Reading Maps

Unpacking after a move is a road map of sorts--to one's past. Former enthusiasms are reflected in box after box of books: apparently I was seriously interested in film, on the evidence of two bookshelves' worth (my annotated What Is Cinema, Andre Bazin, pretentiously dated the day I bought it, in a girlish hand, 1978). I had almost forgotten. Who else was I? Photography, one and a half shelves. Modern poetry, one shelf. Philosophy--s**t, almost two shelves, and all nearly incomprehensible to me now. Is it the loss of brain cells, or is it just the inability to focus in that manner of the youthful book-eater?

No, I still have the capacity for enthusiasm. Lord knows, I still have the capacity for a whole line of temporary insanities, or at the least, very, very bad judgment.

The vinyl collection reflects times frozen in amber. High school: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (I still remember slow dancing to them, but not the person with whom I did it; music lasts while young love does not); almost all of David Bowie, and when I stop unpacking to listen to Changes, it has some new resonance. Later, I see, I had collected the entire oeuvre of Talking Heads and its offshoots; I also managed a fair amount of Bootsy Collins and Parliament Funkadelic--we used to dance ourselves silly in college. Here comes R.E.M. and XTC. UB40, the Clash, Beastie Boys (Let me clear my throat!). And look--Robyn Hitchcock! Now I sing with him as I try to put things to rights in this new place, in a new time ("Brenda's iron sledge . . . Please don't call me Reg, it's not my name"--you really can't beat that, can you?). Of course, I should not be playing these records at all with this old cartridge--or, for that matter, with what I assume is a rotten belt, since the drive is making funny noise all the while--but the combination of being both a lazy SOB and broke never bodes well for having equipment that works right. And so nothing I have quite does.

The other evening, after humping boxes and furniture and books and clothes and toys and pictures and records for eight days straight, having stayed up till 2 a.m. the night before carving a path through the ancient detritus left by the movers in what would, in the best of all possible worlds, become a living room, I finally allowed myself a respite. A glass of Campari and soda, and a dinner comprised of hors d'oeuvres ("a Melissa meal," in the term of one of my college friends, since some stripes do not change; or, to spin it another way, I was serving tapas to people in place of meals before it became fashionable to do so). Then I sat down with the maps. Paper maps. (I had just unpacked my map collection, as well, and it too is a record of the past I had forgotten: is it really possible I have been to all these places?) I am going to make my first big trip of a new life the old way: no GPS, no radar detector. Sharpie'd directions written for the map pocket, and pray it doesn't rain, because the tankbag rain cover obscures it, and then you have to go on memory. That which I have no longer.

There is nothing, nothing, better than dreaming over maps. The first one I consulted, between handfuls of smoked almonds, was the map of the eastern U.S. that, eighteen years before, had gone with me on a journey of five thousand miles. The route was traced in green highlighter, and so it was the ghost impression of trips past, left on the windowpane through which trips future are glimpsed.

Yesterday at the auto parts store at the Kingston Plaza, where I'd gone for bulbs and fuses and the bits and pieces that will be stowed in the topcase for a few days from now, another man at the counter was looking at me, noticed my jacket and my helmet in hand. "Nice day for ride, eh?" he said in a longing voice. "Absolutely perfect," I agreed. He told me he used to ride, but had now quit. I told him I had once quit, but now I was back. I told him he could go back, too. And wouldn't regret it. "Yeah," he allowed. "I'm beginning to think maybe you can quit riding, but riding never quits you."

As the sun set, I drained the glass, refolded the map that was coming apart at every seam, taped and retaped. This time I am not trying to re-create the past. I am trying to live in the present, in this exact second, unaware of the next, and trying to make it last for miles.


[There will be no post next week, since the person responsible for writing them will be here and also because she has been spending too much time in front of maps/boxes/Campari to have been able to write anything in advance. But she might have good tales to tell the week after next. Nelly, by the way, is going to Camp Janet, where she will eat better than most upper middle class humans.]

Free and Not So Easy

Nelly is finding places to be at home in her new home: yesterday afternoon, she hopped into the laundry
basket, and curled up on the dirty clothes. See, dogs are not like you and me. Trust me, there was some really ripe stuff in there. She looked so peaceful and happy. I suspect that will be where this evening will find her, when we all celebrate some vague memory of something that none of us truly appreciate or understand anymore. I am not talking flag decal on the pickup here. I am talking slog to the ends of the earth, to the ends of tolerance, to the ends of what a human being can withstand.

We hear what we want to. Talking politics with someone you care for but do not yet know is a frightening business, maybe more so than delving into personal past history. Which, when you come to a certain point in life, can be more potent than anything that could come in the future. And that is frightening too. Because what occurred in the past occurred in an ethos of endless hopefulness and unseeable boundaries. That is why, I guess, I kept carting around this vast tonnage of stuff--some of it was going to be useful in one of my infinitely numbered future lives: dishware to serve the crown prince; enough pictures to line the great hall of a Tudor mansion; evening wear for whatever gala or prize bestowal might pop up in years to come. But now I finally know I won't have twelve more lives of differing intensity; I might just get to live this one out in some modicum of happiness, occasional pleasure, and decent output of work. Enough for me.

I am still not certain what to do with my wedding shoes, however. I look at them, metallic leather winking at me from inside their tissue paper nest, and try to imagine throwing a box containing shoes that cost many days' wages, that were meant to make me feel like a princess and did, into what feels suspiciously like a dumpster at the Salvation Army. Uh-uh. I can't. But neither could I imagine wearing them at another such ceremony, even in the unlikely event of a water landing. I put the box away again. Perhaps something new will yet occur, for which beautiful bronze pumps will be just the right thing.

Offloading the detritus of the past--after carefully turning it in your hands, marveling that you have such chances, such moments, and so very, very many of them--is a kind of freedom. Not so hard-fought as the one we eat popsicles and watermelon in honor of today. But one that is just a little difficult, because it requires letting go. Once the ballast is gone, though, see how high you can fly!

Back, and Gone

Moving is such a special hell. Get out the trowel, and dig. Dig under the hairy roots of vines, hit rock. Break shovel. Throw away. See something peeking up from the dirt; recoil in morbid terror but reach out with irresistible curiosity. What forgotten thing from the past is coming up from under the dirt? Put it in a cardboard box. Take it with you.

Driving the station wagon across the reservoir on moving day--I moved the bike to the new house first thing in the morning, because I was already so tired that later on the exhaustion would have made it like riding drunk--I was ferrying another load of stuff and listening to anthem rock from the eighties blaring from the radio. I was wondering how I'd gotten here. No, not via 213 to 28A. I mean toward the brink of freedom. Joy was peeking out from behind the clouds, sending its rays to glint against the priceless drinking water belonging to the great city to our south. (The drinking water into which one summer day I dipped my naked body some twenty-five years ago; someone had a great sip of me later that week.) Pain and regret and fear were also tearing at me. It was wonderful, it was awful. It was life. And in that moment, realizing this, and that this was my life, and that it could not have possibly been any other way--this move, at this point in time, in the midst of this curious passage on the other side of which is I don't know what, which is both blessing and curse--I found myself laughing out loud and sobbing in the exact same moment.

The Town of Olive dump has views so magisterial they could make angels sing. Two of my friends appeared, at different points in the packing and lifting, but unbidden both, just when I needed them most. They can have no idea what it meant to me; possibly that I am connected by live wire to their hearts. I can still receive a signal from WVKR, because though I am much farther away, I am also 300 feet higher in elevation. I get to drive across that reservoir, in the witness of a cradle of mountains, whenever I want to visit my old haunts. I am one mile by the clock from wood-fired pizza. The frogs play the banjo all night long in the woodland swamp out back. I have a blank slate on which to make the first tentative chalk marks of a new life.

I have my own place.

These are some of the gratitudes I bear. There will be more to come. I wish I could lift furniture by myself. I wish that I did not have so much stuff. But I lift it tenderly out of its cardboard vaults, and turn my past gently and wonderingly in my hands. Then I look for somewhere to put it.

The Coyotes of Yesteryear

Sometimes the coyotes come at dusk, sometimes long past dark. Sometimes they don’t come at all. That’s when I worry. They should be here, out back of the house, in the middle of the picture I have composed for them: a hundred acres of field, trees, stream, pond, pasture, that I like to imagine is really a thousand. Enough to raise a family on.

We have moved here and staked a claim. Our modest homestead, little house on the hemmed-in prairie. Raphael has his inflatable pool by the barn. We have our dinner parties on the deck. And when the sun has finished smearing colors above the wooded ridge behind the creek, and our son has listened to Tootle, The Red Carpet, and Curious George Takes a Job, and I have retired to bed with the morning papers and the warm remnants of once-cold wine I feel too sentimental to take my leave of, then we can give up our tinfoil pretense to knowing it all. Because I don’t know who is now scuttling across the porch with little clawed feet, who is digging in the geranium pots, who is next for the patient black snake waiting like stone in the grass. I don’t know how many coyotes I hear suddenly: is it fifty, or is it five, and are they celebrating another woodchuck or welcoming a newcomer from Westchester or grieving the one who has been lying in the loosestrife for days with a bullet in what was once his thigh? I hope it is not just another of my fond imaginings that the yip-yips that sound like children laughing are, in fact, children laughing; that the elders have survived the despicable justifications of the shotgun fiends to give birth to small warm drinkers of milk, then beautiful predators not unlike us.

There are families besides mine. There are families beside mine. I turn off the light and hope we all continue to live in the dark.

[2005]

No Rhyme

Black Dog

Once squeezed into the four inches under the armoire; once

Small as a hand; once nearly

Fictitious, mischievous, self-permitting, round and

Filled tight with worms.

Now my friend, not shadow, but gone --

Off in the distance tail flying, arc a streamer, reminder, smudge;

A gay tail they call it, proving bad for work but good for black dog.

She has a smile. She eats her oatmeal with meat and greens.

She draws the world in bounds and springs,

Rounding back, finally, territory covered, miles understood.

Then later she sleeps once more, while overhead beyond the couch

We spy silver planes now changed to lines of light in the dark.

They move distantly past a thin curved moon

Not unlike a gay tail flung in biologic joy over the back of black

Dog, black dog who is here at this moment

Far from me but closer than you know.

[R.I.P. Mercy my love]

Affiliated

I keep a list of subjects someday I want to write about, including Why I Love Dollar Stores. That one would be three sentences long. Far lengthier, though, would be my rumination on friendship. What is it, really? The catalyst there is my dear friend A., and the fact that in no sensible universe would we have ever become friends. Me, the suburban Ohio girl who went to what they call "good schools," who dined at holiday time in velvet frocks at a table dressed with Georg Jensen silver. Him, the Italian-Irish punk from the Bronx streets, who served time in Vietnam, jail, and detox of various sorts. Our lives intersected, however improbably, in the park in Brooklyn, and the means of our linkage was the dog community. Then we found out that deep inside we are essentially the same person.

First, we saw that we would do anything for our dogs. Then we saw that we would do anything for each other.

Thus is the insider/outsider structure of deep bonding built. From the outside, to many people, our attitude looked at worst like insanity. At best like something inexplicable. So we learned not to try to explain it. This drew us even closer together. Motorcycles divide the world even more starkly than devotion to dogs.

In a former life, I traveled on two continents befriended and cared for beyond even what my family might do by people with whom I shared only a common love for a marque, Moto Guzzi. And my door was always open to them, too, strangers who could never truly be strange to me. Unknown people were invited to share whatever I could give, and I had absolute confidence they were "all right." It is really not conceivable that someone with criminal intent would arrive on a Guzzi.

Now I am embraced again by a brotherhood of altruists, motorcyclists who are bound together by something that is deep in our human natures, and that requires only the glue of commonality to flower forth. These are my villagers now. Their generosity is sometimes breathtaking. And I think I have found at least part of the answer why, in a new book by Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell, which is an exploration of the utopian communities that spring up in the aftermath of disasters, from earthquakes to fires to man-made devastation. Time and again, people come together under duress in acts of mutual aid that represent the finest that our evolution as social animals has bred us for. We need one another, and for these moments, we become the gift and the giver both. This is friendship. This is my life now.

I'm a Dissenter

Apparently I am the only person in the world who has problems--deep, deep problems--with the thinking of Temple Grandin. Everyone else falls all over themselves loving her ostensibly profound connection with animals. Myself, I get tripped up over the fact that she is employed by the slaughter industry: a bit hard to claim total identification with the Other in that case. And she knows a bit about dogs--but not enough. She has not read the basic texts. This may be excusable for the rest of us, but for a bestselling author . . . ? Here's my take on her book Animals in Translation. This was originally published in the Village Voice. And I still stand by it.

***

Temple Grandin is no doubt the most famous autistic person we have. She first came to the attention of the public as the subject of one of Oliver Sacks’s neurological studies, in which she described the way she experienced the world as that of “an anthropologist on Mars.” Finding her way on this planet, she discovered an affinity for animals—specifically, that she shared perceptual abilities with domesticated cattle. She has become a valued consultant to the beef industry, responsible for designing humane slaughterhouse equipment that helps dispatch half the animals done in every year in this country. Her profile has risen so high she is employed by McDonald’s to ensure that the Big Macs, while in their pre-edible state, are handled to a standard that will keep PETA relatively quiet.

In a previous book, Thinking in Pictures, she described how her brain functions: not by translating perceptions into words, and thence to concepts, but by keeping input visually discrete. In this more readable book, she has elaborated on the idea that the malfunctioning frontal lobes of autistic brains are more similar to animal brains, with their smaller frontal lobes, than they are to “normal” human brains. She may, as a high-functioning autistic, have succeeded in getting a doctorate in animal science, but at heart she is a prey animal on the plain, alert to every movement in the undergrowth.

Her purpose thus is to rehabilitate animals in the eyes of the humans who for too long have scorned their intelligence. For what goal—psychic ease of maltreatment, perhaps?—she does not assay. But she does give copious evidence, from a far-flung map of seemingly every behavioral, ethological, and biological outpost in the animal kingdom, that it is us who are lacking in the smarts department, at least when it comes to assessing or even noticing different ways of thinking. This is clearly the voice of someone who has endured grave misinterpretation herself; in her 1995 book Grandin wrote, “Some renowned scientist speculated that humans had to develop language before they could develop tools. I thought this was ridiculous . . .” no doubt because she designed tools all the time, and she thought visually, not verbally. (But why not just ask the owner of any dog who by crawling into a lap and depositing something in the hand has turned his human into the ideal tool for holding bones so they might be chewed with optimal vigor?) Here, though, she proves herself hardly outside the usual human pale, for she has been reading the same popular opinions as everyone else: like many, she has confused “language” with “speech.” She corrects herself later with examples of some terrifically complex animal communications systems, notably that of Gunnison’s prairie dog, but first discusses at length how being deaf-mute affects thinking, at one point complaining that it is so little studied a Google search on “language-less people” turns up only nine hits. She might have tried “people without speech”: that one yields 11,300,000.

To those who find themselves daily shocked by the narcissism of humans who contemplate the rest of creation through tiny spyglasses only to find the view uninterestingly circumscribed, Animals in Translation will be clutched to the breast in relief. And then, perhaps, removed a little distance. Because it is ultimately troubling, not for the questions it does not answer—the author is wise enough to say that the probability of animals’ rich emotional and communicative lives coincides with our inability to ever know for sure—but for the ones she does not ask. She claims a native ability to understand animals from the experiential level, yet she often works from the same analytical prison cell we all do, confined by prevailing philosophy. (Certain of her interpretations of dog behavior are likely wrong, which is not just an academic distinction, since it leads to training advice.)

At the beginning of the book Grandin offers the hope that “what I’ve learned will help people start over again with animals,” and at the end she reiterates a desire that animals “have more than just a low-stress life and a quick, painless death. I wish animals could have a good life, too, with something useful to do.” Devoutly to be wished—except impossible, without dismantling the gigantic construct of factory farming, the industry that employs Grandin. She never swims into the dark waters where reside the sharks of debate between animal rights and animal welfare, because she might not come back alive. Yet there is no figure who more perfectly exemplifies that vexing conflict. She goes only so far as to wet her toes at the edge, addressing the apparent riddle of her avowed love for cows giving rise to a career of facilitating their deaths.

One of the true “mysteries of autism” is how a neurological short-circuit can cause extreme emotional dissociation. In Temple Grandin, though not her book, it explains a lot.