“Who’s there?” From Infinite Jest to Hamlet, Empty Nests and the Sounds of Feathers
“Who's
there?” - the opening line of Shakespeare's Hamlet -
Dad and I used to talk about the question all the time,
especially in our last conversations.
Right there with the “Tomorrow,
and tomorrow, and tomorrow,” from Macbeth, it still spoke to him,
illuminating and interior world. He could still recite the plays from memory,
even at the end. Reviewing the play last week, the lines struck me,
thinking about Dad, in parts unknown, waking in the middle of the night or
afternoon, not knowing where he was, or who was around, disoriented, calling
me.
“Who’s there?” he would ask. I imagined him saying it
by himself in bed, aware of something unknowable out there, paraphrasing from
his favorite play, everyone’s. It was also a real question about what we see
and what we know, what we feel, what we sense.
“Who’s in the third chair?” one of my clients used to ask,
years and years ago, looking at an empty chair in our office during interviews.
Is it a holy ghost, an apparition, our imagination, the other, or ourselves, in
internal dialogue.
Is it a book on our bookshelf or a dream?
Is it separation or an encounter with the unknown,
otherness, or oblivion?
“You needn't be so scared. Love doesn't end. Just because we
don't see each other,” wrote Graham Greene in The End of the Affair.
Is it the funny expression from a summer friend?
“Bubba gump gamberetto?” wondered Axel, referring to Bubba
Gump shrimp for dinner, Nutella every morning for breakfast.
We finally met to talk about Infinite Jest in book
group. The book sat on my nightstand all summer, ten pages a day for an
infinite summer, until I read the second half in a rage read traveling from
London to Berlin. Making my way through it, summer turned to fall,
the teenager remained in New York as I flew to Berlin, a month later joined us
in Berlin, before returning here for a minute, off to college, back here for a
show in Chinatown, making a bus on 34th street in a long tradition of college
kids traversing to and from, between Boston and NYC.
The stories were many across Brooklyn, Ave C filled with
songs about activism, Olivier as Hamlet in black and white an internal dialogue
with himself, a reflection on a friend.
"Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of
infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand
times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at it. Here
hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now?
Your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the
table on a roar?"
This rumination became the basis for David Foster Wallace’s
millennial novel of the American empire, Infinite Jest, one of
any number of stories flowing Denmark to the world, Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern Are Dead, on and on. As Wallace writes on p. 900:
“We are all dying to give our lives away to something,
maybe.”
Many of us all are, at least. For years, I gave away my life
to kids, reluctantly entering into parenthood, before the whole thing ended. As
for now, I’m back to books, between activism and writing, teaching and
thinking, wondering who’s there.
Wallace explains:
“'I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are
interesting. I could, if you'd let me, talk and talk. Let's talk about
anything. I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated. I
believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist. I believe Hobbes
is just Rousseau in a dark mirror. I believe, with Hegel, that transcendence is
absorption. I could interface you guys right under the table,' I say. 'I'm not
just a creatus, manufactured, conditioned, bred for a function.'I open my eyes.
'Please don't think I don't care.”
“The process or action by which one thing absorbs
or is absorbed
by another,” it goes on for ever.
There’s a bit of Hamlet in there, between the ruminations
and the ghosts.
I guess we all see ghosts from time to time.
There are a lot of sculls there, said Mark, referring to the
novel and Hamlet, the shadows and mirages, internal plots, steps toward the
edge and back, blood lust and folly.
The jests are many, in this mediation on mental illness and
chemical dependence, loneliness and entertainment.
My oh of my, what a strange reading experience.
Love some of the sentences, but when the opera singer falls
in love with their own voice, it's time to leave the theater.
The teenager from Berlin was back in town for a few
days.
Ray and I walked through the Village, talking about activism
and poetry, Elizabeth Street Garden, stopping to meet Damian and a new friend at
Village Works, and then for a pint at McSorleys saloon, where we talked about
my Mom who Dodi and I visited earlier in the day. Looking about the saloon, the
conversation turned Joe Gould's gold, the oral history of the world that would
never see the light of day. We wished David Wojnarowicz a happy birthday,
thinking of the riverfront journals, the life he lived, "born in New
Jersey on September 14, 1954 … between Long Island and Michigan with his
siblings, enduring both neglect and abuse from his alcoholic father who abducted
them after he divorced their mother” before he wrote and acted up, before HIV
consumed him.
Out into the night, I biked into Brooklyn, stopping at the
corner of Myrtle and Broadway. People were pouring in and out of the Market
Hotel, its light throbbing along with the DJ, sound pouring out of the most
famous window in Brooklyn, screaming into the night, across from the above
ground train, bars popping. “K2 zombies and unhoused folks here and there near
the station … in their own world ..."
That night at the Market Hotel:
“brat hotel: brat autumn
a brat autumn party. officially opening brat autumn season.
we’re entering brat autumn babe, get into it! it’s brat girl
autumn
the ultimate brat autumn carry.
come dance with us <333 to brat <333 and celebrate the
beginning of brat autumn!
a dance party 4 the angels ~ with djs playing brat, charli
and others in the bratverse all night long! Friday September 13th, 11pm -
late,1140 Myrtle Ave. Brooklyn NY
this is NOT a charli concert - it's a party by fans 4 fans
dress code: bad tattoos on leather tanned skin. underwear no
one knows the color of. von dutch. sheer white dress, last nights makeup.
fingerable gold cross, sweat marks on all my clothes, french manicure.”
Dancing, I’m lost in it all, the lights, high, music.
My mind trickles back to the infinite jest, wondering about
Wallace. One doesn’t get the sense, that he was ever part of anything he cared
about, or believed in, despite the book and the fame, sound and fury
symbolizing nothing.
The fall is on its way. At #DecarbonizeCityTech,
we talked about our carbon footprint. All politics is local. Think global, act
locally.
We know we can do better.
As Nancy Romer and Ashley Dawson point out, "From 2014
to 2019 carbon emissions intensity across a subset of 117 (out of 300+) CUNY
buildings rose 15%, while in comparison, carbon emissions dropped 9.6% in other
City government buildings.
With the #summerofheat,
we spent the last 3 months of pushing Citi Bank to stop investing in fossil
fuels... what about our home ... city tech and CUNY... where are campuses use
an inordinate sum of energy. In New York, some say up to 13% of NY energy. But
we can do better... in the last decade were passed the CCPA and Local Law 97.
We've marched... we've also seen new buildings go u ok that use more energy
with higher emissions than the previous older buildings.. we can do better...
but it starts with an honest assessment... that's what we are doing today.
Other colleges have set a model. We are knowledge factories. We can set a
course. Smith College has shown we can do this. The board of trustees at Smith
College approved a "plan to enable the college to become carbon neutral by
2030 by converting our heating and cooling systems from fossil fuels to
electrically powered geothermal energy."
Yet, with the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA), CCPA, and
Local Law 97, the goal is to reduce the emissions produced by the city's
largest buildings 40 percent by 2030 and net zero by 2050. We can bring this
conversation into classrooms, into study groups, into conversations and
actions.
That Monday, my court my charges were thrown out, Hot to Go
charges dismissed for "facial insufficiency".
The wheels of justice move slowly. The #summerofheat
lives on, to fight another day, even if they didn’t talk about it or the
climate much in the Presidential debate, word soup. "They are coming in
from all over the world..." Jan 6rh "Nancy Pelosi was in
charge..." “The immigrants are coming to eat your animals,” pussies under
attack.
And finally, the summer ended.
The teenager is in Boston, drafting essays on Marxism and
Queer theory, connecting a personal history of activism with a social
critique.
The older college kid and her friend caught flights
out of town, after Spring in Berlin that turned to summer, and fall back to LA
for a full senior year.
And the story continues summer into fall, into the next
steps of our lives.
Summer's end is always hard. We all met in Berlin this
summer, watching the Euros, chatting about music and art, CCCP and Lucio
Battisti, Italian and American movies, Marcuse and the eros effect, meeting at
flomarkets and Schankwirtschaft Laidak, the Sandman for Monday blues in
Berlin and Cafe Reggio in New York, watching old Woody Allen movies at
Grandpa's house, thinking about our lives, the places we live, Rear Window and
glimpses into other realities, between Los Angeles and Berlin, Italy and New
York, back to Los Angeles for senior year, onward, ever-growing, changing,
final year of college. Dodi on the move was her mantra, running her scooter
about the apartment. Still is... onward into senior year... across the
world.... l'adventure continue.
I’ll miss their generosity, hangouts with grandmom,
recalling old museum shows she saw years ago, old catalogs she can’t find from
1970, before she loses breath.
I’ll miss chatting with them about Adam Ant and
Wr-mysteries-of-the-organism: “What does the energy harnessed through orgasm
have to do with the state of communist Yugoslavia circa 1971? Only
counterculture filmmaker extraordinaire Dušan Makavejev has the answers (or the
questions). His surreal documentary-fiction collision WR: Mysteries of the
Organism begins as an investigation into the life and work of controversial
psychologist and philosopher Wilhelm Reich and then explodes into a free-form narrative
of a beautiful young Slavic girl’s sexual liberation….both whimsical and bold
in its blending of politics and sexuality.”
And they are off.
Say a little prayer.
Let the community of the spirit envelop us, Rumi
puts it:
“There is a community of the spirit. Join it, and feel the
delight of walking in the noisy street and being the noise. Drink all your
passion, and be a disgrace. Close both eyes to see with the other eye. Open
your hands, if you want to be held. Sit down in the circle. Quit acting like a
wolf, and feel the shepherd’s love filling you.
At night, your beloved wanders. Don’t accept consolations.
Close your mouth against food. Taste the lover’s mouth in yours. You moan, “She
left me.” “He left me.” Twenty more will come. Be empty of worrying. Think of
who created thought! Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?
Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence. Flow down and down
in always widening rings of being.
A few days later, I hung out with my friends, the science
advocates with @VoiceoftheGowanus, who helped draw news about the toxic plume,
up and down Union Street, around the Canal, a national superfund site that has
yet to complete its work to clean up the canal. As the NY Times wrote,
"When a Real Estate Boom Came to a Toxic Corner of Brooklyn Dozens of new
buildings are going up along the famously polluted Gowanus Canal. The discovery
of an underground chemical plume hasn’t slowed the development. Many of the
buildings have high levels of trichloroethylene. According to,
https://toxicstargeting.com/tce/gowanus: "Massive Trichloroethylene
Contamination in Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal Area Illustrates How New Yorkers Are
Unknowingly Exposed to Environmental Health Hazards... New York's legacy of TCE
hazards is starkly illustrated by the infamous Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, NY.
Over the last century, hundreds of industrial, utility and manufacturing sites
released TCE and "black mayonnaise" coal tar into the canal. The U.
S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is currently removing nearly 600,000
cubic yards of contamination at a cost of $1.5 billion." According
to the
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3621199/: TCE is
"carcinogenic to humans by all routes of exposure and poses a potential
human health hazard for noncancer toxicity to the central nervous system,
kidney, liver, immune system, male reproductive system, and the developing
embryo/fetus." After finishing our meetup, rode to the Bowery and
Chinatown to catch up with a few more friends, riding into the night, i
couldn't stop thinking about the soil, the chemicals dumped in the ground about
the Gowanus, spilling into the still toxic waterway, ride of the biggest
building boom in New York. "We don't want another 'Love Canal'
in our neighborhood,' said one advocate, recalling the former chemical waste
dump and landfill in Niagara Falls, New York, site of an environmental
disaster in 1977...
Whats next, I think of the environmental movements I am a
part of, for community gardens, to save the Elizabeth Street Garden, a clean
Gowanus neighborhood, public power at CUNY, decarbonizing the living
environment, Summer of Heat into fall, it goes on and on and on.
By Sunday, the poets lined up with their stories, carefully
drafted for this moment Elizabeth Street Garden. "This shimmer will
be my essence... " read @hay.snder, one of the
countless poets in the @elizabethstreetgarden.
First time readers, vets, my friend Ray Black read:
"Memory-Beetle Circus
My house is infested with memory-beetles .."
The best public spaces are well used public spaces... save @elizabethstreetgarden
...poem after poem born from this space, save the garden, save the city. Tell
the Mayor he's losing your vote if he allows the demolition of this gem.
CUNY alerts about an active shooter on Jay Street before
trauma class.
A gathering of friends at clockwork. Thanks fir the pic #tortasytacones.
@ninaeschoenefeld
displays her work in Berlin. We are honored to be a part of your majestic
work, ride or die... what an adventure it is knowing you.
The following Saturday, I visit some of my favorite people,
favorite places, moms backyard in the fall, la plaza cultural community garden
on e 9th street hosting the anarchist bookfair, jk and dana, a line up into
Panna II Garden Indian Restaurant, just like when i was in college, Christmas
tree lights shine year-round... Bring your own beer. Greetings fall.
JK told me about her cat telling her Tony was going to
be ok. JK understood, she knew. We always wonder, whose there.
The house is empty. No kids about, I wonder, who’s there?
Monday, my yoga teacher read
“The Sound of Feathers,” Mark
Nepo’s words:
“I will never forget your care, how you stared into me the
way a painter might peer into a canyon….This is the quiet gift of love: to be
shown who we truly are by another who, when you say, “I have nothing left,”
says, “But what of this magnificent sun rising within you?”
By Wednesday, I read it to my students.
The city calling
We went to Xanadu where the kids were roller skating. And
Kimya said hi. And we sang along with her covers of i think im alone now and
open arms by journey. And she talked about soft rock and accessability and
family and sang some of her old songs ..
."And say I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's
eye
I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye
I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye
And I don't wanna make her cry
Cause I like giants"
And emilyassembly
reminded us we are fighting for public power.
Adopt a cat.
Look out for a neighbor.
And the mayor was indicted,
Turkish Delight.
Fall from Gracie.
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