Alternate lives

Cafe Hafa, Tangier.

When AOL stopped auto-deleting all the new mail, or mail kept as new, that had been hanging around for 30 days or so, it lured a shadowy part of my nature into a state of hoarding correspondence. The fact that there was no well-functioning printer at the time needs to bear some of the blame, but that weak and procrastinating part simply let things pile up. No need to mention just how many things but as the computer began to slow down and give me the electronic equivalent of the stink eye, I started sorting - printing, saving in files, deleting or releasing.

There was gold there, as I expected; there were also serendipitous mailings, one of which connects to something I've been thinking about for a few days. It was a call, forwarded by a writer friend, for "innovative film writing," which was described, in part, as "...attempt to implant your cinematic experience in others." Dangerous doors to open for one who can take (as may be witnessed in previous postings) a phrase or interpretation from any book, song, movie or word-centered presentation and go riding off like Jeremiah Johnson, alone in the high country, to track whatever realization has left its prints in the snow.

After several evenings of watching for a second time the Jason Bourne trilogy, what stayed in my mind was the name of a city, a Bob Dylan song and the fact that I am actually 64 years old, though my mind works like hell to sidestep that reality. "If you see her, say hello. She might be in Tangier," never has been and now, likely, never will be about me. The location filming in the Bourne movies, seen closer and on a larger tv screen this time around, was something of a wonder. It was not Toronto or Prague posing as Moscow; it was Moscow. But much as the visuals - and the plentiful chases, studies in deep black ops endurance - helped me escape along with Jason, it was just the simple mention that he had traveled (from India, we knew) through Tangier, before the third picture took us there, that had me twirling through my past.

I can't say that I really, actively chose the path my life took; it was more like an unmarked car which pulled up to the curb and I got in. There were never moments in which I thought, "Instead of sitting at this typewriter, I could be renting motor scooters on Corfu," or any Mediterranean coastal island or town. Life was just life, with goals and dreams that didn't involve world travel. I never saw myself, and don't imagine anyone else did, as exotic, adventurous, daring, mysterious or likely to be found in Tangier, but I suppose the possibility existed, for I didn't actually admit until a few days ago that my evolution into such a creature was unlikely to happen.

Nearly 30 years ago I worked with a woman, who might have been found anywhere. She and Bob Dylan were friends - he dedicated a song to her at a local concert. She could walk a tightrope and didn't believe in car insurance and in looking at the two of us through the same lens, I felt pretty much like someone who would be instantly recognized as some version of regular, while she would be compared to the fragrant smoke from a joss stick...sandalwood, patchouli or something unidentifiable, something other.

Allowing myself to accept the fact that her sort of otherness had ceased to be an option was not painful so much as surprising. I don't expect that at this point I will learn to water ski either. Perhaps it is just my mind that processess the passing of time in increments that have pretty much nothing to do with how rapidly the years go by. Tangier or Corfu or faraway places in general are not likely spots for women of a certain age to have new beginnings. But grabbing hold of other words, a Marianne Fathful song called "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan," in which she sings, "At the age of thirty-seven she realized she'd never ride through Paris in a sport car with the warm wind in her hair," it is clear that there are some alternate lives which I choose to hold onto a bit longer.

Mystery

All my life I’ve read mysteries. My mother read mysteries - she also read westerns and stories about the cavalry and the Battle at Little Big Horn. It was the mystery gene that was transmitted.

Beginning with Nancy Drew in the third grade, I spent decades reading my way through series by writers British, Australian, Swedish, Japanese, American and I can’t recall how many others. Nancy Drew is tied to very specific memories, such as my Aunt Dot walking up the driveway on my birthday with a gift stack, each present wrapped separately in an identifiable shape that could only be one thing. The public library, across the street from my elementary school, did not carry Nancy Drew, nor the Hardy Boys, the Dana Girls or any of the other somewhat pulpy favorites as they were deemed to lack literary merit. It seemed to me then and now to be a version of de facto censorship. Someone had read something - maybe that Nancy had a boyfriend! - they didn’t like and all the works in the genre were considered trashy, unworthy of shelf space at the Santa Catalina or any other branch. So one had to purchase the books, trade with friends or receive them as gifts in order to read them. And even though there wasn’t, at least in the N.D. books, a thread that spun out from one book to the next, it seemed essential to read them in order. No need for a paragraph before the opening page which said, “Previously in Nancy Drew...”

Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett were early grown-up mysteries, along with Cornell Woolrich and James M. Cain. Reading, particularly of mysteries, sustained me through uneven times; during a early and trauma-ridden first marriage, I easily consumed nearly a book a day. But I was not, am not, a mystery fan who likes to solve the puzzle. If I can figure out who-did-what, I think the writer hasn’t done his or her job. Of course there are the stories where the villain is known early on, but that’s not the same thing. One day it occurred to me to wonder just what was it that drew me to mysteries, not quite to the exclusion of other fiction.

There is the puzzle aspect, but since I don’t set out to solve it, what does that mean? The closest I can come to explain this passion to myself - and I don’t believe that we are ever required to explain ourselves to ourselves or anyone else - was probably rooted in the sense I have that it is all a mystery. There was a time in my life when I visited psychics, wanting to know what was ahead; I wanted a periscope with which to peer around corners and try and learn if there was a good outcome waiting for me. And the definition of “a good outcome” was very specific, filled with expectation based on wanting and a limited, naive grasp of the way in which the Universe operates. Lengthy, bruising lessons have helped me admit that the way ahead is uncharted, unchartable, and the energy spent in trying to see in such dim light embezzles the energy we could invest in finding the joy or the peace of right now. A well-constructed mystery novel frequently gives us the answer that daily life denies us - how does it all turn out? I find something comfortable in such stories, yet I am never disappointed when the ending is ambiguous, a more familiar situation in which the mystery continues to unfold as time is allowed to reveal next page.

Gray Areas

Before we held the election, before the potential opposing candidates had been named, I finally read THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy, the first of his books I’d come to. I didn’t know what it was about nor even that it had won the 2007 Pulitzer for fiction, not until it was in my hands.

In the recent past I’d seen post-apocalyptic movies but the two that come immediately to mind had humans turning into zombies - a situation that could not be called good or hopeful - but which managed to make the enemies no longer accountable for their actions. Hey, I’m a zombie, I can’t help myself.

In McCarthy’s book there are no zombies. There are very few life forms of any description. The world has turned to ash; no food grows, waters are fouled, the sun is always dimmed. The main characters, a man and his son, are trying to make their way south across an unrecognizable America. There was a point in the story when I felt I had to stop, that I couldn’t bear to fill my mind with additional images of cannibals and all that had been lost.

But the story had me and I finished it in a morning’s sitting. It is not a novel one completes, then goes off to do something pointless. Of me it demanded interpretation, not to find what it might mean to everyone, but simply what it meant to me.

The dominant word that played over and over in my head was - savage. And with that word came a realization that the sides had already been chosen. We will not become either savages or carriers of fire, bringers of light after the fall. We are now who we will be.

Savage came to define itself in many of its forms, often cloaked in pleasing or at least acceptable exteriors. If you are on the lookout for drooling monsters you will miss some of the more ferocious beasts. I began to sense that we had reached the crossroads a long time ago, I can’t say just when, but I could easily equate cannibals with war profiteers, lying politicians, deniers of freedoms, any sort of predator, bully or aggressor, and saw the enormity of their numbers. That any one of us (or maybe just most of us) could possibly turn from civilized to savage under certain conditions was not reassuring. I began to believe than in each moment we have a choice, each decision we make in an ordinary day really does align us with one side or the other. And how important each moment becomes when we realize what rests on those choices. THE ROAD warned me to be mindful, told me where the lines were and made it clear there was not, there never will be, a gray area. We have either signed up to carry the fire and the light or to extinguish them. What I took from McCarthy’s words was that we needn’t wait for the apocalypse to find out what we’re made of. If we look honestly, we already know.

Cautionary Tales

Throughout elementary school years, we were shown a film about how not to be a jerk, thereby keeping yourself and the other kids safe. I remember two of the characters - Giddy Goose and Foolish Fish. Goose walked in front of a child on the swings, her head turned away, never seeing those outstretched legs coming right at her. Fish was a smart-aleck who took pleasure in putting his thumb over the drinking fountain, creating a puddle on the polished linoleum hall floor, resulting in a classic case of slip-and-fall. We saw the film at least once at each grade level, probably more often. Combined with the earthquake drills, fire drills, air raid drills was another film on how to save your buddy from a rattlesnake bite by cutting an "x" directly over the fang marks with the knife you always carried, then sucking out and spitting out the poison. I believe popular thinking has changed on that technique. We did not lack for models of sensible, even courageous behavior.

Yet somehow I became my own cautionary tale. One clear example came on a day I walked home from school to find a shoe box sitting on top of one of the trash cans awaiting pick-up at the curb next to our driveway. The box’s lid was on and I didn’t recognize it as anything we had discarded so I walked over and lifted the top. As I remember it, a lizard lept out, scrambling across my hand, and I’m sure I must have screamed. Our house was set at the very back of the lot and I don’t recall anyone coming to see what was the matter. I assume that I reached the front door in hysterics for my dad was summoned from work and I was driven to the doctor, throwing up all the way. There is no memory of what the doctor said or thought, I just know that on the drive home, my father tried to tell me the story of Pandora’s Box and about never taking the lids off things and letting horror loose in the world. Say goodbye to curiosity and those dwindling threads of daring DNA.

I Can't Make You Love Me

The resignation in Bonnie Raitt’s voice as she sings those words and, "if you don't...can’t make your heart feel something it won’t..." causes me to ask how long does it take each of us to learn that lesson. A friend has quoted Kurt Vonnegut for years, his expression about, "...tap dancing and farting," and we reach a point when, clearly, that is all we’re doing. There is no pay-off.

What holds true for romantic or familial love is just as valid in this world of mixed media artists, a universe, really, densely populated with such a diversity of styles, talent without limit, energy and invention and, I think it could be called determination. In my small boat I cruise the waterways of blogland, one stop sending me on to the next, that one leading me to a new resource; frequently enchanted, feeling what is very akin to relief that there isn’t discretionary income close at hand or there could be trouble. But I do wonder as every day my little journey takes me to destinations I can only describe as fabulous - you may think you’ve seen it, whatever it may be, but are there surprises ahead, and how. Can we possibly know when we’ve reached the top?

And with this abundance it becomes clear, at least in my version of processing information, that not everyone is going to be everyone else’s new favorite thing. There are stars in this universe, the status is easily quantifiable by comments or sales or visitors and by the richness of content, generosity of spirit in sharing ideas and information and stunning visual support. A comparison (odious, at best) that comes to mind is the actual world contains Paris, France, and Dinuba, California. And I know, I can hear, the thought - "Well Paris, duh?" And yet...Dinuba (pronounced Die-new-bah, accent on "new") was where my grandparents had their farm, my grandmother’s paint-by-numbers landscapes on the walls, each of which was papered in a different pattern, as was the ceiling in several rooms.

After more than 60 years Dinuba is still peaches and everything heavenly that can be made from them; it is breakfasts in the not-quite-dawn which include biscuits and gravy; it is collecting the eggs, picnics among the redwoods, learning to shoot the BB-gun, riding into "town" while having to stand in the back of their Ford coupe, praying my mom won't actually make me a dress out of the feed sacks Grandma saved for her.

We put our art and our hearts up on these (I still wish we could agree upon a word of greater fluidity or grace or some recognizable aesthetic) blogs and at least a part of us wants people to find them and love them and by extension, us. And that has never been, nor will it ever be as far as my imagination can stretch, the reason to do anything. To be found, praised or purchased is to feel ourselves catapulted into the dance of joy. It is a challenge to write the words that demand to be expressed, to draw and color the goofy or cheerful eccentrics who have somehow selected our hand out of all the others to bring them to life. And life as I experience it is work. It is showing up as best we can, allowing ourselves to be a conduit for greater visions presented with a unique flair, and letting go of the rest. Bonnie Raitt sang in a way that told us she knew the words were true. What the song didn’t tell us was that we had to be happy about it.

Dream Sequence

Not-quite apropos of nothing, a couple jobs in my (as they used to call it) checkered past, were in the employ of a man who went on to be a story editor, then an Emmy nominee for writing an episode of MOONLIGHTING, shot in black-and-white, called "The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice." One of our shared agencies served several entertainment unions from an office on Hollywood Boulevard, in the very building where Raymond Chandler had set his private investigator, Philip Marlowe, in practice. So we are already waltzing along the edges of dreams, riding factual elevators with the screaming mad woman and wheeling my baby boy along the streets in his stroller, down at eye level with the gleaners, discovering he can say, "Hi," and thus beginning many a conversation with thrifty salvagers of abandoned cigarette butts.

There are dreams from which I awake with such an acute sense of loss when I discover the visions of the preceding moments were, alas, not real, that I weep. There are dreams which inform me, visitations without the seance circle, that someone who has been gone for years is happy to report all is well. Some dreams employ a play on words, things which sound the same but are spelled differently and I manage to catch the little joke. The dreams, unlike that one from MOONLIGHTING, are always filled with color, pattern, texture and dialogue. Since I have spent much of my life writing (but only in my head) all the words I wanted other people to say, there is an easy pleasure to the sleeping dramas in which the only thing that is required of me is showing up; everything else has been taken care of.

In the past years, close to 40, the casting has held some surprises, usually when the mind ropes in some famous faces and poses them in my frequently architecturally-rich stories. Often the dreams hold no clear meaning; at times I think they are a way the mind shows off, putting on little plays as Bobby McClay and I did when we were in the first or second grade. We also believed we could dig a hole to China and build a rocket that would actually fly. Mostly we jumped off his back porch, catching hold of the poles which held up the roof, and swinging around; we ate apricots when they ripened and once had a rock-throwing fight between our yards. I was the one who broke a window.

Christmas calls me to watch MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, primarily to hear Judy Garland sing "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" to Margaret O'Brien whose character resides in that enviable child space where waking and sleeping dreams are really not separate. Her buried dolls, her comic/tragic songs, the snow people, her Halloween prank and its cover-up, are recognizable as the blurry territory of wish and imagination. At what I can only call my advanced age, I still hold title to some real estate there. Too many years were spent in daydreams (escapism would be the more accurate term) and it is not difficult to return, the greatest difference being that now I don't have to go there; I don't need a place to hide. But sometimes there is joy in allowing my brain its dervish dance, a brief visit to an altered state where I can call up the dream visitors I choose, have those self-scripted conversations and find a sort of resolution or a few glowing moments with those who have left these shores, or me, to take paths where I am not invited to follow.

Out West

Today I moved the CD player from beneath a table and behind lumpy containers of Christmas wrapping accessories to the top of a table beside my bed. To celebrate this emergence I dug back through music, overlooked or misplaced, to find Nanci Griffith's "Other Voices, Too (A Trip Back To Bountiful)" on which she and many pals of the folk persuasion (of which I am an unrepentant fan since teen years) celebrate classic, traditional songs of the genre.

Many of the selections, like "Desperadoes Waiting for a Train" and "Darcy Farrow" not only conjure visions of our country as it was but paint for me scenes known mostly from film but partly from life, perhaps some from dreams.

Portions of my childhood were spent in the shared backseat of a series of Ford stationwagons, trying, as were both of them, not to have any human contact with my brother or sister, pulled entirely into myself, body and mind. I can hear my sister shriek, "Mike's shirt is touching me," and see the hand reach around the driver's seat and begin swatting blindly with a bunch of maps or newspapers to make us shut the hell up.

These journeys were sometimes called vacations, though I suspect there was always a business aspect, for mostly they were embarked upon to fill the columns our father wrote for various regional travel magazines. He shot his own photos, did on-the-spot interviews, collected history through research - this was way before computers, probably before electric typewriters - and compiled information on highway conditions, tourist destinations and anything one might want for a recreational drive around the less-traveled roads of California.


Something in me responds to aspects of the American western migration, especially when it involves mining. Our first visit to the Mother Lode, land where gold was discovered in 1849 which started a world-wide frenzy to find a treasure-filled spot of earth or stream, felt for me like returning home. I cannot say just what it is in those rolling hills or visions of panning the waters, ghost towns and their names, that resonate for me but the response carries over to movies that edge on that sort of life, like MC CABE AND MRS. MILLER, even THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD (both of which are made all the more atmospheric by their music, the first by Leonard Cohen, the second by Nick Cave). I have almost stopped puzzling over a connection that can't be reincarnation or cellular memory, at least I don't think so, but must be more alligned with what lived in the hearts of those seekers and dreamers, those with the vision of, as Cohen writes, "...the hand so high and wild you'll never have to deal another." I have never felt that I possessed an adventurous soul but it seems I must share the impossible visions, pipe dreams even, with the foolish and daring from stories real or invented.

So I listened to Nanci Griffith, songs filled with longing and lament, wonder at how it could have gone so wrong in spite of such good intentions. I was left with more melancholy that I wanted to handle this afternoon, so chose, instead, to write about it. Perhaps all our experiences are mystical, we only mistake them for ordinary since processing them seems beyond our skill.