses a Russian bayan instead of an igil, e.g:
[audio:oydupaa.mp3]
Exactly the opposite; and his singing style, which sounds like no other Tuvan’s, sounds all the more Tuvan for that reason. More to the point, don’t I admire Erkin Koray and Sezen Aksu for exactly the same kind of fusion as this group was making? Only done from the other end. Sure: it might have seemed less authentic. But things always look less real close up, exactly because they’re more real. And anyway, no one is expecting these guys to be world-class musicians. And the dancing was good, and I woke up happy and humming.
Touchstone
It’s good to see old friends again and see them happy.
I saw one yesterday after over a year. Time isn’t dealing them out faster than I can take them. He’s up from California for the week for some shows with his band. He looks tanner and thinner, maybe taller and maybe greyer. He’s become an electrical engineer since I saw him last, specializing in solar panels; his wife does belly-dance instruction out of their home and is branching out to clothing manufacture in the kitchen. We talked over salad, humus, and a tempeh-BLT. We talked about Armenia, Anatolian history, music, the price of wood, how to live a full life. He works outdoors and his mind is his own, he says, when he works.
I asked if he had moved from where his wife was miserable to where he would be. It’s clear he hadn’t, and in his words, I’m always able make it happen for me. The self-source of happiness.
If your sense of a person is a sense of their story, and the story is more than where they are at this point, but how they have been between points, it was a good story: it made me feel good, it was believable .
The feeling was: offstage is a safe place to be. I can keep my eye off the ball if it rolls out of my court. The future doesn’t seem dangerous, and I can trust in what’s outside my cone of vision.
He gave me several cubic feet of ripe avocados and blood oranges, and a cheerful, social energy. He left happy with the wet air and land of Portland, and the green everywhere.
We met at my new favorite place to read: a worker-owned vegetarian cafe a few blocks from my apartment. It’s become my new favorite place to read. Whether there are a lot of people or just a few, I can concentrate more effectively there than at home. There’s something relaxing about it, and something homey. We’ve given them books and a couple bookcases, there always seems to be good music, there’s never a bad mood in the place. The endless refills of my tea, the salads as big as my head.
There’s the cone of attention again: the security about what is beyond its boundaries.
Morning story
She had been on her feet forever. And she was so tired and everything was against her. Doing the least things she had to lift her own lead weight. Her head hurt. Standing behind the counter, brewing coffee, was torture. She would trade one foot against the other, shifting, leaning. Couple customers, it wasn’t seven. Quiet, thank god.
A man came in with a gust of leaves; and the door thudded shut. He sat at the counter. Hands on either side of his cap he started talking.
It was some confused story. A new housemate, there was general conversation about drugs, it was her first week, and she said well sex is my drug. That was weird, and then she’s gone for days, and where did she work, was she talking about quitting when she moved in, not sure.
But today, a bang had woke him up, he thought it was a gun or fight or what, and he got out of bed and down the hall and it was her door slamming, the windows were open, it stank of nail polish, and her floor was covered with pairs of jeans. And the wind and the rain outside, and she was nowhere.
That had been an hour before, and he couldn’t get back to sleep. He propped the door and left.
He shut up and drank his coffee. No food, then left, and no tip. She shifted from foot to foot, curling her toes in pain whenever she stopped moving.
Shakespeare and dogma
I spoke recently with a friend about Shakespeare, and I realized how far my view of him had changed. In some ways, I still feel the same: I don’t care for the language. It seems somehow overstuffed, inorganic, and too deliberately full of ambiguities; maybe even too full of life, or overstimulated. I don’t know that I would be too interested in defending this point: but it’s the way I feel. Maybe call it taste and leave me to it. So much is constant.
But then I also didn’t get the characters. I couldn’t understand how they changed, what pressures were on them. It was all over my head. But now somehow they’ve exploded into life for me. It’s a little like learning how to open a pop-up book right, so the shapes all stand out in their proper relation. I just didn’t see the depth that was there before, the several simultaneous motions of the unfolding.
I don’t know how to characterize what the difference is. I remember pretending to like him, and I remember feeling that I couldn’t quite get a purchase on him. I felt the plays to be flat without knowing quite what I was missing. It’s funny: I’ve become more dogmatic, in my views on human nature and political realities; or I’ve gotten more of a hold on these things, I’m more opinionated: so I can read him better in these areas. I can understand the pressures on his characters, how they change and how they interact.
Time fetish
I can feel a change coming in my life. Of course I know that it is coming, since I set it in motion; but there are indicators that confirm it for me. I touch on them and their texture reassures me.
There is a certain character to my encounters these days. I get in touch with old friends, I revisit old familiar places I haven’t been in years, I try drinks I had put aside long ago, I see old roommates again. And in each of these circumstances, there is a kind of summing-up; chapters get closed, stories are resolved, the past is put in its new place and its parts shuffle into their new arrangements. The conversations tend toward the historical, or the philosophical. They also seem larger than themselves, and they somehow come from behind themselves.
The people I’m meeting, the encounters I’m having, stand like gatekeepers at a portal. They are ordinary encounters at ordinary times in others’ lives; but for me they seem to reflect the glow that comes from the open hallway behind them. They are different in that light. Their shadows go far back, the shine on them projects forward. They take on a fetish character, they represent a divinity that I begin to see in them.
Fetishization has come to mean pay unreasonable attention to, or rank something inappropriately: there’s a background standard of rationality the fetishizer offends against. I think the usage derives from Marx; but he used it to mean: to give powers to something that doesn’t have them, to make the thing a divinity. However there is a truth to the divinity of the fetish, that he would not deny.
In the social world, powers are transferable to things. Money is a god, it does create and destroy. Clothes, houses, other objects: they can confer status. The fetishes that are made of these things do gain powers. You make a thing a fetish, and the fetish is the dwelling place of the god, simply because you say it is. The fetish is the object or the time or the festival or the place in which god reveals some of his presence; and he reveals it to you and you perceive it.
This time is the dwelling place of the god, the god resides in this time, he gives the events in this time to partake in his character; because the god is absolute openness and absolute possibility. This is the time of portals and the openings in walls that had been only the outer edges of the shape of your life, this time has the god in it; it shows forth part of the god, a possibility from his realm of all-possible, sent as emissary to the actual world, existing in the transient moment, temporarily making actual the possibility as possibility.
Or: instead it’s like you check your necessities before you go out the door. Spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch, your fingers touch on them and make sure they are there to rely on; you double-check on the things you are used to, the things you’ll carry on your way; you touch a memory and remind yourself of its texture, you close certain doors to shallow halls as you climb the stairs into the radiant, deeper one.