As I Lay Dying

Recently I've thought of my presence in New Orleans as ill-fitting.  I watch myself interacting with locals as a visitor.  I see women at bars as unapproachable--somehow removed from whatever my plane is...  I look at all this dripping beauty through a temporary gaze; here, I am not a part of the land.  As I walk down the sidewalk on my way to my coffee shop, I see cracks in the pavement.  And whereas identical pavement cracks once stood out to me in Seattle and even in Walla Walla as some sort of natural spite against the world, here they merely exist.  I am growing here... learning from my inhibitions and my setbacks and my strengths and my triumphs, but there is a lingering in my mind of my fitting into this place as a circle might fit inside of a square; there is an unconquerable void around my edges.

Addie Bundren's passage in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is one wrought with regret.  She presents her reasons for marrying her pathetic husband, for birthing her troubled children...  but far beyond that, she gives us a disposition that strikes me as fundamentally pertaining to my life right now.

She recalls:

"He had a word, too.  Love, he called it.  But I had been used to words for a long time.  I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear."

And of course, throughout my education and until today, I've thought of words as little tools to be used for the sake of conveying those feelings we have but cannot explain, those moments we know but cannot understand.  Words have always, then, been the survivors; they've been the vehicles behind my shining moments of truly being able to acknowledge those deepest feelings I've felt.

But in this passage, Addie makes things simpler.  In her view, the triumph of words is always secondary to the triumph of feeling, the triumph of existing.  It is as though, for her, words like "love" and "fear" exist as consolation prizes, substitutes for the true experiences we face, the true emotions we feel, and the true existences we endure.  They are, then, ill-fitting...  because the truth is, for her, that if we have a word that perfectly describes our moment, then we are not truly feeling our moment at all.  Rather, we are filling some square void with a circular substitute...  we are filling a lack of reason with an excuse...  we are filling the void left by an emotion with some lifeless explanation...

for me, though, the image of the circle ill-fitting into a square of equal diameter is reductive.  For how often do we recognize that the deeper we look into our lives, the more complex our lives become.  If we narrow down, for instance, the root of a personal issue to a comprehension of "love," do we not, then, find many different facets that make up our "love"?  That is to say, once our circle has "ill-fitted" into our  emotional or sensual square, doesn't that square then morph into a pentagon?  A hexagon?  An octagon? etc.  And etc...  And the beauty of this is that as this exterior shape continues to grow in terms of angles, our "circle," our "understanding,"  touches more and more surfaces of this exterior shell.  And yet, with those increasing moments of contact between our verbal circle and out experiential shape, we also find an equally increasing number of gaps in between understanding and void, between sensation and description...  between being and the means by which we understand our being...


...does this leave us feeling weak or empowered?  This, I think, is the beauty of Faulkner.  He presents to us this question with such a natural ease that we must confront our growing understanding with our growing confusion, and vice versa.  He gives us a slap in the face while commemorating us...  He gives us the strength to find our own beauty as we writhe in our own despairing mirth...

and vice versa.


There are two different kinds of "good vs. bad" writer; there those who label individuals and "good" and "bad," and then there are those who present the conflict of "good vs. bad" internally within each individual.  This seems almost intuitive.  But even those dumbed down and dualistic presentations of good vs. bad that we see in, for example, comic book stories, provide the reader with an interpretation of good vs. bad that registers on an internal and personal level, one that can only be understood by someone with the understanding that, within them, both "good" and "bad" exist...  in a sense, then, the fight between good vs. evil exists within all of us.  And I think we all understand this pretty well.

But why, then, do we always want to convince ourselves that we are good?  Why do people have such an urge to take these artists' representations of good and bad (and our understandings of their works) and process them in a way that eventually makes each one of us "good"?  I know this seems like a simple question.  But the answer, too often, is too reductive and, frankly, naive.



Within all of us exists the understanding that with each growth and new contact between our verbal or comprehensive circles and our world's shapes, we are experiencing a simultaneous growth of gaps between our different points of knowledge...  the more we know, the less we know, and etc.  We've heard that before.


But if this is true, why do we fight so hard to convince others that our way is the correct way?  That our vision of the world is the clearest view?  Most importantly, why do we work so hard to convince ourselves that somehow, innately, we've ended up on "the good side"?


I think that we are all wrong just as often as we are all correct.

and vice versa.

Recently I've been losing a part of myself that once felt intrinsic.  I once saw serendipity as not just inevitable, but essential.  I once saw purpose or meaning in gaps and voids, in coincidence and chance; I believed myself connected with my surroundings in an inexplicable sense.  And it was a sense, for that's from where faith blossoms: the senses.  

It is uncommon for me, these days, to find the serendipitous where most might find coincidence.  I find myself corked, choked...  the very senses that are meant to guide us have faded into a secondary relevance, one that follows the guidance of my constant and thirsty desire for home, reminiscence, my past, and above all, safety.  I must force myself out of what shelters I've created in order to experience something new, in order to place importance (necessity) on the gorgeous opportunities facing me every day.  And I rarely gather strength enough to get myself there.  ...I'd rather find refuge, shelter, isolation.  

I moved to New Orleans.  And in itself, that was a kind of risk.  I wasn't sure what I'd feel and what I'd miss and for what I'd yearn.  

When people encounter anything, they are faced with a choice.  It is an option to either find importance or find the lack thereof.  Always.  We are always floating down a river.  And I don't want to call it time.  But whatever it is, you can struggle against the current or you can swim with the current or you can just sit in your raft and float with everything.  Lately I've felt like I'm just a guy standing on the riverbank, watching the river flow without him.  

I think of the image of a young boy stomping his boots into a puddle of water.  This is where I find myself against this New Orleans culture...  but I undoubtedly am the puddle.  ...Whereas I once (and over and over again) was taught to think that my actions were the puddle-makers, that I was the young boy, I now feel like I am the puddle, like I am the toy of some greater agency that decides for me how high I will travel, how far I will fly, for how long I might settle.  

And what can I do with this?  Not only am I lost, but I see the flow of those who are found passing right in front of my eyes.  Something beautiful: even as a bystander on the riverbank, I am still brought down with the flow of my own unique stream, of my own personal river...  

But the beauty lies in the fact that every time I am jumped upon, every time this still foreign culture jumps upon me, I have a choice of how far the droplets of my personality and my being will fly.  Even in the moments of absolute submission, there is still a choice to be made:  how will I react?  How will I act upon this act?  How will I prepare for the next puddle-stomp?  

My fingers have always been fat.  I am losing the hair on top of my head.  I attempt to write almost every day.  I am afraid of the greatness that I know I can (and still want to) achieve.  I look in the mirror every morning and see my face, looking back at me, questioning whether or not this loneliness is a part of the puddle or a part of the boots that disrupt it.  I am kinder now than I once was.  I am quieter.  I am less ambivalent to the active things, I am less action-oriented towards the quiet things...  There is a flow in me that I can't stop, and yet there is a seemingly immovable constant in me that I wish to kick-start; I am a man of unstoppable potential, and I am a boy of unvanquished innocence...  there will never be a precise meeting of these different people that I am, there will only be a time when I know how much force against or for I want to propel against the river of my life.  There will only be a time when the flow of things becomes my happiness, and vice versa.  There may be a time when I, myself, am a river, flowing through my culture and my life with an unstoppable force...  or there may just be submission.  

But I exist in this world.  

  

I Thought That I Do

One excellent thing about working as a server in a restaurant is that you get to spy on people.  All sorts of people eat out at restaurants, and you get to talk to them.  And keep an eye on them, and play a very voyeuristic role in the production of their meal.   You see them create their own atmosphere upon arrival, you see them make decisions, and you see them undertaking in an undeniably huge moment of pleasure: taking the first bite of a delicious looking meal.  Of course, people who work at restaurants where the food isn't good might not understand that last part.   

To do your job well, you've got to be paying very close attention to the people you're serving.  And this gives you a glimpse, whether your like it or not, into some intimate part of those people.  

The other evening I served a couple who revealed, at one point, their ages of 85 and 85.  And no, they didn't show me that love lasts or something.  What they showed me, I think, was much better...  They sat through most of their meal in silence, looking around at the decorations on my restaurant's wall.  They were very polite, and gave me (quite obviously) that look that older people sometimes give.  The best translation for this look is: "yeah, you're young.  And you're doing this.  And I get it."  This look manifests in one of two ways: it can either accompany a smirk or a smile...  and this smile is one of the most beautiful faces a person can make.  

They loved their food, and they made sure to tell me all about the different ways in which they loved it.  I occasionally witnessed them as they took bites and relished what they experienced and were about to experience.  

Each of these bites was a new moment, a new recognition, a new appreciation, and a new acquaintance with their food.  Everything was new.  And after they had finished their meal, and we'd all spoken cheerfully about how the restaurant used to be a bar which used to be a gas station (for they'd been in the same neighborhood their entire marriage, and had been to all these places,) I noticed an unmistakable look on both of their faces.  It showed through their smiles, It emanated past their full and reclining bodies.  It was youth, and I'm sure of it.  

I remember telling others in high school that I would "never grow up."  It seemed, at times, that I told this to others because I'd grown tired of telling the same thing to myself in the mirror.  Because it's easy to look yourself in the mirror and tell yourself in your head that you are always going to be something.  And most times I look in the mirror, I've prepared myself for the arrival of the image of my face, even if just milliseconds before.  And then, sometimes, I see myself in a reflection without having prepared myself, and I'm shocked.  I can see myself there, in that memory that we all have, finding my reflection  jumping as though it has been caught.

The only mirror in my apartment is in my bathroom.  Each trip to the bathroom involves a look in the mirror, and these are (for the most part--not to discount my trips to other bathrooms) my only moments of looking in the mirror.  And I cherish these small moments throughout the day.  And of course this sounds awfully narcissistic, but it isn't out of a vanity or hollow self-indulgence that I enjoy these moments.   I appreciate them for being those times I really retreat into myself...  perhaps nobody else does (not likely, I think) but I always say words to myself when I see myself in the mirror in the bathroom...  I always greet myself with something.  Sometimes it is as though I'm asking myself permission for something, important only because of my eye contact with myself, and yet seemingly unavoidable...  

That part of me that insists "you will never grow up" exists every time I look in the mirror.  It might not have the tangible benefits for me as, say, getting a tattoo of the cover of Where the Sidewalk Ends, but it is there.  And while I used to see only my youth, I now have a constant voice telling my face in and out of the mirror that "I have grown up."

And sometimes this is sad.  Sometimes it is wonderful.  But it is always in contrast to the other voice, the one that insists eternal youth.  

And that latter voice, it exists in me more presently and noticeably in my day to day life than the "I have grown up" voice.  Because I sense things...  because I learn to know things...  because I enjoy food, and Andre champagne, and playing my video games, and saying hello to strangers, and moves...  everything I enjoy is a part of my youth.  Furthermore, everything I feel reiterates my youth.  And as long as I am alive, I will have that youth.  And this gives me one reason to be satisfied.  With my choices, with my impulses, with my routines, with my faults, with my strengths...  

But then that other part of me...  it is so strong at times.  When I realize that I've left things and people, and that I've been left by things and people, this side of me is so strong...  it is the all encompassing of the past over the present...  the slowly degenerative state like that of a vegetable left too long on a kitchen counter.  

But.  If these are two sides competing or, hopefully, coexisting, I might side with the view of me who knows that as long as life is happening, youth is happening...  pleasure and happiness are existing.  And if I do, won't I see that even moments of dissatisfaction--those that promise nothing but an aging past--are always accompanied by a youthful movement towards an impulse of feeling, towards a decision, or (perhaps best of all) towards something about which I know nothing?  

A Pale View of Hills

My parents, Shari and Otto Klein, live life moment to moment.  Whether or not they notice it or feel it is irrelevant.  They exude a kind of joy over certain things that I rarely feel...  it is a combination of understanding a moment, feeling a moment, and loving a moment that, for me, comes only in the most extreme of times; my mother's exclamation that she's thrilled I found a job, my father's guiding my attention towards an almost impossible coincidence of seemingly different circumstances...  these things, for them,  demand not only an intense attention, but a kind of rejoicing moment, a moment of thankfulness and pride that we are alive, that I am alive because of them, and that, in some intangible way, they are alive because of me and my family.

I envy this.  For I feel so much adoration for them, so much pride in the fact that I love everyone in my family and that they all love me...  but I am always coated in a sort of confusion that constantly disables me...  it leads me to selfishness, to eternally deep questions about whether or not I'm worthy of them, whether or not I'm capable of making and staying with and cherishing my own family (someday), and whether or not I can find a peace with my life that they have both appeared to have found.  

The cherry on top of my confusion is the fact that my parents have such immense faith in me.  They seem to understand that I will do great things--great for myself, great for others, great in general--and yet I remain this lost soul, this confused son who treads deep swamp waters in New Orleans and knows almost nothing (after 23 years of experience) of himself.  

On my final night in Seattle we went out to a bar.  We drank and ate and my parents and one of my brothers (and his wonderful fiance, Jane) gave me advice about my life.  They told me such wonderful things, that I am capable of so much, and that I can achieve so much...  my father asked me what my dream job was, and there wasn't a glint in his eyes so much as there was a piece of his eyes that implied how confident he was that I could achieve this "life."   

At some point, I couldn't hold my tears any longer.  I was so overwhelmed by the prospects of my future that I began crying... and it wasn't because of my family: it was because I have no idea what my future might hold.  Acting, writing, teaching, hosting, talking, loving... these are all things I can do, and some of them quite well, I might add...  but I was feeling lost.  And I think this disorientation came from an idea that I just don't know... that I just can't think of my future because I'm so God Damned confused about my present.  

New Orleans is an astounding place...  it confuses me every day.  It thrills me every day.  It provokes me every day.  It inspires me every day.  And it depresses me every day.  

There is nothing I can do about the impulses I feel towards this city, and they are certainly many and sometimes seemingly crucial...  people here have a defeatism that dances with their optimism, a punishment that teams with their celebration...  and I find myself so utterly lost in the midst of it that I don't know about what I am hopeful, happy, alive, versus what makes me dread, despise, avoid... and perhaps this is a beautiful confusion.  

So why can't I just be?  Why can't I feel a sort of appreciation for my present as opposed to a dread or ecstasy towards my future?  Is it because I am too young?  Is it because I am too hopeful?  Is it because I am too defeatist?  

The final paragraph of "A Pale View of Hills" brought me so many memories and so many thoughts...  it is a woman saying goodbye to her child as she moves back to her home.  The child will travel back to London and the woman will remain in a small and simple house in Japan: 

"I would like to have seen her to the railway station -- it is only a few minutes walk -- but the idea seemed to embarrass her.  She left shortly after lunch with an oddly self-conscious air, as if she were leaving without my approval.  The afternoon had turned grey and windy, and I stood in the doorway as she walked down to the end of the drive.  She was dressed in the same tight-fitting clothes she had arrived in, and her suitcase made her drag her step a little.  When she reached the gate, Niki glanced back and seemed surprised to find me still standing at the door.  I smiled and waved to her." 

The main character, the mother, has (as other characters in the book have) seen such beauty in the youth, in her daughter, and has demonstrated a sort of deference towards the young...  but there is a tone throughout the book of a kind of missed opportunity...  it comes not from the passing of a distinguished prompt...  rather, it comes from a young person ignorant of the glory that is their present surroundings.  And I can't help but read it with the assumption that I have ignored my "present" surroundings.  

I remember those times waving goodbye to my parents as I drove away from home.  And I remember them standing, just as Etsuko does in "A Pale View of Hills," at the front of the house, waving goodbye to me.  Just the other week, as I entered SEA-TAC airport, both of my parents hugged me goodbye and waved as I entered whatever void it was I entered...

And I wonder to myself, am I appreciating these moments as my parents are?  We are always taught to live in the moment, to be aggressive (rather than passive) in the pursuit of our dreams, to make our lives happen rather than to live our lives... but how on Earth can I truly know that this is what I'm doing?  

There is a kind of understanding that comes with age that none of us can understand.  And our lack of understanding only aids in its beauty.  Of course I know that as I leave my parents at the airport something beautiful is happening; it is a reflection of love, a reflection of blood, a reflection of being.  But where am I as I step onto the plane?  Empty--longing--alone... 

When someone tells you to live "in the present" you assume a sort of responsibility on your part, and rightly so.  But we, for the most part, are wrong; we assume that to "live in the present" means to make things happen, to take risks, to bend our own boundaries...  and to an extent, these expectations are legitimate...  for often the most beautiful things in our lives are created through the most unexpected areas and times...

We have a tendency to turn our lives into a plethora of exchanges; we turn our actions and beliefs into currency that can be exchanged for something new or preserved for a future benefit.  I feel almost corrupted by this idea...  for why do we feel the need to excavate some meaning or beauty from every moment for the purpose of something to come?  When someone tells me to live my life to the fullest (as everyone is doing from pre-school on...) I feel a sort of requirement to meet an expectation, when perhaps the requirement doesn't exist.  

I'm not sure what compels me to do certain things here in New Orleans, and I'm not sure what compels everyone else to do what they do...  but I know that I tend to place too much importance on the future, on my own future, on my own future-life.  What if my "future-life" is my "present-life"?  What if I find just as much importance in my day to day encounters as my parents do in their encounters with me?  My parents have worked their entire lives to make my life something beautiful (and of course, the lives of my siblings, and their own lives).  But what if all of their children had become drug-addicted low-lives?  Would their lives have been failures?  Of course not.  

I'd love to change the saying "live life moment to moment" from an incentive to action to an incentive to just fucking relax...  to an incentive to appreciate the moment in which one lives rather than to waste time preparing for that eternally elusive moment in which one might live in the future.  

As we sometimes forget: we are all making decisions and making plans in a time in our lives where we all still feel, we all still hope, we all still regret...  when we die, is there some test we take to make sure we've made the right decisions, to ensure we've made all of ourselves that we could possibly have made?  Of course not.  

There is only the clear or tainted, neglected or appreciated understanding of what we have.  

Tender is the Night

I finished Tender is the Night on the patio of my favorite reading coffee shop in New Orleans.  It's the one across the street from Lafeyette Cemetery #1.  As I finished the final hundred pages, I downed cup after cup of spearmint tea.  This tea, once I've inhaled its aroma, once I've touched the cup to my lips, always rushes me back to my stint in Morocco; I remember the long rectangular room that was "mine" for a bit in a small home in the Atlas Mountains, the majesty of my host-family's palace-like home in Rabat, and a momentary and reductive (yet gloriously beautiful) glimpse into a cultural spirit that electrified me.  My memories of that place are so strong.

As I came to the end of the book, a group McGhee School students gathered around a table next to mine.  They were five girls, all probably around 14 years old, come to "Still Perkin'" to enjoy hot chocolates and iced teas before their parents were to pick them up.  They were excruciatingly loud and obnoxious...  at first, I had a very hard time focusing on my Fitzgerald as they giggled one minute and engaged in screaming arguments over what had, to one or the other, "just been a little offensive" about something some girl or boy did at school the next.  I am riding this Fitzgerald train pretty hard right now, so I took extra offense to the intrusive, loud, and annoying gaggle.  I heard them discuss boys, I heard them say awful things to one another, I heard them hurt each other, I heard them laugh with each other, I heard them be hurt by one another...

It was an unpleasant reminder for me of the times I experienced in middle school.  Sometimes my memories of those days are beautiful, sharply conveying a gorgeous life I once lived.  Other times (like these), though, I am reminded of the ignorance and naiveté that leads young people do and say terrible things to one another.  At first, I thought: whatever.  These girls are going to fuck up, they're going to hurt each other and other friends / be hurt, but they will learn and yadda yadda.  But I was pissed that I had to endure their moment-to-moment life lessons while attempting to enjoy my final moments with Tender is the Night.  




And that was what started me on "memory."  Of course, everyone grows up knowing the old sayings that demand one not live in the past, not to wallow, and to make every effort to enjoy the present as it is happening.  Some choose to live in the past, and some don't.  But increasingly, lately, here in New Orleans,  I've noticed myself living in the past.  Surly, I tell myself, it's because I'm in a new place, because I'm in unfamiliar territory...  because I'm scared, because I'm unaccustomed, because I'm naive.  Sure, there are the gorgeous moments of living in the present, dancing recklessly on Canal Street to a previously unheard brass band blowing the roofs off of the New Orleans established and contemporary Bourbon Street alike...  but then there are moments when I miss my dog, Dude.  When I miss the comfort of knowing that my parents are close by...  the comfort of friends, of alliances, of the built as opposed to the plans to build.


There is a transition from past to present that is impossible to define.  I am the same person today (despite all of the more obvious growths and changes) that I was when I was in 8th grade, the same age as these girls sitting at the table across from me.  My brain worked then, and it is still the same brain now, and I am still Kevin Klein.  I can lay out for anyone the "details" of why I'm a better man now than I was a boy then, why I'm stronger, why I'm improved, why I'm more secure, why anything...  but there is no escape from myself, no matter how hard sometimes I try.  With images of the past, sometimes we see more clearly the images being drawn in the present.  The transition from past-self to present-self is sometimes kind, sometimes turbulent, and the recognition of present-self is sometimes victorious, sometimes unbearable.  But from this we can gather that the transition from past to present comes from a clear idea of ourselves in the past and a different idea of ourselves in the present... two easily distinguishable entities that, when contrasted with one another, shine as their unique entities.


But what happens when the transition is not clear?  What happens when the past self and the present self are palpably and unbearably different, and yet a transition between the two is unnoticed?  What if it is not only unnoticed, but apparently non-existant?  Is it the world around us changing?


The decadence of the jazz age in America is commonly known.  Fitzgerald lays out for us in The Beautiful and Damned and The Great Gatsby a number of individuals whose paths shift from gloriously raging rivers to hardly drifting streams: psychologically, emotionally, mentally, physically.  Some claim that Tender is the Night is his most tragic novel.  And, though I haven't read them all, it is definitely the most tragic of the ones I've read.  And not because the characters endure the hardest fall from grace, not because the most horrendous and unknown forces act to destruct our heroes.  In fact, it is for nearly the polar opposite reason that Tender is the Night is so tragic: The characters endure personal shifts, personal changes--in preference of love, taste, personality, habits, addictions, etc. --but they do so in an unrecognizable way.  The action of the book is almost non-existent: we know that these characters have endured something tragic, but we don't know where or when...  we can't pinpoint the personal transitions, we only know that they've occurred.  But without evidence of the transitions, of the events, of the tragedies, how can we know that these tragedies are real?  That is to say, without clear and distinguished understandings of these characters' past and present selves, how can we truly connect with their tragedy?

I think the answer is: we cannot.  And this is why Tender is the Night excels as a tragedy.  This is why I read the vague, surely not extreme closing lines of the book with simultaneous feelings of repulsion and malaise.


Whereas in The Beautiful and Damned we have two "great" characters, skyscrapers among shacks, eventually crushed by the inevitable grip of their decadence,  in Tender is the Night we have two skyscrapers who are devoid of climax altogether; the story is not one of loss or dismay, not is it one of greatness and gain...  it is a story devoid of its own characteristics; a portrait of those who are great drifting slowly, calmly, peacefully into nothingness.  And it is precisely this lack of action, I think, that makes Tender is the Night so painfully tragic.


Has this sort of unnoticeable transition happened in me?  I grew up with "so much promise" and "so much potential," and I'd hate to think that these things have left me...  rather, I'm sure that they haven't.  And yet, I've made this transition into a life where I work every day and live every day in relative obscurity.  Yes, I live in a fantastic and magical city, one filled with emotion and resilience and love.  And yet, I find myself standing alone on my balcony listening to the melancholy music of choice, watching my past self evolve into the present, and I'm confused; I'm confused about my own existence, about my own abilities, about my own intentions, about my own passions, about myself.  Who is to say I'm not the next thriving genius, waiting impatiently in line behind others for my turn at recognizing my own life as something wonderful?  But who, though, is to say that I'm not another victim of time, another victim of the action-less, climax-less demise that befell my heroes in Tender is the Night?


Call this doomed valiance, call it cliche...  but if what I've said already has inklings of truth, I am either forced down this road or doomed to a depressed and invisible sort of decay:

I love the fact that my memories live with me.  I love the fact that the gaggle of middle school aged girls at my coffee shop reminded me of myself in a different time, that the memories of myself in NW Africa are centered around a self that still exists.  I am thrilled that I live a North America away from a family from whom I'm no more than a trivial yet monumental reminiscence removed...  I am myself in Morocco, I am myself in middle school, I am myself in adolescence, I am myself now.  And in ten years, I might be able to say the same thing about those "Kevins" as well as the "Kevins" that will live from now on...

There is something beautiful about the fact that not only will we continue our lives and create new memories, but also the fact that we someday will pass on.  Both of those facts live with us eternally, happy of them or not, conscious of them or not, and it is up to us to find the beauty in the midst of what appears to be nothing.

It isn't nothing.  In the same way that Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night is not nothing, our temperate drifts through our own lives, thrilling and humdrum moments alike, are not nothing.

The Beautiful and Damned

I finally finished The Beautiful and Damned by Fitzgerald the other day.  I was drinking an Abita on the patio at my work during a break.  And though my first attempt at reading this book was quite unsuccessful, my second left me peculiarly and intensely invested in Anthony, Gloria, and the tragedy of their lives.

Today I sat on the patio of a coffeeshop on Prytania and Washington, across the intersection from Lafayette Cemetery.

Small birds gathered around me upon my arrival, as they seem to do outside of every coffee shop in New Orleans.  I can only imagine it's due to an unusually large number of crumb-throwing old people.  There's one man in particular who comes to mind.  I've never been to CC's on Magazine St. without seeing him.  He exits the coffee shop with a biscuit, which he crumbles and throws all over the courtyard.  I have seen him hit customers before.  Then the birds descend like locusts, and all present must temporarily quit what they're doing and watch the flourish.  I rather enjoy when he does this.

Anyways, I had no food at the coffee shop on Prytania and Washington, so the birds quickly quit me.  But before they left, I experienced something very strange... something that almost never happens to me. A memory, unnoticed and dusty after years under some blanket in my brain, revealed itself and sent flashes of something intense through my entire body.  I don't think I had ever experienced this before...  and I'm not sure how to describe the sensation.  It was as though I'd discovered an ancestor of supreme importance and greatness, someone previously undiscovered and unknown to me and yet seamlessly connected with me; this memory and I were finally together, and it pleased me so much.  Here's the memory:

In third grade my mother and I picked out a pair of finches from Petco.  My teacher that year, Mrs. Carroll, was very pet-friendly, and loved the idea of adding more animals to our environment...  though I've forgotten every other type of animal we had.  I loved the finches immediately upon meeting them.  I watched them and talked to them the night before I was to bring them into class.  And though I can't deny I loved imagining all of the attention these animals would bring me from my peers, I can truly say that I felt an attachment to them.  Perhaps I didn't quite recognize the extent of my affection.

They were our class pets for some time, though I don't know exactly how long.  We'd named them Romeo and Juliet, and Mrs. Carroll loved them as much as we did.  And then one evening as the winter was approaching, Mrs. Carroll turned the heat off in the room for the weekend, and it became too cold for the birds.

We had just recently discovered that Romeo and Juliet had produced a few eggs in their little cone shaped nest.  It was a cocoon shaped nest with a little hole for them to get in and out.  If you peeked in, you could just see the eggs at the bottom, underneath both of them.  We came into class on Monday to find them dead, huddled together on top of their eggs that never hatched.  I remember the image of them in their nest, dead, together, on top of dead eggs...  and I remember it piercing me.  I didn't quite know what to feel (or what I did feel) but it was bad, it was awful...  at first I wanted to blame Mrs. Carroll.  Then my anger shifted more towards an unfamiliar discomfort.  I wouldn't call it dismay, not grief, not mourning... it hovered somewhere around all three, and more.  And it was the first time in my life I'd felt so sad over such a thing.  I remember laying in front of the heater of my room-as I often did back then-feeling the burning skin on my hands and my face and the hot carpet beneath my head...


Here's a passage from The Beautiful and Damned that brought me a similar sort of pain the other day:

"I was adept at fooling the deity.  I prayed immediately after all crimes until eventually prayer and crime became indistinguishable to me.  I believed that because a man cried out 'My God!' when a safe fell on him, it proved that belief was rooted deep in the human breast.  Then I went to school.  For fourteen years half a hundred earnest men pointed to ancient flint-locks and cried to me: 'There's the real thing.  These new rifles are only shallow, superficial imitations.' They damned the books I read and the things I thought by calling them immoral; later the fashion changed, and they damned things by calling them 'clever.'
"And so I turned, canny for my years, from the professors to the poets, listening--to the lyric tenor of Swinburne and the tenor robusto of Shelley, to Shakespeare with his first bass and his fine range, to Tennyson with his second bass and his occasional falsetto, to Milton and Marlow, bassos profundo.  I gave ear to Browning chatting, Byron declaiming, and Wordsworth droning.  This at least, did me no harm.  I learned little of beauty--enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth--and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition...
Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me.  The fibre of my mind coarsened and my ears grew miserably keen.  Life rose around my island like a sea, and presently I was swimming.
"The transition was subtle--the thing had lain in wait for me for some time.  It had its insidious, seemingly innocuous trap for every one.  With me?  No--I didn't try to seduce the janitor's wife--nor did I run through the streets unclothed, proclaiming my virility.  It is never quite passion that does the business, it is the dress that passion wears.  I became bored--that was all.  Boredom, which is another name and a frequent disguise for vitality, became the unconscious motive for all my acts.  Beauty was behind me, do you understand?--I was grown.
"I was grown up then, into this land of jazz, and fell immediately into a state of almost audible confusion.  Life stood over me like an immoral schoolmistress, editing my ordered thoughts.  But, with a mistaken faith in intelligence, I plodded on.  I read Smith, who laughed at charity and insisted that the sneer was the highest form of self-expression--but Smith himself replaced charity as an obscurer of the light.  I read Jones, who neatly disposed of individualism--and behold!  Jones was still in my way.  I did not think--I was a battleground for the thoughts of many men; rather was I one of those desirable but impotent countries over which the great powers surge back and forth.
"I reached maturity under the impression that I was gathering the experience to order my life for happiness.  Indeed, I accomplished the not unusual feat of solving each question in my mind long before it presented itself to me in life--and of being beaten and bewildered just the same.
"But after a few tastes of this latter dish I had had enough.  Here! I said, Experience is not worth the getting.  It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up against.  So I wrapped myself in what I thought was my invulnerable scepticism and decided that my education was complete.  But it was too late.  Protect myself as I might by making no new ties with tragic and predestined humanity, I was lost with the rest.  I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death..."



This is Maury, who is, by giving this passage, "unburden[ing] [himself] of many memorable remarks reserved for the darkness of such earths and the brilliance of such skies."


This passage truly rocked me.  By the end of it, I noticed that I'd been so enthralled that I'd given the voice some divine authority over me; this all-knowing man was telling me, Kevin, what it's like.  What it's like to be me, now, post-college, far away, confused, struggling.  And then, I closed the book for a second.  And I looked around me at some folks buried in their business...  and then I looked down at my drink.

And I smiled hopefully, with enthusiastic optimism.  I grinned to myself, and enjoyed a feeling like that split-second you first step into a hot shower in the morning.  For he was telling me what "it's like".  And I most definitely listened to him.  Those feelings, those discouraged and self-pitying feelings...  they exist in me strongly enough for one to make a useless argument about the justification, the purpose, the "truth" of fiction.

But they are not alone.  The story found it's most likely point of entry into my psychology and into my blood and my heart, and I welcomed it.

But those feelings fade as they did immediately after my first read.  The smile upon my face, though bred just seconds after the darkness of Maury's monologue, brought to me those feelings from the weeks following Romeo and Juliet's deaths.  Weeks filled with joy, with hope, with renewed curiosity. And then back to the memories of Romeo and Juliet...  feelings of renewed discomfort, loneliness, dismay...

Maybe it is the case that fiction facilitates or emulates a process of retrospectively considering a natural cycle of emotions that we all endure / enjoy / despise / require.  A cycle without which we'd be lost in the chaos of our own feelings; they would not be contrasted with one another upon reflection, they would flow in and out of our bodies and minds, chaotic emotional tides combatted by flailing consciousnesses.  Whatever it is that fiction enables in us, it is essential.  I don't know why it feels so fucking good to wallow in F. Scott Fitzgerald's substantially depressed muck, but I know that it does.  Really, really good.