TIME AS TERRAIN

Often I begin the day’s writing at 4 or 5 AM when I take off my email for the day. I don’t stay up. I just read the most interesting stuff, delete the dreck, and drink a glass of water for the sake of my kidneys because of the Diabetes II. Then I topple back into bed and, this time of year, turn up the electric mattress pad. Squibbie moves to sleep under the computer lamp, which I leave on. Crackers moves from the foot of the bed to the crook of my arm and not a creature stirs until the church next door begins to bong nine AM. In the interval the paper has come, most of Valier has gone to work or school, and the mail has been put up. Also, I’ve been dreaming, vividly.

This morning it was about “San Francisco,” in the Aquarian years and there was to be a great festival performance. Posters were up, featuring a face painted like Tristan’s video (bright as a parrot). My task was to get a poster up inside a bus (a Portland bus) so I quickly and easily splotched a version of that face on a torn scrap of newspaper, jumped onto the bus (through a back window) and used duct tape to stick it to the windows but had to move it because the bus driver, a hefty, strong-armed woman in uniform, couldn’t see to drive.

This came from a braid of sources, at least partly from the Cinematheque posts, but also from a review and first chapter of SOMEWHERE TOWARDS THE END, A Memoir, by Diana Athill which I read in the NYTimes. This fed into the memoir-based conversation between Barrus and I that is meant to become a book called “Kickstart.” He’s from that Boomer generation, bi-coastal, drug-enchanted, hip and swinging, communal, and always partnered -- though not the same ones or even the same gender. His cohort was ripped by the AIDS holocaust. I’m from the generation a half-step (ten years) ahead of him and should have been a smug conformist. Athill at nearly ninety is a full generation (twenty years) ahead of me. It was a time of confidence after WWI. I say “ahead” rather than “older” because I’m seeing time as a terrain. Our choices put us on a bus which we can leave, but should we? Is it The Green Tortoise or is it the Streetcar Named Desire?

Winter always makes me reflect this way, esp. when I’m in a situation where the allocation of resources and the means of moving around to get them has to be carefully monitored. When is it NOT like that? One of Barrus’ fascinations is that he seems able to just fly off thousands of miles to a totally new place. When he gets there, he breakfasts on espresso and cheese the same as always. I often reflect that people who watch me (Valier watches everyone) see only an old woman sitting at a keyboard with a cat alongside. Maybe two cats. (too-cats?) My travels are invisible.

Before I went back to sleep I was having brilliant thoughts about two people in relationship and what keeps them there, versus what strains are too much. (Maybe I should have stayed up to write.) Our parents are the evidence. Of course, much of it is the social pressure, what is “admirable” or not. Partly it is people simply being thrown into proximity until they become attuned, knowing each others scent and timbre, losing the boundary between two individuals even when it is like the borderlands between England and Scotland where Braveheart painted his face and went to war. But that in itself becomes familiar until not-warring feels like there’s nothing palpable there. War becomes a kind of intimacy. And marriage is often an economic necessity as some are re-discovering right now.

My mother married as a passport into a new world she’d read about in books: the City. My father, also rural moving to the City, also thought he was doing that. Both of them approached education as an economic guarantee (which it was to some degree in those days). They thought that if they had copies of Shakespeare’s plays bound in leather on the bookshelf, if they attended art shows, if they knew where every heroic bronze statue of a hero was in the City of Portland, and if we had trekked across the country in a kind of scavenger hunt of famous American places from Gettysburg to the Petrified Forest, then we must be among the elite -- the ones who “know.”

The importance of this enterprise was transmitted to me, but I gradually came to understand that they weren’t even close to what they thought they had achieved. They were on the wrong bus. And now that I’m somewhere close to the end, I see that what they were after is not a destination anyhow. It’s the trip. Delivering the same days’ mail to Scalia and Sunstein in the same building at the U of Chicago Law School (a building considered highly modern in 1982 but now rebuilt as outmoded) taught me both that “top” men are ordinary and that they come to entirely different conclusions by the same means. But their conclusions change the world, or at least this nation.

Athill traveled alone, never married. In fact, she didn’t “travel” much as a book editor in London: people came to her, famous people or at least they were then. Many are now forgotten. Her reviewer calls her “robust, free-thinking, nonmawkish.” I’d love to be those things. But she is concerned about her appearance. I’ve given up on that. (I’ve been growing my hair out this winter and discover that I have “old lady hair,” which is to say thinning, white and too fine to capture in a stretch-band for more than a few minutes. I think my only hope is hats.)

Barrus and I are too sophisticated to actually compare our lives: we just juxtapose and let you draw your own conclusions. His life has been pushed at the public in a grotesque truncation of reality that left out all the important stuff. I used to preach from my own life until a woman told me, wanting to come live with me, “if you disclose yourself like that, it’s a clear invitation.”

But we both wonder, why did our parents marry? Why did they stay together? Why were there so many troubles? What could I have done differently? What does it mean about what I am doing now? Or in terms of terrain, we look back at the long and surprising trail, then look ahead at an incline that seems to becoming steeper. Is it approaching a drop-off? Or will the sides fall away to reveal a grassy meadow?


Tim Barrus: All Your Other Selves

Fritz [Perls]: You are leaning forward. Bending. Your hands are balled like fists. They are turning. You seem to be riding a motorcycle. Ride it and tell me what that's about.

Tim: It's about power. My power is more powerful that your power. It fits between my legs. It vibrates it takes me where I want to go. I ride it to escape.

Fritz: Talk to the bike. It's over there on the chair.

Tim: You are my noise and my ride. I easily go erect just riding you. The vibrating of your heart between my legs. The wind in my face says go, go. Don't leave me with no form of escape.

Fritz: Your hands are doing what.

Tim: It's like I'm wringing them.

Fritz: What are you writing, wringing out of them.

Tim: Sweat.

Fritz: You are breathing deeply.

Tim: I am afraid.

Fritz: Your fear is on the hot seat. What do you want to tell it.

Tim: STOP FOLLOWING ME AROUND, YOU FUCK! You will never catch me. I am faster and smarter and more dangerous than you. Get out of my life.

Fritz: Where are you now.

Tim: On the bike. On the beach. I am going very fast. Maybe a hundred miles an hour. There is nothing in my way. The bike was built for this. We are escaping.

Fritz: What about the sea. You turn one way, and you go into the ocean and drown. You turn the other way and what then.

Tim: I'm cornered now.

Fritz: By what.

Tim: The past.

Fritz: Talk to it.

Tim: (scratches palm) OUT damn, spot. Out, I say. What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?—Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him.

Fritz: Talk to the old man. He's you. You are a hundred. Talk to Tim.

Tim: We can't look back at all the rides. We will just get lost in it again. Do not tell me there are no more rides. There is always somewhere new to go to. If you are too feeble to do it, what good are you to me.

Fritz: The old Tim is afraid.

Tim: He just slows us down and defeats us because he is not strong like he used to be.

Fritz: What a disappointment Tim is to Tim. Talk to him.

Tim: Someday the speed of it will slow. Then what.