On Impermanence

We all wanted to be Joan Baez. It wasn't about the vocal range or the political passion. It was the hair...that long, straight, black hair. We all had jewfros, nests of uncontrolled frizz burgeoning out of our overworked brains, as if the electrical impulses of precocious literacy and self-consciousness had gone haywire. We suffered the cartoonish antics of hair springing off the head of someone with her finger in a wall outlet. Some girls put their heads on ironing boards and pressed their curls into a flat, singed stink. Some took it a step further. I got off the Broadway local at Times Square and climbed a steep, garbage-strewn staircase to an enormous salon that specialized in straightening, the only white person in the room. The treatment was like something that should have been outlawed by the Geneva convention, a thick paste applied at the roots that scorched the skin right off your scalp. You had to submit to this torture for a length of time, flipping through old copies of Ebony. The goop gave off the same odor as the stuff they would paint on to send your hair in the opposite direction. If, let's say, you were getting a permanent, replicating the style of a famous model or actress. Apparently, whether you were going from frizzy to straight or from lank to curly, the punishment was intended to be equally painful and sulfurous. A season in hell for the sin of failing to be satisfied with who you were.

This, then, became the paradigm. Whatever you looked like, you wanted to look like someone else. Whatever gifts had been bestowed on you, they were the wrong gifts. Whatever club included you, it meant automatically that you wouldn't be caught dead belonging to that club. What does that even mean....."caught dead?" Maybe it means finding yourself in the irreparable situation of arriving wet and cold on the far shore of your life and discovering, too late, that you have expended your time here masquerading as another person altogether, hoping to be admired in what was at one time called a bathing costume. Once, in my early twenties, I ventured too far out in the surf at Montauk. A predatory wave knocked me down and snatched my bikini top. I took in a gallon of salt water. I could have drowned going back under trying to find it, but instead I ran up on the beach topless. In spite of the exposure, in spite of the shame, I chose the naked alternative. This is the story I'm telling myself now, my midrash on the biblical dictum, Choose Life. Be naked, be frizzy. Occupy yourself while the house is still standing.

This is especially true when I am writing. People who write, draw, dance or any of the other divine mimicries are especially vulnerable to self-doubt. There's not much point in doing it if you're dressing up as someone else. The role of playing Zadie Smith has already been cast. Richard Ford has cornered the market on Richard Ford. I have to rescue my stories from the undertow and bring them up for air. Once my words are out there, they are no longer mine. I can't swaddle them. I can't keep them safe. There is always potential for misunderstandings, for damages. I was struck recently by the comments of a friend who is now showing three-dimensional drawings, fragile paper sculptures. What if they get torn, I asked her? What if they get dirty? Maybe they're supposed to be impermanent, she explained. Maybe I'm making them just for the pleasure of making them. It would be, I thought, like cooking a meal to be enjoyed and consumed, like writing a blog. You make it, you offer it up, you let it go. Doing this is practicing a radical theology.

The spirit that sustains all of life never rests, I remind myself. Creation is ongoing, giving birth to new apple blossoms, new words, new poems. It is constantly recycling old songs, old thoughts, old versions of the self. Not only am I not Zadie Smith or Joan Baez, I'm not even the person I was last week. I am a swarm of words, a frizz of awareness, getting acquainted with impermanence, the truest friend.


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