Animal Thoughts

I worry about what the dog does all day. Not about whether she's destroying every object in our home with her typical attitude of a cheerfully undertaken duty, though that is always a possibility. It's something more metaphysical.

The hours simply seem too long for the range of pursuits available to a dog. She may sleep in various corners of the house; she may chew on one of the frayed ropes or deteriorating rubber things that are the only toys she can't destroy inside an hour; she may look out the window. But then what? Are the pleasures of merely circulating enough?

It is unnerving to imagine this alien but not unpersonlike consciousness drifting endlessly around the house. I worry that we have made for her a prison of boredom. When she sighs as if the last new thing under the sun had just withered away, pressing her chin to the floor between outstretched paws—is it our fault?

Clearly, the dog does want to be taken seriously as a person. Sitting tableside and staring up, she'll vary her exasperated groans and miffed little howls until we think she must have exhausted the repertoire of her larynx. But she methodically goes on, searching for the one phrase that will be correctly decoded by our limited ears. She disapproves greatly of our various indulgences: dancing, embracing, laughing at a movie. Her eyebrows, slightly redder than the rest of her head, furrow moralistically; she places on us one paw and then the other, as a door-to-door proselytizer might lay a hand on your arm while using the other to thrust a pamphlet at you. To her dismay, we do not convert.

Of course, it is all projection, we say to stay sane. Still, the irrational worry keeps coming back: can the dog feel okay about the shape her consciousness has taken? Isn't it the nature of consciousness, to struggle against its mute and bony ceiling?

If it is all projection, the dark little booth from which it beams is not so hard to find. For I feel ever more aware of and less okay with the particular sort of animal I am as the years go on. Having reached a state of abundant comfort, I realize with horror how painless it would be to continue in this fashion for decades on end, living pleasantly while getting nothing of consequence done—at only the bargain cost of being visited on the hour by the voice that intones: So, now you are closer to death. What have you accomplished?

To my animal brain it is about enough. I am fed, and loved, and entertained, and lucky—a better than expected outcome, all in all. What I am not is accomplished; what I am not is great. It seemed for twenty years or so that if I got the outward circumstances of my life in order the rest would follow. Feeling innately and inarticulately that I was a superior artist and an inferior animal, I put my energies into making a safe habitat for myself and expected that the art would come to fill it. But I may have gotten it exactly wrong. I am rather too good at being an animal, distracted into contentment by the slightest spring breeze, by minute gradations in the color of the lake from day to day. Ready to curl up and sleep in any patch of sun until it moves and I awake, dry-mouthed and desolated.  

Perhaps it will ultimately be good for the character, the tectonic shift in confidence that has occurred in the past year or so. Even more than before, I stand agape at the vast range of human endeavors in which I lack all skill, and at the vast-enough numbers of very talented artists—my contemporaries! As a child it was easy to believe they all lived unthreateningly in the past—afoot in those few fields whose corners I sometimes clumsily cross. I guess this is the task: to look on who they are and what they do with admiration, but save my envy and emulation for how hard they work. It may not be enough, but what else is there? Only to sit staring up beside the table, emitting a muttering whine of incomprehensible want. 

More Light

On the horizon, spring. Freezing nights but days of thaw, laying bare mud that seems as cheering and delectable as cake batter. I feel as though I am about to graduate from something — to conclude or to start on some endeavor, although viewed soberly my days appear as settled and as uniform in measure as they have ever been. My mind does not rest on my work; it flits up from its branch every minute or so for a better view of what's in the air, returning wind-ruffled. (I began writing this from work; now it's Sunday and the house is full of unaccomplished chores, but the thing is that crocuses and daffodils have thrust their blades through the earth overnight.) I listen to a radio story about two brothers crossing America on horseback; their Southern accents sound drunk with fresh air and adventure, and the sweetness of their banter stings my eyes. I page through apartment listings urgently as though our building had just burned down, although there is nothing very wrong with our current place, we'll keep it if we find nothing better, the lease runs through May, and we aren't planning to travel outside a two-mile radius even so. I stay up too long, fueled by the new late light, and go to bed feeling as though I very likely will not have to go to work tomorrow; it will just happen that way, like a snow day but the opposite of that.

At night, unrolling like sod down the length of my dreams, is land. I have been lately to the Pacific coast and down strange ravines, but mostly I have been to my grandparents' 40 acres in the Michigan woods. I have gone there so long and so often in sleep that as a young child I sometimes failed to discern where, precisely, stood the glass of the mirror between the waking and the dreaming forest. I'd ask, for instance, to be brought again to the little brick church we had found back behind the Yoohoo House (that is, the old outhouse, fixed up, scrawled with camouflage spray paint, and transported from the back yard to the top of the knoll we generously called the sledding hill, to serve as a deer blind and playhouse), which I believed I had visited a couple of years before, in a near-infancy that would explain the haziness of the memory. This sort of thing happened a couple of times with locations in the city, too, but my dreams more often overlaid their maps across the woods. Now, even if sleep sets me down in some stranger landscape, I often will still wander back there, to the east meadow, the west meadow, the swamp, the crick, the frog spring — no matter if I have to pass an alpine lake or flowering gorge along the way.

All winter my mind has seemed dull, its thoughts thudding into existence like the muddy bass coming from my downstairs neighbor's stereo. Too well insulated by snow clouds and city buildings and work to receive the slightest breeze. In memory, last winter slushes into this one without regard for the months between; May, for instance, seems like something I'd read about a couple years back but never experienced firsthand. I am eager to finally see it for myself.

There is a time of day that's routinely wrecked me for as long as I can remember: three or four o'clock in the afternoon, the point at which the day seems to have reached maximum saturation. An unreasoning dread (though reason would concur, were it roused) settles into place in the gut—a dread verging on certainty that the ensuing decay will continue not just until the morning but forever, the sun slowly going dead rather than swinging away for a few hours. But now, just past the time change, there is a little reprieve: suddenly, an extra hour of daylight that makes the evening seem near enough to eternal. When I awaken from my work in the late afternoon to note this fact, joy swells in me. It's hard to keep to myself — I want to go around informing people about it, this extra light, as though it were good news they might not have seen yet. Yeah, I don't know if you heard, but it turns out all of this is free! And, get this — tomorrow there'll be even more.

It feels good to sometimes be unable to bear the length of the day solely because it's blocking me from tearing into the next one, like a child on a perpetual Christmas Eve. At the same time, I do not actually want time to move faster at all, not by a single breadth of the needle. Since I reached my middle twenties I have been more and more distressed by the relentless speed that has got into things, got there without even the compensating thrill of perceptible acceleration. My mother beamingly repeated a joke she'd learned from one elderly patient at the medical office where she works and used with success on another, about life being like a roll of toilet paper, getting used up faster at the end; I could not laugh as convincingly as she'd have liked. Perhaps this generally troubles us less as we get older, past a certain point; that would be a mercy.

I could not laugh so well partly because my grandmother is getting genuinely old now. She was in her early forties when I was born; throughout my childhood, the white-haired, bosomy grannies who populated picture books with their cookies and crinkly smiles shared nothing with her except a more limited version of her skill set. She accompanied us up mountains and down alongside waterfalls on vacations; she fished and hunted; she was bottomlessly kind and utterly unsentimental, of a sharp and original cast of mind (despite thinking of herself as fundamentally unintelligent from childhood, having been very slow in school). She shocked me one night on a camping trip in Ontario — the stars brighter than I have ever seen and the moon so huge and clear over Lake Superior that we could actually see it move upward, like a boat or balloon or any old thing — by remarking, in an offhand way and in connection to some mundane matter I've forgotten, that she did not believe that people went anywhere special after they died, they went into the earth and that was that. I was still a little religious; I think I was twelve; the black night under the trees back inside the pop-up camper seemed suddenly to have more the ring of truth about it than the dazzling moonrise we'd just watched.

This is how I think of her, and this is why lately it is hard to call her on the phone: she repeats stories I've already heard three times, she asks me the same questions, there are tiny gaps after I speak where she must pause and either work to understand what I've just said or work to pretend she understands what I've just said — and, most terrifyingly, she is becoming sentimental. Her love for me has never been in doubt, but it has never been very demonstrative; that is not how it's done in our family. But she misses me, she says now, in every conversation and email; she says she is proud of me for "all that I've accomplished" (and god knows what that is; previously she would have had no doubt that so far I've done nothing of consequence — which knowledge would of course have had no impact on her esteem for me); she has even hinted that I ought to come visit her soon. And that edges so close to an admission of need it sends chills down my spine. You go down the usual dirt road, climb the usual little hill, and the little brick church is not where you expected; there is not even any sign that it has been torn down. Until now, you had not thought to wonder why you were so certain it was there.

I should, in fact, go visit. Why not in the spring? The land will be lively; there will be miles of country roads for me and the winds to gust down; I can ask the names of birds and flowers, and request to hear again old stories I loved as a kid, stories we both know I have heard a dozen times. Why not wring all the light we can from this sense of quickening in the air?

Busy Bodies (Or, My Fitness Blog)

I've started a regimen of physical fitness. Ha! Just days ago Joseph invited me to a yoga class his friend was teaching.

"Jos, you know me. Do I seem to you like a yoga person?" I asked.

My body is what's inevitably going to let me down, after all—hardly the sort of thing I want to curl up and relax with. Under the best of circumstances it'll begin circumscribing my motions in a couple decades' time, fortress walls crumbling and opening nothing up, but rather blocking all the doors with fallen rubble. I've managed the business of having a body as someone trapped in a yard with a sleepy but presumably vicious dog: no sudden moves, and things will probably be okay. Avoid eye contact.

Of course, it makes no sense to say these things. My brain is body. My eyes, my ears, my tongue. But useless to deny the sense of separation, too. I relentlessly knock my hips and shoulders against doorframes I've passed through thousands of times, take steps that fail and trip me for no reason I can understand. What am I, to the section of my mind that runs my motions? A camera mounted on a broomstick? Or something smoothly limbless like a water-snake; but nothing I inhabit is calm water.

As I write my foot has fallen asleep. Without ticklishness I run my fingers down the sole. Curiously, it registers the chill of my hand, and nothing else. My circulation is poor, as forgetful of my extremities as my primary motor cortex. When I was very young and had not crawled out as far yet from my flesh I would say: my foot is dizzy. Limbs, nerves are brain.

I've groaned and rolled my eyes at the thought of "working out" for years. It certainly was not a punk rock thing to do, and later it seemed unrelated to the life of the mind. Sometimes I've gone for runs when my body's grown twitchy from too much sitting around. I overdo it immediately, which doesn't take much. To sprint is more fun. I bike about 20 miles on most weekdays, but that is simply how I get places; I like to move just fine, but I want the motions to get something done. I do not want to think about my form. Are there not enough labors to be undertaken in this world?, I sniff. Must we work so hard at useless things? (After which I generally turn back to reading the internet for another hour or two.)

It is a little bit more than my laziness speaking when I get nervous about these gyms and classes and machines and the people in them. One hears of the sense of accomplishment to be obtained from working out, and it is probably no more useless than most ways one could spend an hour's time. But nothing has really been pushed forward in the world, unless you are training for combat, perhaps, or to perform a demanding dance. That we spend hours running in place is too blockheadedly obvious a metaphor even to complete.

Heather brought home this Jillian Michaels DVD, is how I started my regimen of physical fitness; it was lying there, and I'd been sitting around working from home all day. So I began. "You want those abs!" Jillian Michaels says by way of encouragement as she gestures to her fellow demonstrators of fitness, and suddenly the video is some kind of QVC program, the viewer window-shopping for body parts which she will, hopefully, soon be able to afford. (Jillian has two fellow demonstrators, one supposedly more and one less advanced along the path of fitness, though the less-fit model's only visible difference is that she is five or six inches shorter than the other. And that does make her more relatable. Possibly she also cannot reach the top shelf of her kitchen cabinets.)

Shopping is a feeling, though this version is about as interesting to me as coupon-clipping. I can sprint, and, on the other hand, I can endure. Long bike rides, hikes up mountains, walks across town. These seem to be the natural rhythms of human movement. Something is darting past quickly and must be seized, or else it is staying put somewhere far away, and it will take a while to reach. The stuff in the middle is too vague to bother with; there are complicated calculations of pacing, budgeting. I am not so interested in becoming "shredded," as Jillian horrifyingly puts it. (She really isn't awful, and doesn't talk that much, but naturally my radar's tuned to certain wavelengths.) It'd be easier if I would simply agree that our goal is for me to lose twenty pounds in thirty days. But this is an instance in which you realize that you are dependent on certain figures who have extremely little in common with you, almost by definition of their profession: the dentist, the hairstylist, the banker. The woman on the workout DVD, who bosses me around while remaining cheerfully immune to my scoffing at her music choices.

It would be good to be stronger. And it is good to step out of my habit of only ever doing things I'm already pretty sure I'll be okay at, to be physically humbled in a different fashion than tripping on the sidewalk or dropping a glass. Because I started on a whim, I may have a chance of sticking with this thing—or at least get as far as I did a couple of weeks ago with National Novel Writing Month, which I also began impulsively, pounding out 26,000 words or so before losing hope of meeting the deadline. Which feels not so bad. It was good, then, to slip into a space mostly soundproofed against the hemming and hawing of the internal editor (though what lets me hope I'll finish the project is the anticipated pleasure of going back and fixing, improving). Its hesitant voice is also difficult to hear over Jillian's smooth encouragements, the bastardized synthetic '80s jazz that's never acknowledged by the women onscreen, the thump of jumping jacks. The unfamiliar-sounding bursts of breath that are emerging, somehow, from your lungs. They are forcing their way out on the wrong beat, Jillian keeps telling you, but eventually you may begin to bring them under your control. 

Hard Listening: Patti Smith, "Horses"

When I summon some of my most intense teenage memories, a primary sensation is of school bus seats. Are they the same everywhere? The color a sort of horseshit green. The texture a zombie version of leather, a third-generation imitation that isn't even vaguely trying for authenticity. Holes in some places letting the white cloth backing and then the yellow foam show through. And always cool and clammy to the touch, no matter how many kids were packed inside. Your cheek lay resting on the back — if you were motion-sick or queasily nursing an impossible crush or just very, very tired — and the side of your forehead made a little live circle on the frosty window glass, which rattled and buzzed in its frame. Inhaling, you smelled old foam and dust, infinitely stale. I was on buses a lot in middle school and high school, not just to and from school but often across the state to theater competitions. It cannot always have been dark on these trips, but the essential atmosphere is always the darkness of evenings in winter or early spring.

Claire and I are sitting toward the back. We hold a clunky Discman delicately to avoid skips, and we share a pair of headphones — earbuds not yet being ubiquitous, we simply turn the volume high and lean into the speakers, plugging our outside ears with our hands (and even then, the sounds of the bus and the theater kids around us make it a little hard to hear. We are working from memory; both of us have spun this record countless times).

Singing is a classic ritual of the drama bus ride home. It's a group thing, even if the social butterflies with the big musical-theater voices lead the way. The songs I like don't lend themselves to this campfire approach, but I love singing in a car anyway. In Kelly's minivan late at night on the way home from a show or a party in the middle of nowhere, my friends and I belt out our songs. Sleater-Kinney, the Clash, dozens of punk and ska bands on the mix tapes that circulate endlessly between us and whose sequence of songs we have memorized as well as any actual album, the next track keyed up in the back of our throats in the static pause before it begins. I'm too self-conscious to join the theater-kid sing-alongs. I don't have the talent to sing nicely without a lot of apparent effort or the self-assurance to belt it out without caring how I sound. At Girl Scout camp one year I overheard a girl complaining that I was "showing off my voice" when I sang along with everyone else -- showing off the voice that had frequently been judged not-good-enough in other contexts. It's hard to know how to use an in-between voice like that, especially when you're 16.

So Claire and I sit and strain to hear this album. There is a lot of silence in it anyway, a lot of space. A sense of an actual room. The opening chords come softly, a low church-bell cadence on piano. We just barely pick them up. I'm not sure when we start singing, but by the time we reach the chorus we are wild and audible, breathless with the excitement of football fans cheering on their underdog team.

"That's not how the song goes," notes one of our friends, a straight-laced theater boy a row back. He thinks we are listening to and fucking up Van Morrison's "Gloria." It takes us a minute to even understand what he means. For us, this is the primary text. Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine -- what use could the world even have anymore for a version that did not begin this way?

As Claire and I sang along with this album, we'd sometimes stop and look at each other and crack up with delighted disbelief at just how crazy she was being. There are words we've never managed to figure out. And the name of the band is . . . Twistelette? Twist-to-the-left? Take me up, up, to the belly of the ship, she stretches out over about a dozen bars, and later ends the song: We . . . like . . . bird . . . land. This almost Sesame Street thing. But there's a looseness to the album that makes the hippie weirdness work; it sounds like it all could be ecstatically spontaneous, and doesn't land with the thud of solemn calculation. And it doesn't interfere with the moments of aching poetry.

Or of forthright sex appeal. I knew even then that Patti Smith was not actually gay, I think (having almost certainly researched this online as soon as I brought the record home), but the female-directed sense of sex in the record felt convincing — probably because rooted in the power of the singer rather than in the object of desire. That strut a consummation in itself. Eileen Myles has written a little about being a young woman wanting to be a boy — not to be male, but to occupy the same cultural space that a boy does. To be independent and have adventures and make mischief selfishly and forgivably. To be, automatically, a protagonist. And there's a similar, wholly untortured sense of boyishness to Patti Smith, not engaging femininity in battle but just ignoring its expectations outright. In fact it took me a while to identify as a feminist when I was young, not because I disagreed with any feminist principles but because I had a hard time feeling that being female was all that essential to my character; I was reluctant to play up that accident of my birth too much.

So this skinny figure with a ratty halo of hair, an Oxford shirt, and a jacket jauntily slung over her shoulder staring out of the white album cover with utter self-possession -- androgynous but not sexless -- resonated with me. Horses (and Smith's book Just Kids, which I've just read) has plenty of affection for women, but it's mostly full of boys. She's watching them, drifting in and out of their stories as she tells them, merging with them in places. In "Land," there is a boy, on a beach or on a bed or in the hallway of a school, dying or being violently transformed; she arrives finally on the scene and touches his throat, his hands, his brain itself before all boundaries are erased, stuttering out with him: I, I, that's how I, that's how I, I died.

Few songs provide so clear a template for transformation through rock and roll. There's this scene of high-school violence and hysteria, of self-destruction undertaken not as an act of enmity toward the self but as the defiant answer to the angel who looks down at him and says, Oh pretty boy, can't you show me nothin' but surrender? (As she shouts sublimely on the CD's bonus track, a cover of "My Generation:" I don't need their fuckin' shit! Hope I die because of it!) Then this moment of perfect stillness -- he felt himself disintegrating, there was nothing happening at all / and go inside the black tube -- before a little window opens in the blackness onto a street scene, and there's the "sweet young thing" we met in "Gloria." Finally, in the last seconds:

In the sheets

there was a man

dancing

around

to the simple

rock and roll

song

I like and listen to "Elegie," which follows, but this has always felt like the end of the album for me. When I wasn't listening to it on a bus, I'd listen by putting on my headphones and lying down on my bed in the dark, letting myself be cleansed by this ocean of a record. At the end of "Land," Patti converges with her beautiful doomed boy and then there I am too, on my own sheets, twitching a foot to the rhythm, having drowned whatever ugly adolescent commotion had made me retreat to my room and now ready to make something, to take on that rock and roll strut for myself. Less alone in my wedge of Venn-diagram overlap between poetry and punk rock, the Watusi and Rimbaud.

Because it so demands my concentration and involvement, I don't listen to Horses much anymore, but when I do I often think I may be able to hear it anew after a gap of however many months. It always turns out that it is too deeply embedded in me to come at fresh; it's like trying to frighten yourself by shouting "Boo!" In a silent room I can reproduce every intonation, every stab of guitar in my head. I don't think I've ever put a song from Horses on a mix tape -- maybe "Gloria" or "My Generation." They're less songs than weird spastic meditation exercises, existing beyond the purposes of appreciation and built for total catharsis. It's almost not necessary for me to listen to the album anymore. The squeak in her voice, when she tosses it up and catches it midair — I've stolen that for my own use for years, and "Gloria" thunders through my head whenever I need to feel okay about going onstage. In smaller moments, too, the album is with me. Riding in a car at night, looking out over fields: It was as if someone had spread butter on all the fine points of the stars, 'cause when he looked up they started to slip. That cold starlight made warm has always gotten me. This is a record that shapes and purifies the darkness, using wild noise to engineer a peaceful vehicle through the night.