It's nearing the one-year anniversary of "Everything is Personal." I've been thinking of writing a year-end summary of what it’s turned into. Quickly, two sentences come to mind.
The past is always still happening.
Each day I wake up and invent what I have to live for.
By the end of the first year, there will be a 100 posts everyone is free to read. It's an archive that isn't behind a paywall, and I’m committed to keeping it that way. The stack is feminist all the time. It’s a way of telling you what’s big to me in a picture and what’s small to me in a picture, where these things may be reversed through another lens. I’m writing literary pieces at the top of my game. My goal is to provide pleasure, according to a little check list I’ve mentioned before:
Start in the middle.
Fail to arrive.
Remember to love something.
Make the reader hot.
Make the reader laugh.
Richard and I have hosted several Zoom conversations about writing craft with subscribers and more are planned, as well as smaller Zoom gatherings to write and read together in real time. A community of readers and writers is forming, and that’s the best thing of all.
When I started, I didn't know I could make money producing a stack. It turns out I can make money producing a stack, and other writers can as well, at a time when it’s very difficult for most writers to find venues that pay. Some of you reading this jumped in with paid subscriptions at the start, and your subscriptions are coming up for renewal. The stack has become the center of my writing life. Please renew your subscriptions, if you possibly can. This publication is pretty much the cheapest one out there.
Love and thanks, Laurie
There are three buttons at the bottom of every post: “like,” “share,” and “comment.” Your responses attract new readers and mean the world to me.
The Love of Strangers
In Hudson the other day, a couple was coming out of the place where we get coffee. The man said, “I don’t look like an artist.” The woman said, “You could. Today you look a little corporate.” They were Asian American, in clothes that cost a month’s mortgage. The clothes were black. They were in their thirties and took off down Union Street.
What kind of artist, I wondered? Did he only want to look like an artist? What do they make in the corporation he looks like? Do corporations make things, anymore? Is moving information from point A to point B a form of making things?
Richard said, “Do you notice how couples dress alike?” I said, “Do you think we’re dressed alike?” I was wearing the same thing I wear every day, pants from Athleta you can’t be sure what they’re for. There’s elastic at the ankles and waist, and they have pockets. I love the pockets. Richard was wearing Banana Republic slim legged pants and a corduroy shirt he ordered from a company you browse when you don’t live in a city. When he showed me the shirt on his computer, he said, “Should I order this?” I said, “Order whatever you want.” I don’t know why I said that. He said, “Corduroy is warm. I will be warmer in corduroy.”
Before that, he’d shown me a plaid shirt and said, “Should I get this?” I said, “No.” He said, “Why not?” I said, “If you wear a plaid shirt and live on a farm road, and when you go outside you cut up trees with a chain saw, you can see where this is going, right?” He said, “Okay.” He didn’t see this where this was going.
In the place where we get coffee, there were samples of cheese. In the cheese, you could taste the grass eaten by the cows that had produced the milk. You could taste France and the time you got on an Lambretta scooter. You were wearing a beret. Seriously. You were wearing a beret, and you drove the scooter I don’t know like 50 yards, and you were hopeless on the scooter, and in those days you thought you could do things without knowing the rules. The scooter wobbled, and you jumped off. You jumped off it without a scrape, as you recall, although there might have been a few cuts, and you left the scooter on the street, growling on its side. You didn’t know how to turn it off.
The other night, in the city, we went to a party on the Lower East Side. The party was in a bar, and we were early, so we spent an hour on Second Avenue, making up stories about the people who passed by. The density of population was thrilling. Wave after wave of fish swimming downstream, and I missed my old life the way you can almost read the torn bits of a dream. There was so much glorious freedom in the clothes. No one looked corporate. People were wearing the pants of clowns. A few had hair the color of fresh blood and had styled it with those weird, stringy braids hanging down their cheeks. I felt too much love in the moment to ask anyone if I could take their picture.
Everyone was younger than us, except for a few people pushing walkers. At every age, you think about the age you are in the animal of a life. We’ve arrived at the position of hindquarters leading to the tail. Everyone was younger than us, and I had this thought: the generation of Richard and me, we had it easier than the generations after us to enter the world and try to change it. We went to school without debt. I went to school without debt because my father, who had left school after the ninth grade to go on the road as a traveling salesman, because my father had saved for the tuition. Richard went to school because the Labour government in England sent working class kids to university for free and paid all their living expenses. Rents where we wanted to live were cheap. We met so little resistance, comparatively, in doing what we wanted with our lives.
The party was for writers on Substack, and the vibe was open and warm—no jagged, competitive NYC party energy. I mentioned to a young woman the thought that her generation was having a harder time than we’d had, bursting into their lives. She thanked me for appreciating this and said she was thinking of moving to a different country to be with a new guy. I said I’d done that, in effect, when I’d met Richard. As I’d entered each new life, I’d felt I’d had nothing to lose. It wasn’t true. It was something I told myself in order to blow around.
Yesterday, back in Hudson, a small poodle leaned his body against my legs. The woman who was holding his leash said, “His named is Winston.” I said, “Winston, your fur is brindled, and you are beautiful. Do you know your fur is brindled?” Winston didn't care he was beautiful, or if he did, the stronger feeling of falling in love was moving through him, same as me. “That's a hug, he's giving you,” said the woman. We stayed like that, the three of us, and Richard moved down the street, bored.
The air was filled with the smoke of Canada and a light breeze blew up from the river. The pleasure of this love was real, even though it was fleeting, the same as everything is. Winston and I on the street like that, his face turned up with the deepest and lightest dog love imaginable, is my identity, if anyone asks. Richard and I sitting on Second Avenue, watching the tide of humanity float by, is my identity. They are my sexual identity and my every other kind of identity. Loving something in the moment is the identity I feel as me. All the other boxes we are asked to tick, all the boxes and labels and bar codes we are asked to sign up for are the triumph of marketing. “You, Stone,” some the emails, “I got a hearing aid for you. I got a tool that open jars.”
To me, all identities, through every stage of life, are mistaken identities—someone else’s idea of you, and maybe even your own mistaken idea of you. Have you seen the Hitchcock movie, North By Northwest (1960)? In it, Cary Grant plays Roger Thornhill, who is mistaken for George Kaplan and is sent on the run for a murder he didn’t commit. The thing is, there’s no such person as George Kaplan. He’s an invention of the CIA. You see where I’m going with this, right? From the point of view of other people, we are all Roger Thornhill, mistaken for George Kaplan, a person who is nothing but a game.
The other day, I was reading notes from a visit Richard and I made to England in 2009. We were there to see his family and travel to parts of the country he loved. In the Lakes, we visited Dove Cottage, a rabbit warren of chilly rooms where Wordsworth had lived with his wife Mary, his sister Dorothy, and their myriad visitors and children. We loved the tour because it had centered on the poet’s work more than on his fame, and we bought a CD of Ian McKellen reciting “The Prelude” in what Richard called “his slightly affected Cumbrian accent, blending with the RADA voice in which every syllable, although peppered with regionalisms, is intelligible.”
In the car, we listened to “The Prelude,” Wordsworth’s journey through “spots of time.” For Wordsworth, the meaning of a memory changes on each return to it. Some returns are prompted by an activity in the natural world, such as hiking, others by sharp feelings, such as a memory of stealing a boat or of his father’s death when Wordsworth was thirteen. He’s on his way home from school for the holidays:
And afterwards, the wind and sleety rain,
And all the business of the elements,
The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,
And the bleak music of that old stone wall
All these were spectacles and sounds to which
I would often repair and thence would drink . . .
The verse is modern and heartfelt, not straining for affect, and it reminded Richard and me of the “spots of time” that crop up in our notebooks when we write together. In Ambleside, we walked on stone paths through a meadow of tiny lambs just up and wobbly on their fluffy legs. As we approached them, they scurried to their bedraggled mothers. Pink and blue dye marked their wool, and pearly light shone through the tender membranes of their ears. There were white lambs with black legs and coal black lambs with dots of white over their ears. We twisted through styles built to pen them in.
Later, we sat in the breezeway of a grand hotel fronting Lake Windermere. It was still, except for birdsong. The mansion is perched above the water, majestic and steady, maybe a little dowdy. We were freeloaders, resting on a small sofa, when suddenly I realized I was sitting beside a mound of coins that had spilled from someone’s pocket. There was more than 15 pounds, and Richard shot me one of those I can’t believe the things you get into smiles. I said, “If we ever get rich, let’s live in hotels.” It all started with us in 2006, when Richard brought me that drink at Yaddo and electricity moved through the glass.
Ok, I am reading as many of them as I can, but wanted to stop by and say:
Wow. How does that happen?
~
1) You seem to be taking every unnecessary word away.
2) Then, I can dimly also see, the same trick, but repeated on some kind of emotional flow plane.
When I take all the unnecessary words out, there are hardly any left.
~
Well, that's enough bragging about you, back to reading your words.
ps Nice!
Thanks for giving me my morning pill of FREEDOM OF MIND plus a few favorite WW lines. These posts are all just so delicious. Hurray on one year--it's your paper anniversary! xoxo