Here we are, old. Which direction will we take?

“Here I am in my mid-70s, and I am wondering: Is now the time to take a final stab at unfinished business—to accomplish at long last the remaining goals on my lifetime to-do list? Or is now the time to step back, let go of my ambitions, reflect and just live?”

So wrote Daniel Klein in the Wall Street Journal a few months ago. I suspect that it’s not usually  as clear cut as that. I do have one friend whose life is filled with activity. A poet and social activist, he’s also become a fine photographer and editor, a curator, an essayist, and more things than I can name–trying to get it all in before it’s too late.

Klein decides in favor of “friendship and reflection.” He’s happy to go to an island (many of us haven’t got the wherewithal to get there!) and contemplate life and death.

The new old age is the result of medical advances. We have time now to address our bucket lists; we can stay at our jobs and accomplish ambitions that would otherwise be lost to illness or death. Or we can let go and listen, think, wait.

I think most of us will probably do something of both.

Bach, like life, is so many things

WQXR in New York City is doing Bach 360 from now ‘til Easter. That means all Bach every day. It’s all wonderful and amazing. Bach is always so many more kinds of music and experience than I remember.

At the same time, I discovered two very different experiences of the composer’s music. The one is recounted on the WQXR website. At Stalin’s funeral in 1953, Sviatoslav Richter, one of the century’s greatest pianists, was asked to play the piano. He chose the longest and densest prelude and fugue from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. The authorities tried again and again to interrupt him to make way for another pianist, but Richter, involved in the music, could not be distracted. He was finally removed bodily by armed soldiers, certain he would be shot.

Then I ran into the very different experience of another very different musician:

“For the past eight years I have started each day in the same manner. It is not a mechanical routine but something essential to my daily life. I go to the piano, and I play two preludes and fugues of Bach. I cannot think of doing otherwise. It is a sort of benediction on the house. But that is not its only meaning to me. It is a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part. It fills me with awareness of the wonder of life, and a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being.”

-  Pablo Casals, Joys and Sorrows, at the age of 93

 

A fugue from The Well-Tempered Clavier

Which category were you in?

On occasion, when I drive from place to place in the afternoon in Vermont, I listen in an incidental way to National Public Radio. The other afternoon as I tried to pilot the car through the ruts and snowy trenches of what is almost mud season, except that another blizzard was on its way, I listened to The Story, featuring an interview with a young man who was trying to reduce gun violence in Chicago. The interviewer (Dick) was trying to get the fellow to describe high school students’ motives for acquiring guns. The kid talked about kids trying to figure out who they were in school, and needing to belong to different categories: ladies’ man, athlete, hero, nerd…. “You have to be in some category,” he explained.

The interviewer wasn’t especially interested in that construction, but I was. The secondary school assignation of categories still haunts me after all these decades. Some students were popular; some were squares; some were “cheap.” I know that breakdown varies from place to place and time to time, but it distorted and sometimes still distorts how I see myself and others. Scary to think of the harm it’s done. Hard to believe that schools can’t quash it. They might change the world.

When I get old enough…..

I am now 73 and still working hard at writing, still learning, still trying to form prose that says something and says it well. What gives me courage are other old artists. Take, for example, Louise Bourgeois who declared, “”I am a long-distance runner. It takes me years and years and years to produce what I do.”

Bourgeois made her greatest work after the age of 80. When she was 84, and an interviewer asked whether she could have made one of her recent works earlier in her career, she replied, “Absolutely not.” When he asked why, she explained, “I was not sophisticated enough.”

I’m back and blogging again!

Painting by June Young

 

I’ve been away from this blog for several months now. The reasons are multiple.

I got caught up in the writing and marketing of two cozy mysteries. (Two more are on the way!)

I seemed to have nothing more to write about.  Perhaps I had written such lengthy posts for so long, I was tired of listening to myself.

Like many other people, I’ve been caught up in the politics of our time. There are days when there’s room for almost nothing but. I don’t want to write political posts. There are far and away more of those than at any time in our history, and a lot of them are excellent. Unless I have something to say that’s truly new and important, I’d rather not indulge the urge when I feel it.

Blogging is like a lot of other things. If you stop, it’s hard to get started again.

At any rate, I’m back and hope to be for a long while.

There will be a few changes. I intend to make my posts much, much shorter. My favorite form of the essay has always been the question. I hope to post more questions and fewer answers.

I will, from time to time, tell you about my writing. You will notice that I’m putting up a website devoted to the subject. Please link to it when it happens —any day now, I think!

If you’re been around off and on, waiting for me, thank you!!!

The insignificance of us

How utterly strange, tentative and untethered our lives are. There are other words to describe our  situation—many, many of them—but I won’t try to come up with them here.

Physicist and novelist Alan Lightman looks at “Our Place in the Universe” in a recent article in Harper’s magazine and tries to describe how small we are in a universe whose size is unimaginable—and growing. “Simply put, the cosmos has gotten larger and larger. At each new level of distance and scale, we have had to contend with a different conception of the world that we live in.”

How large? The most distant galaxy we know about, says the author, is approximately  100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles from Earth. The average distance between galaxies is about 2 million light years. (Some of us may remember learning that a light year is the distance light travels in 6 trillion miles.) Oh, sure!

Farthest ever view of the universe from the Hubble telescope, containing thousands of galaxies. 13.2 billion years ago. NASA.

All of these are unimaginable numbers. They keep growing as astronomers are able to peer deeper and deeper into space. “A question naturally arises,” writes Lightman. “Could the physical universe be unending in size? That is, as we build bigger and bigger telescopes sensitive to fainter and fainter light, will we continue to see objects farther and farther away—like the third emperor of the Ming Dynasty, Yongle, who surveyed his new palace in the Forbidden City and walked from room to room to room, never reaching the end?”

Even more breath-taking, keep in mind that that distant galaxy is not only “farther and farther away” in space, it’s farther away in time. We’re looking into the past. We’re seeing the edge of the known universe as it was almost 14 billion years ago.

As Lightman points out, we can’t really understand any of this. Oh, there are people who understand it intellectually, “but our emotional reality is still limited by what we can touch with our bodies in the time span of our lives.”

The author calls attention to another bunch of figures that derive from the estimates scientists have made about the possible presence of life in other parts of the universe. They show that the fraction of stuff in the visible universe that is alive is something like one millionth of one billionth of one percent. “If some cosmic intelligence created the universe, life would seem to have been only an afterthought.”

So much for the significant human!

In the course of his article, Lightman mentions the philosopher, George Berkeley who argued that the whole cosmos is a creation of our minds and that there is no reality outside our thoughts. As a physicist, says Lightman, he “can’t accept that belief.” Largely because of science, most of us would agree with him.

But science has also concluded that the typical table is not really solid, no matter how it feels when you thump it with your fist. It’s made up of whirling electrons and other molecular whatsits. Reality is not what it seems. Something is there but it’s not exactly what we experience. It’s at least partly a construction of our minds which, by the way, would seem to apply to our incredible intellectual construct of the cosmos too.

Lightman’s conclusions are awesome, disorienting, frightening — all of that and more. But they’re far from the last word. Our relationship to reality is, I think, much more complicated than we know. We may not be George Berkeley idealists, but I’m not sure that it’s any more accurate to adhere to the materialism of science.

“Six degrees of separation”

Six Degrees of Separation

 

 

I remember wandering through Port Authority in New York City and wondering why, out of the thousands of people there, there seemed to be no one I knew. I’ve been convinced since then that  there was someone, I just didn’t know how to go about finding them.

Last night I went to a concert of Gershwin music by six men in black, classical jazz musicians and, I would guess, almost my age. Incredible music. We all know it. It’s in our blood and maybe by now in our genes.

One of them, a trombone player, reminded me of a friend in Nevada. Nothing specific, something about the eyes and the shape of the face.  According to the program notes he’d played with innumerable New York musicians and I thought, it’s not just his face, I might know someone he knows. I’d just contacted someone on facebook after years and years and she was fine, aside from some disappointment that she’d never achieved stardom. I knew she’d sung all over the city, and run a jazz club many years before, the same place I’d celebrated a birthday and moving to Vermont  a quarter century ago. So, when I had an opportunity I asked him and, of course, he knew her, had known her many years ago, and played at her club. Who would have thought of  it on a lovely Vermont summer evening?

That happens often. Some of my best friends in Vermont lived a few miles from me in California, and even though we didn’t know each other then, we knew the same places, felt the same sunshine, drove through the same grapevines.

It’s as if there’s a web, not the intentional one we usually talk about, but one that’s been there for decades now, that links us to nearly everyone else, at most six people apart, and often several closer.

 

Flowers because I don’t seem to have any words for here….

 

flowers all in a blur…...

 

 

Remember the “good old days” when the world was “normal?”

We’ve all heard the phrase “the good old days” many times. Too many times, probably. But just yesterday, for the first time, I understood it.

First of all, it’s not that they really were “good.” Not necessarily, anyway. They were just the way things were, and everything that’s deviated from them is not the way things ordinarily are.  Could be better, could be worse, just not “normal.” My normal, and I would guess that this might be true of many people my age, happened in the 1950s. I was old enough to begin to understand the world around me, but not old enough to understand that everything was not what it seemed. Age 11 to 17 or so. I’m sure the actual years will vary from one person to another, and younger people will have other times that became their normal.

Anyway, at that time we lived in the suburbs where most average and normal people lived. We went to church on Sundays. My mother always insisted that most people believed in God, and from what I could tell, that seemed likely. We all thought Mormons were odd then, but their Tabernacle Choir sang on the radio every Sunday morning, and was a Christmas staple. The mainstream Protestant churches were the church; they were very American; there was a reason two flags, the American and the Christian, were at the front of most churches. Catholics weren’t all that much different from us, even though my Lutheran minister thought they were an abomination. He apparently hadn’t seen Bing Crosby as the affable priest in television reruns of “Going My Way” and “The Bells of St. Mary’s.” There was no one more American than Bing Crosby.

Bing Crosby in “The Bells of Saint Mary’s”

The only cheese was American cheese. I guess there was something called Swiss too, but all I knew about that was that it had holes. Children were expected to grow up and do better financially, and in most ways, than their parents. They were expected to marry and bear children, and do something practical to earn a living. Everyone knew that it was necessary to defeat Communism and the evil Russian empire, and that we might die in a nuclear blast – but probably wouldn’t.

I could go on and on about what was normal then. When I got to college (in San Francisco), when I ate cheddar cheese and San Francisco sourdough and drank red wine; when I read Ginsberg’s “Howl” and listened to Miles Davis, when I marched for peace with Communists and discovered they looked like other people; when I began to frame another kind of American world for myself — when the whole world opened up to me and I discovered the beautiful variety and excitement of life — then normal faded. And I was glad.

 
But last night, for the first time, I really grasped that “the good old days” were those several years when I came of age. That, I’ve always unconsciously measured the fascination of the world around me by what I knew then. That was what was normal, and everything else has been wonderfully, and sometimes awfully, abnormal.

High-lining it

On the first day, I was walking the High Line above New York City’s Chelsea district. It was a perfect time to be alive, with soft breezes and a veiled  summer sun, a perfect day for walking this narrow mile-long public park built on an historic elevated freight rail line. At about 14th Street, approaching the Gansevoort Street exit, people were spread out eating lunch, eating from those ubiquitous clam shell containers that the better class of fast food comes in—stuff in wraps or spread across thick slices of homemade French bread. The shovels and cranes working on the new Whitney Museum, the trucks making their deliveries in the meat packing neighborhoods below, all the never-ending traffic of Manhattan roared below like a threatening sea, but lifted up like some flowered island in the sky, the High Line seemed quiet and protected. A garden with rails. Changes your perspective on the city.

That’s when I saw them: two elegant young women on a lunch date, their wine glasses raised in a toast, their striped umbrella turning gently in the breeze, a whole lobster on each of their plates staring up at them.
New York is always filled with surprises.
At the LGBT Community Center my friend Steven Dansky read from the sad broodings of young gay writers trying to find their place in the old Times Square. Hot, horny, desperate, very afraid. And the riot that everyone had forgotten, that began there and ended in the Village where the women at the House of Detention threw down lighted toilet paper to the demonstrators below.
At the Metropolitan Museum, two larger-than-life fashion designers, Elsa Schiparelli and Miucca Prada, who missed each other’s eras in real life, conducted “an impossible conversation” in a bar. Walking through the conversation, we were surrounded by skirts and hats and shoes. She’d worked with Salvador Dali, Schiparellli said, and would have liked to be a sculptor. “I’ve never wanted to be an artist,” said Prada. “I never wanted to be called an artist.” Implying that she was at least that, and a good deal more.

 
Everywhere, young people were running. More nannies than I’ve ever seen anywhere herded their broods of small and adorable white children from one park to another, or sat chatting, watching the youngsters dance in fountains or build sand castles and roads leading nowhere. Dog walkers leaned back, holding onto taut leashes that just managed to hold their lunging beasts. In an east side gallery, Picasso and his lover, Francoise Gilot, shared the walls with work dating from 1943-53. He painted her; she painted mostly their two children, Claude and Paloma, playing in Cubist style. I never knew Cubism could lend itself to pictures of play, but in her hands, it did: they romped, twisted and turned, leapt, fell in a heap….

 

Downtown, thousands of Americans and who-knows-who-else lined up for blocks in the hot, humid day, waiting to see the 9/11 site. With no reservation, I gave up and walked over to Trinity Church and sat in its graveyard by the stone of a 24 year-old woman named Ann who assured the world in the 1700s that she had been impatient for eternal life. I’m not sure I believed her.

 

When the rain finally came on Thursday, breaking into the warm wet air across from the Frick and next to Central Park, the thunder and lightning trumpeted a warning but no one rushed for shelter. No one ran until the deluge and then not with much resolve. This was New York, after all, and so much else was going on.