Not Yet

There is another hostage crisis and we are all captive. Waiting for the outcome of the political circus, the resolution of our deepest anxieties, much of the country is holding its breath. We are all trying to make it through these last few weeks of not knowing, craning our necks, watching the trapeze artists, the tightrope walker. Everything is up in the air while we wait for the advent of solid ground we can stand on. Ours is not a culture that rewards hovering in the in between. We abhor ambiguity, the shadows. This is a painfully uncomfortable neither here nor there moment and we are all in it. Yesterday, I saw a drawing at a gallery opening that perfectly reflected this condition. The caption accompanying the drawing said "the abyss yawns but it does not sleep." Looking up at the tightrope is dizzying. Looking down into the abyss is frightening. And there is no straight ahead. Not yet.

At home, I wrap myself in sweaters and blankets. I eat too much comfort food and watch baseball. It's been raining all day today, but not in Chicago where the Dodgers are playing the Cubs. During the unfolding of the postseason, I think about the rain. It's that rain that always comes when fall begins to lean into winter and the burnt sienna trees give up the ghost. It streams through the porous roof of the sukkah, a monument to impermanence. Here in New England, in the attics of our minds where we keep the wool socks, the thermal underwear, we are anticipating ice. We don't know it consciously and we don't know exactly when it will come, but soon enough we'll be standing outside the door sprinkling rock salt like confectioner's sugar down the front steps. But not yet. This is above all a season of not yet.

We have not yet fallen on the ice this year. Later, it will hide on the blacktop or under the snow, threatening us with its slippery lack of empathy. Sometimes, it will fall from a dark sky and cover our windshields with a brittle crust, daring us to get from here to there unharmed. It has its upside, ice does. It offers its slick, glassy surface to swan-like Russian skaters. But overall, ice is misanthropic, unloving. Better to crush it mercilessly and introduce it to Margarita.

When it melts in the spring, crocuses giggle, birds trill their free-spirited sing-song. Then, droplets irrigate the born-again grass, rivers rush headlong to meet the sea. Waves approach the shore, tickling the toes of small children building sandcastles with moats that empty and fill with the August tide. Once long ago when we were taking our two boys to Tobago for the first time, the airline lost our luggage. We arrived in the punishing heat dressed for the arctic, no sandals, no bathing suits. The very first thing we did was tear off our north country clothes and fly naked and unashamed into the Caribbean, after which, covered in sweat and salt, we stood rapturously under cascading outdoor showers that reminded us of the waterfall where the Konkapot meets the Umpachene. It receives us, water does. It cleanses us and slakes our thirst.

In another state, not red or blue, but scalding, hot enough to burn your hand when you drain the angel hair, water becomes steam. It whistles a happy tea tune. It creates an entire percussion section, making that deeply consoling knocking noise that tells you the radiators in a drafty New York apartment love you and won't forget you. It pours out of our mouths in winter breath, affirming for us that we are warm-blooded animals even as the air on the far side of our skin is below freezing. Water has its moods, icy and forbidding, steamy and evanescent, just right for swimming, for drinking.

Watching the rainfall, a lesson from nature arrives at my front door. It's the lesson of neither here nor there, the understanding that definite boundaries in time and space are often human conventions, designed to make our experience intelligible, tolerable. This not that. But what if the various material states of water are not boundaried, despite everything we learned in school about the boiling point, the freezing point, in Fahrenheit and Celsius? Our teachers admired specificity. They had no feel for those liminal intermediate moments when water hovers between solid and liquid, liquid and vapor like a blurry pre-dawn consciousness in between dreaming and waking. This is the existential situation we find ourselves in for another two weeks waiting for the election to be over. It's foreign to our way in the world. Still, here we are, the future of our country hanging in the balance, inhabiting a state of suspended animation, like water on those days when it freezes, then melts, then freezes again. Or those times when it refuses to boil, no matter how intently you stare at it.


For more on impermanence and the lessons of nature check out Aruni's piece below.
http://coacharuni.com/2016/10/the-lesson-of-leaves/

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Time Lapse

Today, I feel the need, I'm sure you understand, to retreat into a safe haven of my childhood. I used to love to sit on the blue carpet in the living room and rifle through the wide, shallow drawer at the bottom of the breakfront where photographs were casually tossed. This was before the iPhone, before digital files, when photos were both more and less important than they are now. Some black and whites were lovingly mounted with adhesive corners into leather-bound albums and labelled in my sister's hand...Susie 1947, mother and daddy behind the counter in the family antique store 1952. But I am captivated by the loose pictures in the drawer, the homeless. My father is wearing his corduroy peaked hat, recently inherited by his great-grandson, a fisherman. My grandmother Anna, laced up stiffly, poses for a formal Victorian studio photograph taken before she emigrated from Romania. My mother is impossibly 40s glamorous in Persian lamb. There are also pictures of me, many pictures of me. I invent narratives to go with the photos, especially stories about all those people cavorting around in pre-war America. Many images are unidentified. Who is that leering, oily charmer with the tennis racket and what about the woman in the skimpy one-piece with the wet hair sitting on a man's lap? I'm stunned by their open sexuality. Apparently, life was flourishing before me, without me. I can't nail down the slippery identities of these shadowy people. I want to be able to name names, connect the faces of the people housed in the drawer to one another, but at the same time, I relish their aura of mystery. Mine was a life that cried out for mystery.

There were also loose negatives trapped under piles of pictures. The negatives, white becoming black, directions reversed, conveyed the shadow side of their photographic subjects, their rejected identities. They defined people by what they were not, a common organizing principle for a worldclass non-joiner like myself. I specialize in rejected identity. I know who I am because I'm not the sort of person who eats lunch at Burger King or drinks martinis at the country club. I know who I am because I do not believe in American exceptionalism, especially not in this season of vulgar buffoonery. I am Jewish, but not that kind of Jewish. Not zionist, not orthodox, not tribal. Not, not, not. What happens when events conspire to force me to print the negative, to stand and be counted?

My husband has written a play. I am generally resistant to the idea that all women are sisters. I regularly consider and reject that sweeping generality along with all the others. But then a man I know socially approaches the two of us at a reading and asks me how it feels to be the muse of a playwright, muse being code for the woman behind the great artist who types his manuscript and provides encouragement and coffee. The first person I think of is Vera Nabokov and while I am thinking of the beleaguered Vera, the moment passes, the opportunity to say, wait a minute, wait just one fucking minute, becomes part of history and doesn't resurface until Donald Trump makes his porcine remark the following week and I say to myself. Mother of God, he's talking about me.

It's remarkable at this late date to be considering fluid identity, a poorly explored aspect of aging. A friend just the near side of seventy laments that she used to be the life of the party. Clever, witty, the whole Dorothy Parker-Nora Ephron thing. Now, she says, she feels more reserved, more introspective. The change in social metabolism comes as a great surprise. Much has been written about wrinkled skin, about sexual invisibility, but very little about the way for some people, aging involves a certain withdrawal, a tendency to want to give it a rest. I remember when I was much more gregarious. I remember when the idea of spending a protracted period of time alone was anathema. I felt a great dullness, a great heaviness that begged for distraction. I wanted to go out, out of myself, to see and be seen, to discover the identity du jour and attach to it. Being young seemed to be one long advertising campaign, one long broken record, designed to reach the largest audience, whether we believed in our product or not. When sales declined, it was a dark season.

Aging has lifted me out of that malaise. It has introduced me to myself, a previously unidentified image, and offered up a time-lapse photograph that has recorded my evolution from an uncertain girl, anxiously scanning the horizon for indications of social weather, to a grown woman, in love with her family, with spirit, and with writing. The images are emerging from the developing negatives.


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