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.
Friday, December 16, 2011
Monday, December 5, 2011
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)