Snow Globe
Weather conditions.
When I look back, I don’t see myself disliked for the wrong reasons. I see myself disliked for the right reasons, and that is one of the gifts of growing older. The opinions of other people, whether insightful or muzzy, I don’t care about as much as I used to. You know how a wave changes shape as it moves toward shore? There is no longer a get-out-of-jail-free card for eating cake. I have fewer impulses prompted by jealousy or mean-spiritedness. I spend more time remembering to love what there is to love.
The Museum of Things that do not Exist has recently acquired an honest answer to the question: “Does my ass look fat in these pants?” It has also acquired the concepts of wisdom, “general anxiety disorder,” nymphomania, emotional intelligence, the lovable curmudgeon, the national treasure, the naturally thin, and the generous to a fault.
I don’t think you can return to the feeling state of believing something you no longer believe. It’s a one-way door. Like believing in God. Like when you couldn’t tell the difference between good ice cream and bad ice cream or between a good movie and a bad movie. Everything was entering you at the same rate and with the same thrilling intensity. What it looks like when you step back from the wall is I don't know. It's wonderful to make a thing. You forget yourself.
Richard has been writing about an acronym he came across from bird watching and before that from military something or other. The term is GISS, standing for general impression size and shape. The idea is that a birder who is experienced can identify a bird from just a flash of color or a moment of patterned flight. A form of metonymy, in a sense, where we see the whole of something from a part. If the birder is wrong, it can't be proved.
I like the concept of GISS. Richard does, too. We don’t know why. The concept of GISS reminds me of the work of the amygdala that has to guess the answer to the question: Is that a bush or a bear? If you wait for more data by moving closer—close enough to enlist the frontal cortex—you could be dead.
Richard thinks I’m in love with flash judgments. I am in love with love at first sight. I like the indeterminacy of not knowing if you’re right about the bird. The guess of the birder is informed by long years of observation. Living a long time is the same as becoming a bird watcher.
A snowy weather condition blew through our area today. The sky turned dark gray and wind whipped around the way tornadoes do. It was not a tornado, but it sang. It was really loud, and I was upstairs in the bedroom as it sang into the windows. The house was on the verge of shaking but did not shake. The convulsion was quick, and then it moved away, and the sun came out. I thought it was exciting, being in the snow globe, and I continued to feel the excitement because nothing bad happened and the lights stayed on. If something bad had happened, it would have swallowed the excitement in one gulp. Or maybe not.
In 2017, there was a reunion of people who had worked at the Village Voice. We gathered in a big venue downtown, and everyone from the giant, rundown ghost mansion of the paper opened the doors of their cramped, rabbit-hutch rooms, and came out. Everyone was there. The dead were there. I was happy to see people I wasn’t happy to see.
This kind of confusion feels like being at a casino, gambling away, and it doesn’t matter if you win or lose. Surely there is something to celebrate in having known each other in the past. We should do it, shouldn’t we? I send myself on these errands all the time. It doesn’t matter if you lose, because the point is the casino, and the sense this is true is the only thing that gets more intense and more real as you get older.
The other day, I got Richard to go to Banque, the fancy new place in Hudson, and we had the best time. We are going back for drinks. There is a happy hour from 5 to 6 Thursday to Sunday, where cocktails are $10, including negronis. I love a negroni. I can't wait. We're going on Saturday with our friend Heather. You can come, too.
I love being seduced. It's an orgasm on the surface of life. I am easily seduced. Why resist. You can be abandoned without being seduced, so you might as well be seduced.
The idea was to have a moment out together, sit in the most beautiful space on Warren Street, and talk to strangers. Talking to strangers is not Richard’s favorite event. He did great. He looked cute sitting at a high table on a beautiful stool upholstered in midnight blue fabric.
Banque was formerly a bank, and the marble bankness of Banque is part of its imaginative flight. A friend had mentioned the coffee there was the best on Warren Street. It's by far the best on Warren Street. Also, we shared a croissant as big as your shoulder. It was the best croissant on Warren Street: buttery, flakey, lacquered. Eat me, it said, why not eat me, you know you want to eat me.
Arden, the owner, who is young and beautiful, trained as a pastry chef in Switzerland and Europe and did a stint at a chocolatier before settling here. We met her, and her mother, and her mother's small dog Gigi, a recent rescue pup.
You know what happened as we talked about the food world and what it feels like to be new in town, what happened is that everything else fell away, and we were together in now with two women we liked a lot.
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Primo Levi now.
In his book This is a Man, also known as Survival in Auschwitz (1947), Primo Levi details the step-by-step grinding down of Jews by Nazis in the camps. The starvation, the forced labor so difficult for the starved it’s a form of murder, the stripping off of clothes in freezing temperatures, the beatings, the public selection of the naked prisoners for immediate execution.
Levi was sent from Italy to Auschwitz in November 1944 and was still at the camp when Russian troops on horseback, on their way to Berlin, rode up to the prisoners on January 27, 1945. Levi was in Auschwitz for eleven months. During the tenure of Auschwitz, German officials murdered one million people.
Because of the way Levi writes about his experience—without the heightened language of accusation and misery and with a kind of ongoing amazement such treatment can exist—he offers a way of seeing the people in the narrative as occupying two categories. There are the people who can get away with torture and murder. And there are the people it's okay to torture and murder—to prove your dominance.
After a claim of superiority, a show of force follows swiftly. The group with power doesn’t question how it gained its power. The fact that it gets away with murder proves its fitness to dominate. Both kinds of people are reduced to their role in the drama of power.
So here we are. Where are we? When Levi is first hit by a German officer, he wonders with “a profound amazement: how can one strike a man without anger?” I doubt he would have pondered that question is he’d lived in the body of a woman for as long as he’d lived in the body of a man. Or if he’d lived in the body of a black person in a society where apartheid was law.
Here we are. Where are we? There are the people who can get away with rounding up others. And there are the people—immigrants, for example, considered contaminating agents and unworthy of kindness—selected to be ground down.
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The Primo Levi section is so right now, sadly. Recently, just after the election, read Lore Segal's Other People's Houses, which felt prescient. The final sentences are, "Every day there are hours when I can write, and we have our friends. My husband is Jewish, too, but he was born in America, and accepts without alarm this normal season of our lives; but I, now that I have children and am about the age my mother was when Hitler came, walk gingerly and in astonishment upon this island of my comforts, knowing that it is surrounded on all sides by calamity."
You always make me look at the ordinary with new eyes. I wouldn't miss one of your essays, if that's the word, not for worlds. You encourage me to take off my skin and be available to the air, no matter that it hurts. I have known all these things for a long time. But it is so easy to - step around it into some kind of anesthesia. Thanks for the wake up.