Embrace

Look at these lines and curves, these letters and words, these black absences of light against a background of white. They suggest sounds, and the sounds suggest a meaning, and the meaning refers to an action: embracing. And when you think of this action, it brings memories to mind; associations with hugs you have received before. If you allow these associations to fill your mind, you will recall the feeling of being hugged. Think about it long enough, and your skin will remember, and your blood will remember, and the very core of you will remember what it is to be enfolded.

I cannot now embrace you. I cannot hug you, I cannot hold you. I am too far away. I cannot comfort you, although your sadness is real to me, here. The transmission of your sadness suffers from no noise. All I can send to you is light, mere light,. That light suggests sounds, which suggest an action, that might evoke a memory, that might make you feel loved. Through all this abstraction, all these removes, it is all I can do.

It is all I can do, and it is what I must do.

The Body Bourgeois

You know that billboard at the end of the 55? The one that's always rented out by Banana Republic, and always features some ultra-thin model in a pastoral setting? The image changes every month or so, but even so, you can always grass in it, usually sunlight. I commented to Bonny that it seemed to me that Banana Republic was consciously trying to court an upper-class clientele. I was thinking about how the urban poor would feel alienated by images of a carefully cultivated nature that only exists at country clubs and in the expansive yards of those who own fine houses. I was thinking also about how class implies a certain body type, how economic class actually fundamentally affects one's flesh--and that rich folks with their fad diets and personal trainers and yoga classes and plastic surgeons are probably model thin a lot more often than poor folks who are too busy dealing with economic stressors to spend time cultivating the perfect body and who, for lack of education or lack of options, eat shitty fast food and pre-packaged food and basically spend most of their lives awash in high-fructose corn syrup. Funny how the cheapest foods are often the highest in calories, meaning that you pay less for more energy (in an absolute sense), while more expensive foods involve things like garlic and herbs, using flavoring agents other than sugar and fat to be appealing. Health as a luxury item, health as conspicuous consumption; the fat cats are thin now while the workers are fat. It makes me hate my own conceptualization of beauty, seeing it as a contrived imposition from the top-down and reinforced by the heavily-edited images I see every day in advertising, as much as I fail in my struggle to subvert it. It makes me loathe my self-loathing, seeing my hatred of my own body as being a piece with that self-hatred that depressed ethnic groups experience when they measure themselves by the metrics of the ruling class and inevitably find themselves wanting. So yeah, this shot reeked of richness.

She informed that yes, this was true. Banana Republic is for rich people, while Old Navy and the Gap, which were owned by the same parent company, appealed to the lower and middle classes, respectively. I was a bit stunned. I was not aware that class distinctions in this country were so concrete. I would not have thought that a corporation would be so obvious in its efforts to say "Yes, this is for poor people" and "Yes, this is for the rich." Or rather, I might've assumed that a company like BMW would make a product that is the best it can possibly be and charge as much as possible for that product, but then, after achieving that threshold, I wouldn't think that company would pull back on its efforts and make a product that's just okay for the the rest of us (or a product that's really kind of crappy for those who can't even afford that)

I don't know why I wouldn't have thought that; I guess, being a person who wants options and experiences to transcend boundaries of ethnicity and class, I don't want to think about such boundaries as being rigid and clearly defined. Clearly price is a huge determinant, and as a member of the upper-lower-middle class I recognize that more than most, but it was still strange to me to think of the aesthetics of women's clothing--which I figured were all more or less decadent and an expression of conspicuous consumption--were actually graded along class lines. Is Banana Republic clothing the ideal to which Gap and Old Navy clothing aspires but falls short--and is this falling short a calculated thing intended to make Old Navy and Gap shoppers feel inferior? Or does each clothing store promote a distinct aesthetic, making the most of the styles and materials (and traditions?) within that set price range--"We're here, we're poor, get used to it!"

I don't know. I think it's all ugly, and when I say that I'm not really talking about the clothes themselves. Which is why I will persist in spending as little on my clothes as I possibly can, and in buying clothing that does not compromise comfort for the sake of class vanity, and is otherwise as non-descript as possible.

Not that I think that Banana Republic would have anything that would fit me, anyway.

Tresasure Seekers

Treasure seekers
With their metal detectors
Sifting the sand
For gum wrappers
Pennies
And pull-tabs

I wonder
If they ever
Make enough
To recoup
Their initial
Investment

Somebody
Should do
A Study

(These city workers in their yellow vests have the right of it; scavenging the sand for the evidence of last night's debaucheries to put into the proper receptacles before someone steps on it and shreds a foot. I think these weekend adventurers would be hard pressed to earn the equivalent of minimum wage with their pathetic treasure seeking. But I'm sure it's more exciting to find a fallen quarter than it is to pick up the ten-thousandth Coors light bottle tossed away by some drunk and selfish fuck, even if it is far more useless.)

Orange Fail

A few years back I went to the farmer's market across from U.C.I. for the first time. I bought some navel oranges there from a vendor who no longer comes to that market. These redefined my conceptualization of the navel orange. These were the Platonic ideal of the navel orange. Sweet and so full of juice that they soaked your shirt when you peeled them. The vendor has stopped coming to the U.C.I. Farmer's market for whatever reason, and I've been trying to find suitable replacement oranges ever since with mixed success. While my farmer's market produce purchases are usually superior to chemically-ripened waxy desiccated things at the super market that bear only a passing resemblance to fruit, I've yet to find a consistent grower who can deliver fruit that good.

If my hands stay dry after peeling your navel orange, you fail at growing navel oranges. I'm so tired of dried-up oranges with flesh that is the taste and consistency of packing material. Juice content, people, juice content.

Navel oranges are sterile hybrids, which means they can only be grown by grafting, which means that all navel oranges are genetically identical. Barring any delicious mutations like the Cara-Cara navel (which is the best kind of navel), all navel orange trees are genetically the same. So the pronounced difference in quality between an orange like a ball of uncooked rice and an orange that is dripping with sweetness must all be in the application of agricultural techniques. Nurture over nature. Something to think about.

All You Need Is Love

The song was playing at the stand where I went to buy my tea. It got me thinking. Let us examine Mr. Lennon's claim, shall we?

All you need is love. Well, if we assume that a need is that which is necessary to maintain the organism, then I don't know how long one could be sustained on love alone. Nine minutes in an all-love, no-oxygen environment and you're dead. You may be loved, but assuming you need to continue to be alive in order to appreciate the fact, the love is rendered moot.

Okay, so all you need is love. And oxygen. And food, and water, and shelter. Because without these things you will very soon be popping your clogs.

(Yes, I looked that up. You can too.)

Now things are getting messy. In order to fulfill these biological needs, there's a lot of non-love activity involved. In order to get food, you either have to work to raise or gather it yourself or, more likely in this specialized post-industrial society, you work at some other task and somebody pays you for your work and you take your pay to a fourth party who has been commissioned by corporations to warehouse the food created by other other parties and then to exchange your payment--which has to be guaranteed by a government, so now there's *that*--for the food. Water and housing aren't much simpler.

Of course, all you really *need* to live in order to love and be loved are a few handfuls of berries and seeds and insects per day. But I'm thinking that if you're content to subsist at that level of material existence, you're not going to be getting much love from people who are members of a post-industrial society. Assuming that's the kind of love you need, and we'll assume that that's the kind of love Mr. Lennon is talking about, because that's the society he was a member of, drug-filled spiritual quests to India aside.

So now in order to love, you need to eat, and in order to eat, you need to work. In order to work, you need to do all kinds of other things. For a lot of jobs you need to get an education, so now you need to go to college in order to love. For those jobs that don't require a college degree, you might still need to undergo years of training. And in order to maintain most jobs, you need to cultivate a specific kind of appearance, work on one's social skills...so now we get to the fact that if all you need is love, in order to get that love, you have to wear a tie.

You're still with me? Good. I know it's been a bit of a jog to get here, but the logic is sound.

To Mr. Lennon in the year 1967, it might well have seemed that all one needed was love. But getting past that level of ebullient optimism, we see that there are layers and layers of economic necessity (and then layers of luxury that, once entrenched, are perceived as necessities, such that we think we "need" cars and flat-screen televisions and breast implants) in order to maintain the capacity for love. Recall that Mr. Lennon previously quoted Barret Strong to claims that "Your lovin' give me such a thrill / But your lovin' don't pay my bills;" his subsequent reversal of this position doesn't acknowledge the necessity of paying the bills in order to love. And this is to say nothing of the other realities that go into making one loveable and capable of being loved. Can one be content with love alone while dispensing with such other needs as job satisfaction, personal security, actualization through the meeting of self-created goals, variety, et cetera? Certainly love can contribute to the meeting of these other needs, and can even compensate for some deficiencies, but it can't satisfy all other psychic needs, all of the time. It can't really be all you need. Because nobody is liable to love you when you're depressed about how nobody cares about your work, or when you're panicking because you think the terrorists are going to come and get you.

And thus we end up with the causal relationship whereby in order to love, we have to have the war in Iraq. Personally, I'm not willing to make those links--my own needs for security and my own interpretation of the causal relationship between my personal security and the war in Iraq being very different from those of the lion's share of my countrymen--but I can assure you that there are plenty of people who do feel such a need, as stupid as it is.

And thus we end up with the actuality in which the need for love implicated myriad other needs, and the need for love actually generates wars and corporate capitalism and other dumb shit like that. Love equals the purchase of a diamond equals the endorsement of forced labor in Africa, so love equals the endorsement of forced labor in Africa, so John Lennon's original proposition could be retitled as "All You Need is Forced Labor in Africa." Not quite as cheery, but as true, given the assumptions we tend to make in post-industrial societies, some of which are based on actual organic needs but many of which are based on an incredibly luxuriant interpretation of what those needs actually are.

In any case, I am afraid, Mr. Lennon, that your position is an over-simplification of the matter at hand, ignoring the political and economic complexities of a person's "need." Perhaps at some point--like infancy--love includes and provides for these things, but by the point one is an adult, love is far more fraught and complicated

Nutshell

Imagine a man. The man is tall. The man is fat. The man is blondly bearded and his blond hair is unfashionably long. The man is young, but his weight and his beard and the hard set of his eyes make him seem older. The man is dressed in dark clothing. He is wearing too much clothing for late spring in a desert climate. He wears his black jeans and black sweatshirt as though to shield his shape against the outside world, as though he would as soon wear steel armor over his skin as cotton. He wears a backpack on his back and the backpack is full of books that cause his broad shoulders to stoop.

He stands at the foot of a bridge that spans a city street. A human flood comes at him over the bridge. Hundreds of eighteen-year-olds with perfect or adequately perfect or at the very least perfectly adequate bodies come jogging at him. The eighteen-year-old bodies are wearing nothing but underwear. The eighteen-year-old bodies wave and shout and cheer and wave their hands in the air with drunken exuberance. Their sweat smells of alcohol. Their sweat is eighty proof.

The man sets his jaw and locks his eyes. He deliberately stares at the point in the air fifty feet directly out from him. He deliberately does not stare at the nearly naked breasts. He fails, locks his eyes again.

The man takes a breath. He closes his eyes and bows his head. He opens his eyes and raises his head. He forges into the human flood, going against the current. He is jostled from all sides by young flesh, the soft flesh of women and the hard flesh of men. He forces his way forward through the flesh and the laughs and the screams of ecstasy, refusing to concede one inch to the circumstances. He is a darkness among all the bright nudity.

The tide overtakes him. He is pushed back.

Unable to force his way through the flood, he heads to the street to take a circuitous detour. Nearly naked people clutter the sidewalks and clutter the air with their loud chatter. One of the naked girls walks opposed to him on the sidewalk; she sees the hard set of his eyes and sees his beard and his fatness and his darkness and shies away, scared. Her boyfriend with moves protectively in front of her, putting the wall of his abs between the girlfriend and the man. The man does not stop. He looks at the girl's shivering breasts as little as he possibly can.

The man reaches an intersection, sees people standing next to the base of the streetlight, doesn't trust their judgment, reaches out to push the Walk button himself. Naked people crowd around him. One of the naked girls loudly and drunkly asks him if he did the Undie Run. Without ever looking at her, the heavily-clothed and heavyset man shakes his head and says “No.” She then asks another waiting and standing person if he did the Undie Run. She says they do Undie Runs in London, which is where she's from. She is very clearly lying; her voice is from nowhere near London, although now, as if to give some force to the lie, she remembers to torque her vowels a little bit, but the effort is inadequate and unconvincing.

The light changes. The man and the others cross the street. The man walks the several blocks to finally get to the parking structure, and walks to the far end where he parked his car.

It is only when he comes to his usual space and finds it empty that he recalls that he parked in the parking structure on the other end of the college campus. He realizes that he has, in fact, been going the wrong way this whole time.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give unto you the life of David Michael Kammerzelt III in a goddamn mother-fucking nut-shell.

(Last night actually happened exactly like this, almost.)

The Play in the Park

I’ve tried to write this out half a dozen times now. It never comes out right. And yet it is one of those incidents to which my mind returns with regularity, a core of gravity around which the rest of my identity spins. I think I keep coming back to it in the hope that the final, decisive, conclusive, real writing of the incident will provide an expiation.

QUINCE
If that may be, then all is well. Come, sit down,
every mother's son, and rehearse your parts.

I won’t return to New York. Not if I can help it. Once was enough. One week was enough to suffice me a lifetime. I’d break this vow for a publishing opportunity, of course, of course, but nothing shy of that could draw me back. A week of breathing in that air, congested with congealed emotion, thick with stress that was a second humidity, walking through those concrete canyons and swimming through the air that was saturated with the stress and dead dreams of myriad millions was enough to make me disinclined to go back.

And then, of course, there was the play in the park.

QUINCE
O monstrous! O strange! we are haunted.

On the downslope of a week surfeited with sensory data and concentrated culture, we were going out to see a play in Central Park. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as interpreted by students from Julliard. The prospect of seeing Shakespeare in Central Park was, for me—suburban rube and aspiring literatus with deep-seated feelings of inferiority with respect to the cultural intensity of New York City—quite exciting.

QUINCE
Pat, pat; and here's a marvellous convenient place
for our rehearsal. This green plot shall be our
stage, this hawthorn-brake our tiring-house; and we
will do it in action as we will do it before the duke.

I was, I think, about sixteen at the time. Seventeen, maybe. I was with a friend from high school who had a number of relations in the City, and we were shuffling between his uncles and aunts in the course of our explorations of New York. On this night, we were out with one of his aunts. Maternal or paternal or incidental, I don’t remember. I do remember she smiled incessantly, smiled at everything. I remember that she wore a blue dress with a white polka dot print. I remember she was very overweight, and that each step caused her to huff her breath. We’d taken a taxi from near her place of work in Brooklyn to the place of the play.

PUCK
What, a play toward! I'll be an auditor;
An actor too, perhaps, if I see cause.

We drew up on the cheap plastic chairs arranged on a green, oblique to a cluster of hillocks. I don't remember if we paid or not, nor do I remember if there were sufficient chairs for everybody or if we had to sit on the grass or on the small wall that ran behind the green. These details have left me. We were open to the air; that much I do know.

The seats filled up with persons in buttoned shirts and dresses. Even to this outdoor play in the park, this free play, a goodly number of the playgoers had gone over the threshhold of business casual, at least, to make an impression of their professionalism and their richness. Or perhaps they had just come from their serious, rich, professional jobs and had not had opportunity to change. Or perhaps they always dressed like that. Unlike me, who enjoys plays but always balks at spending more than $40 on an article of clothing, such that even when I saved up to shell out the two thousand dollars to see the Ring Cycle, I was seeing it in jeans and tennis shoes. But I'm defraying myself. Back to it.

The play commenced. It was quite the minimalist affair—which was to say it had no set to speak of, other than the green hillocks and raw moonlight.

SNOUT
Doth the moon shine that night we play our play?

The actors had no costumes other than plain black sweatclothes. They were relying on the broadness and bigness of their acting to carry the magic of the play, I guess—and that there was in abundance.

I hadn't found A Midsummer Night's Dream to be particularly funny. I hadn't found any of Shakespeare's comedies to be funny, really. I'd read MND before, or had tried to and stalled out; I can't recall. But what verbal humor there is in the play is largely lost on a first time auditor, due to the now-unusual and intricate constructions of words and the rapidity of the delivery, complicated in this face by the manifold distractions of being in an audience in a park in the middle of the City. I've read it subsequently and I can parse out the jokes now, and some of them are actually quite good, but it takes a kind of concentration and the ability to re-read lines and scan the gloss to get the full humor out of the play. None of this was available to me at the time, with the result that the comedy was coming across as profoundly unfunny.

I wasn't the only one to feel so. The audience tended to sit in dumb silence, as though these graying people in button shirts and dresses didn't know any more than I did when it was that they were supposed to laugh. The actors were trying to assist us in this regard by making exaggerated gestures and faces, turning dramatic comedy into clowning. I wasn't really feeling it, and I don't think anybody else was, either, judging by the deadness of audience around me. We'd proceeded along to Act III, Scene 1, in more of an endurance than a mirth.

That changed, though. For, you see, a homeless man who perhaps had been sleeping behind one of the hillocks or a nearby tree was stirred to come onto the “stage.”

QUINCE
Ay, marry, must you; for you must understand he goes
but to see a noise that he heard, and is to come again.

He violated the fourth wall by violating what could have been the second wall but wasn't anything more than open air. He was thin and dark-skinned. His hand was held out, and an empty, dirty white polystyrene foam cup was in it. He began to panhandle at the actors. Now that got a laugh, a general loud laugh, more of a laugh than anything the actors had done up to that point had gotten.

The man was moving slowly. He kept holding out his cup. He held it at a slim, small brunette actress who was playing one of the mechanicals. She frowned and stepped away. He held it at a round-faced blonde actress, who made an expression of disgust before moving away. He held it at the thickset bearded actor who was playing Bottom, I think, and he slapped the man's hand away. The homeless man then violated the fifth wall that was the actor playing Wall, as indicated by a man covered in a bedsheet, by holding the cup at him, too. Wall swatted at the cup as though it were a fly.

All this was the greatest of improvised physical comedy. The audience was cracking up in laughter, in a way that it never had in response to the archaic boring tameness of a Shakespearean play. Sometimes the homeless man looked out at the laughter, looked at it sideways, as though it were confusing him. He was muttering something. I couldn't hear what. I think he might have been asking for change or saying that he was hungry or needed help.

Through the duration, the actors were gamely or lamely trying to bluster their way through the scene by means of going even more over the top so as to drown out the obvious fact of a homeless man standing among them. The thickset bearded actor who was playing Bottom, I think, and who had never been under the top in the first place, tried to be even louder and even more broad than he had before, until he was damn near shouting his lines. I think perhaps he was envious of the homeless man's inadvertent facility for comedy.

I don't think that the homeless man was aware that he was interrupting a play. He looked only rarely at the audience, and he seemed to be mostly oblivious of the extraordinary circumstances of these actors and actresses reciting lines at a great group of people sitting on the green. He held up his cup at Bottom again. He asked audibly for a little something. His voice was tired and sad and weak and old.

Bottom knocked the cup away. He turned to face the homeless man. Red blood burned in his cheeks and neck. Bottom screamed that no, he would not give anything to the homeless man, that he was interrupting their play and touching the actresses and that he needed to get out of there. The homeless man lowered his hand, but made no other movement.

The crowd cheered at the monlogue. People clapped and they laughed and they cheered.

After maybe half a minute the homeless man wandered toward the front row and began to panhandle the people in the good seats. He wasn't at it for long, though.

I saw the red and blue of police lights coming from the nearby street. A good New Yorker would tell you what street it was; all the streets have distinct identities in New York, I guess, but to me a street is just a street. Comes from living in a subdivision shot through with cul-de-sacs, I guess. Somebody—a uniformed policeman, I think—came and took the homeless man away.

TITANIA
Be kind and courteous to this gentleman;
Hop in his walks and gambol in his eyes;
Feed him with apricocks and dewberries,
With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries;
The honey-bags steal from the humble-bees,
And for night-tapers crop their waxen thighs
And light them at the fiery glow-worm's eyes,
To have my love to bed and to arise;
And pluck the wings from Painted butterflies
To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes:
Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies.

There was more cheering.

The play proceeded.

We left shortly after. I don't know why we left. I think my friend's aunt, as hard-pressed as she was to move, was the first to get up out of her seat. But the underlying motivation for leaving? Had the play become boring again now that it was once again on course? Had the illusion of the Athenian youths and mechanicals gamboling in the faery-haunted wood been so thoroughly broken that there was no going back? Or was my friend's aunt, like me, sick to the stomach, sick to the very guts, with helpless guilt? I didn't know. I don't think we talked about it.

But I thought about it. I went over the incident again and again in my head, scanning and re-scanning my memory of the evening. Because I had to know, I had to be sure—it was everything to me that I had not laughed.

I remember myself sitting rigid, silent, horrorstruck. Not laughing. Never laughing. Even when everybody else was laughing at the antics of the ruined man up on the stage, I was not laughing. I could not laugh at the play, but I would not laugh at the ruin of another man's mind. I would not. Or so I told myself.

I tried to recall the memory of my muscles. Had my diaphragham heaved up, the breath rushed quickly through my throat? I swore that it hadn't, but I had to know. But I couldn't know. So I was obsessing about it, trying to coax answers out of my muscles that my muscles couldn't give, trying to sort out my memories of the event from any form of wishful thinking. Because it was everything that I had not laughed.

And I wondered if I should have done something, if there was some right course of action to take, if I should have somehow helped the homeless man, or if I should have somehow helped the actors, or if I should have done anything other than be overwhelmed with the most sickening sense of futility in the face of misery that had ever afflicted me in my life.

I was still obsessing about it when, the next morning, we were on the subway going to somewhere; I don't recall where. There was a homeless man passed out and stretched out on the seats across from us. I didn't notice it at first over the general humid acridity of the City, but after a while I recognized that the homeless man had pissed himself, and that the scent of his urine was sour and musky and brutally strong.

BOTTOM
Good Master Mustardseed, I know your patience well:
that same cowardly, giant-like ox-beef hath
devoured many a gentleman of your house: I promise
you your kindred had made my eyes water ere now.

Another guy—a young guy—opened the door into our cabin. He exclaimed loudly that he wasn't going to be in a cabin with a bum who had pissed himself, clamped his hand over his nose, and left. My friend and I stayed. We got off the subway eventually, because that is what one does.

I was still obsessing about it the next morning, yes. And I'm still obsessing about it ten years on. And I think I'll be tumbling it over and over in my head, again and again, as long as I have thoughts to tumble.

PUCK
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend:
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call;
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.