Friday, October 24, 2003

I was planning to write more here about my vacation, particularly the portion of it spent driving up the East Coast, with various stops along the way.  I hope to write a long travelogue in time, perhaps in a week or two when my life returns to normal - I'm very busy.  But, I have been thinking about a quality of certain American cities that I find disturbing.  I first noticed it a few years ago, during my first visit to Santa Fe, NM, and experienced it again recently in Nashville and Memphis.  This feeling manifests as slight unease, tinged with feelings of disgust and guilt.  I had lunch with an old co-worker of mine yesterday, and found that I was finally able to understand, and express that feeling.  It's such an odd thing when these thoughts and feelings that have been floating aimlessly about one's mind suddenly become sensible, and you find them falling out of your mouth.  I should talk to people more often! This feeling is the discomfort of residing wholly and utterly in the simulacra, while the real, dirty, unpleasant life of the city moves along at the very edge of your vision.  Some cities, particularly when one is doing no more than passing through, seem to encourage this sort of idyll.  You (and by use of this third person pronoun, I most certainly mean to implicate myself, gentle readers) are on vacation, eating good food, seeing lovely sights, feeling pleasantly removed from the day-to-day stuff that comprises your life at home.  You are playing a game of indulgence, while all around you there are tiny, almost imperceptible indicators of the grinding poverty, cross-eyed greed, and sheer calculated consumerism on the back of which your enjoyment rests.  This is particularly noticeable in the South - you drive down two-lane highways in horrible repair, through innumerable ghost towns with weathered, leaning, seemingly abandoned residences.  You don't notice that there is absolutely no possibility here of obtaining, I don't know, a piece of fresh fruit.  And it never quite comes completely into consciousness that people really live here, that entire lives unfold at this spot.  Then you drive on, and into these glittering oases of restaurants, bars, clubs, malls, precious little antique stores, and so on.  It was difficult for me to make the connection between the two - perhaps because I was on vacation, and therefore willingly blind.  But it was there, this extraordinary gaping inequality between people like me - on vacation, spending a lot of money - and the people who took my ticket at Graceland (for example).   I suppose I could go on to draw broader conclusions, ones that lie outside my own personal, somewhat self-indulgent feelings of guilt and dismay, but I didn't set out to write about this at any length.  I only meant to write that I sometimes wonder if this feeling somehow dampens my desire to write a "what I did on my vacation"-type essay.  I think I might be slightly embarrassed by the fact that I wasn't able to transcend mere tourism - "a cheap holiday in other people's misery" to quote Mr. Johnny Rotten - but rather succumbed to a too-great sense of ease and entitlement.  I fear that I never once really opened my eyes, during my entire two-week trip.  That's a difficult thing to acknowledge.  I want, instead, to write about re-reading Malloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable, by Samuel Beckett.  I read Beckett's famous trilogy a few years ago, and although I enjoyed it to a certain extent, I didn't feel as though I'd really gotten it, or even enjoyed it as much as I might have.  The novels are so long, and so dense, and so repetitive, and so ultimately uneventful that, outside of the obvious beauty of some the language, I went away feeling more than a little lost and unsatisfied.  Recently, however, I've been watching a series of Beckett plays on DVD, entitled Beckett on Film.  This is a series of nineteen Beckett plays, realized as films by various directors and actors.  It was a real revelation, because the dialogue in these plays moves along at an incredibly fast pace.  I already knew that Beckett, as a director, forced his actors to perform at a clip with which many of them were uncomfortable, and I also knew that he chose to write many works in French, rather than his native English.  Beckett felt that French was more 'musical'.  His feeling, in this regard, was not due to the sonority of French over English, but rather to the fact that French has significantly fewer words in the lexicon (most musical works, after all, only have about 12 'words').  I finally got it - Beckett's work is very much about rhythm, and just as I would not dissect Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman" for the meaning of each discrete note, nor should I dissect Beckett's work at the level of each discrete word.  I'm re-reading these books much faster than before, enjoying the sounds and the rhythms, and it is so clearly the manner in which they were intended to be read.  This is not to imply that some essential meaning is lost, but rather that meaning begins to cohere somewhere above the work (if that makes sense), it its unity of form and structure.  I'm experiencing a very tangible sense of time passing, in much the same way it does in my life (i.e. so very quickly, with seemingly insignificant things taking on enormous import as they pass from experience into memory) that I don't believe I've felt in anything else I've ever read. I actually had a similar experience a number of years ago, after listening to Kathy Acker read from a work-in-progress (eventually published as Pussy, King of The Pirates).  I actually told her, later, that I was surprised to hear her read it so rapidly, and that I had really enjoyed it performed in that fashion.  When I said this, she looked a bit surprised, and kind of laughed at me!  It often takes me a long time to just get it, gentle readers.  I forget that reading and writing are not ponderous exercises in middlebrow self-improvement, but rather ways of apprehending the world, and messing about with its form and function. And that can be so much fucking fun. In my search for some ideal self, I too-frequently forget to play at reading, at writing, at working, at making noise.  Well, the self is one thing, but it is certainly not the only thing, or the most interesting thing.  It's okay to get wilfully lost in this or that pleasure, from time to time.   5:48:45 PM