Peter Clothier's Blog, page 17

MISSILE

It seemed I had written--or perhaps received--something dangerous or compromising on my lap top computer. I felt obliged to alert the military. I was instructed to place it in the middle of the floor of the motel room where we happened to be staying.

In the middle of the night I paid a visit to the bathroom, and while I was there the bomber arrived. I heard the swoosh, the crash of penetration, the neat explosion.Back in the bedroom I found the laptop skewered to the floor, a missile still protruding from it. (For you Freudians: don't laugh. Sometimes a guided missile is just a guided missile).

I had heard of precision weapons that could "see through" roofs and walls, but this was amazing. There was a neat hole in the ceiling where it had penetrated, and the laptop had been nailed perfectly to the floor.

When Ellie woke in the morning and went to the bathroom herself, she seemed unfazed. And I myself was not unduly worried. I had been sure to back up all the information and the documents on my other laptop, and the military would surely send me a new one to replace the one they had destroyed. Would they also, I wondered, send someone to repair the hole in the motel ceiling?

THE MAYOR

I find myself in a meeting with the new young mayor of Los Angeles, a man of considerable importance. I have no idea as to the reason for our meeting, but we are getting along just fine. He is engaged in our conversation, attentive and interested in what I have to say. I am recounting the story of my years as Dean and Director of Otis Art Institute and our battle to survive the decision of the L.A. County Supervisors to cut off funds for the school. Our meeting goes on for a surprisingly long time, a matter of some two hours from his busy schedule.

When the time comes to leave I go out onto the city streets, surrounded by vaguely familiar official buildings. I realize that I am already late to return home and imagine Ellie will be worried about what is taking me so long. It begins to rain, and I decide the best option is to call for an Uber. I try using my iPhone, without success, and realize that the battery is too low to make a connection. Perhaps I could impose on someone to borrow theirs? But then I would not be able to charge it on my credit card.

Looking for help, I enter a building that appears to be a city library. Inside, I find a young man working on a computer and assume him to be the kind of tech-savvy person who could help me out. I ask if I could hook up to his charger, with the thought that with this connection I'd be able to make my call. He agrees with what to me is surprising reluctance--he had seemed like a nice young man. My first call is to Ellie, to let her know that I have been delayed and would be late for dinner. To my surprise, she seems not in the least bit concerned.

I ask the young man for help with my mobile phone, which now seems to be more like a laptop computer, He starts to work on it, and the job seems much more complex than I thought. Before even completing it, he hands me an elaborate invoice on official-looking paper, on which the bottom line is $1,300. He laughs at my protests and tells me if I want my computer back I'd better pay up. He is working on what looks like a hard drive--a disproportionate task compared to what I had anticipated or asked.

I try to wrest the computer from his grasp and he resists, pulling back against me. I start to protest loudly, calling out for help from others in the library. I manage to attract the attention of several people, who come running up to see what the fuss is all about. I'm trying to shout out an explanation of the situation, even as I struggle with the tech guy and complain about his totally unfair bill. But I wake from the dream before I manage to get my computer back...

PIECES OF THE PUZZLE...

In this dream I drove over to a meditation session in Beverly Hills--though why, I can't imagine. I had a terrible sit--they say there are no bad sits, but this one was terrible, believe me. And afterwards the people in charge made it clear they wanted us to leave as soon as possible so that they could lock up and go home themselves.

It was then I realized that a few jigsaw puzzle pieces had fallen out of my coat pocket and I started to pick them up. They were recognizable as pieces from the (very difficult) Van Gogh "Iris" puzzle that I'm actually working on at the moment, while my family are here. The more I picked up and stuffed into my coat pockets, the more I realized that there were. The woman responsible for clearing out our area of the meditation hall--it was more like an old-fashioned theater--was clearly getting impatient, and was not shy about letting it be known. I asked her if she would help by finding me a bag, because my pockets were now full of puzzle pieces; even a paper supermarket bag would do, I told her as she huffed off to find one.

By now the piles of jigsaw puzzle pieces had turned into small mountains. The more I managed to shovel into piles, the more there seemed to be. My search was complicated by a huge duvet which covered many of them, and by the dismaying appearance of pieces that were clearly from other puzzles. How was I ever to sort them all out?

I must have done, somehow, because I was finally able to leave the meditation hall and went out into the darkness to find my car in the parking lot. It was not where I had left it. I used my clicker as I searched, to see if I could hear the responding beep but, when I heard it, I found only the garage door remote hung up in a nearby tree. Curious, because I never use it, preferring the remote button on the visor of my rear view mirror.

But the car itself was gone. It must have been stolen, I concluded. I had neglected to bring my cell phone, and thought to ask a couple passing by if they could lend me theirs so that I could call the Beverly Hills police. I hated to think of all the hassle I would now have to face, and thought that I'd have to somehow call an Uber to get home. But these people were reluctant to lend me theirs, telling me that I was not the first person to have asked...

At which point, my dream was interrupted. I was relieved to wake and realize that my car was still parked outside my house.

A NICE STORY...

A NICE STORY…
... for a change. Don't we all need one? The news about this nation and the world at large needs compensation. There are good people. There is mutual respect and compassion. There is a sense of selfless service, a consideration of others. Here's what happened one morning recently. Well, it started quite some time ago...
... when we started noticing that our trash cans, all three of them--black for trash, blue for recycle and green for, well, green--were being returned to their place behind the lemon tree in front of our house, beside the fence with our neighbor's house, tidily out of sight from the street. Every Wednesday evening our gardener--thank you!--puts them out curbside to await the Thursday morning arrival of the big waste management trucks; and like all our neighbors on the street, we have always replaced them ourselves after the Thursday morning pickup.
Until we no longer had to. We began to find them every week, as if by magic, placed back where they belong. Closer observation confirmed that this minor miracle occurred immediately after the passage of one of the trash trucks, so we decided that it could only be one of the drivers doing us this favor. We looked up and down the street several times, and concluded that he was doing it for no one else, just us, and of course we couldn't help but wonder why.
My wife and I concurred: our man deserved a Christmas present by way of thanks for his mysterious acts of kindness. We do not often see him--he arrives early and is quickly gone--so it seemed best to enclose a modest gift with a card and a message to convey our gratitude; and to have it ready by the door, in case we might be able to catch him in person. And the night before, just in case we missed him yet again, I pinned the envelope to the fence where I thought that he'd be bound to find it.
I woke early on trash pickup morning and could not go back to sleep. It would be so much nicer, I thought, to see our benefactor and thank him personally, so I lay waiting for the inimitable sound of the trash truck lumbering down our street and the deafening crash of the trash cans being hoisted up and emptying into its bowels. 
I ran upstairs (our bedroom is downstairs) when I heard the first truck arrive. It was the wrong one. The driver picked up one of our three cans and hastened on his way. The second one, it turned out, was headed the wrong way. It was with the third one I had luck! I sneaked a peek out of our front door and there he was, a huge man of African American descent--a true gentle giant, it turned out--who climbed down from his truck and started to wheel our trash cans back behind the lemon tree.
I caught him just as he found my envelope pinned to the fence. He must have sensed me coming up behind him, because he turned with a huge grin and stuck out a massive paw to shake my hand. The man dwarfed me. He was tall, yes, but also built like an industrial scale refrigerator. And every cubic inch of him was kindness. He just radiated the stuff, like Santa, but without the ho-ho-ho. His first words: "How's the wife?" (She told me later that she often sees him on her walks around the neighborhood and they always exchange a friendly wave).
Our friend was certainly grateful for our gift, but not so grateful as we are to him, not only for his weekly act of kindness, but also for restoring our sense that human beings can actually care about other human beings and go out of their way to help. I asked him the obvious question, the one we had pondered often in the past weeks and months: why? Why us, and no one else along the street? What made us so privileged to receive this kindness from him?
"Well," he told me. "I seen you." (My wife and I are, um... of a respectable age!) "I seen your wife, too, dragging those trash bins back, and I couldn't let that happen." 
I thanked him again, from a really full heart, and he swallowed up my hand in his another time before climbing back into his cab and heading off to the next house down the street. Sentimental old codger that I am, I found myself tearing up a bit as I headed back downstairs to report on the story to my wife. After which, we hadn’t the heart to turn on the news…

A FRAUD

A familiar dream. I'm hired to do a lecture and I arrive without having the least idea of what to say. I have made no preparations. I'm thinking I might talk about how I became a writer, but that seems off-topic. Perhaps I should talk about my last visit to New York? But I can't remember anything about it. There's a large crowd of people, so I get very alarmed, but it turns out most of them had come to the wrong event and they all leave. I'm left with just a handful of participants, which means I can turn it into a group discussion--which leaves me off the hook.

I've had a variation of this dream more times than I can count. I assume it's a hangover from my academic days, when I felt like such a fraud...

DESPAIR

I have been thinking about despair since reading an opinion piece in the Review section of last Sunday's New York Times by Michelle Goldberg, a writer whom I much admire. Her article, Democracy Grief is Real, struck a chord with me because I have been experiencing precisely the feeling she describes, as have many of us on the liberal side of American politics. She calls it grief. I call it despair.

Grief, as I understand, is about something that already happened. Fair enough. Too much has already happened in this era of Trump to undermine every value I myself hold dear. For me, though, it's more about what might happen--or continue to happen--in the future. It feels like the bad guys are winning all the time through sheer ruthlessness, and there's nothing we can do to stop them. As one of them said recently, with the galling truculence of the impenitent, "Get over it." With the assumption they had already won.

Despair, it seems to me, is the result of continuing attachment to outcomes other than those I expect or want. My mind constantly creates the illusion of control, as though I can somehow assure the outcome of a particular situation in a way that is favorable to my point of view, and each time it does I'm proven wrong by the actual result. When I'm confronted with this reality just once or twice, or even a few times, it's called disappointment. When it's chronic, when it happens repeatedly, especially with the same or a similar set of facts, it turns into the deeper feeling of despair, which is an unpleasantly persistent form of suffering.

Like many of us today, I suspect, I am deeply attached to the return to some kind of rational norm in our political life. The lies, the duplicity, the breaches of both decorum and trust, the disregard for the law and the absence of human compassion I perceive on one side of the spectrum seems to me indisputably clear and undeniable. The despair I feel derives from the clash between my judgment--no matter how "right"--and the realization that it makes no earthly difference to the situation, and that those I judge continue, despite me, to thrive in their malfeasance.

Meditation helps. It allows me not only to recognize the illusory nature of my feeling, but also to distance myself from a reality over which I truly have no control. Perhaps, I tell myself, if I had meditated longer (than my 25-year daily practice), with greater frequency and deeper concentration, perhaps I would have more success in maintaining my equanimity on a daily basis. The truth is that it's a struggle. In our current circumstance the mood is powerful, invasive. The fact that I share it with so many others like me makes it no more tolerable. What I'm left with is the need to accept it for what it is, acknowledge its source and, when I can, to let it go.

THE SPY

I have just finished reading "The Spy," a novel by Paulo Coelho. He calls it a novel even though it is based as accurately as possible on the true story of Mata Hari...


... the exotic dancer who was executed by firing squad toward the end of the First World War on trumped-up charges, and for reasons that had as much to do with the PR needs of French officialdom as with her innocence or guilt. As Coelho has her lawyer write, in a final letter addressed to her, she was "victim for the sin of being a woman, for the greater sin of being free, for the immense sin of stripping in public, for the dangerous sin of getting involved with men whose reputations needed to be maintained at any cost."

Coelho's novel opens with a heart-rending description of Mata Hari's execution...


... which she faced apparently with calm, if not a kind of bored indifference. From there he takes us back to her final jail cell, where she writes the letter to her lawyer that takes up the better part of this short novel. Her lawyer's lengthy, self-exculpatory and in part apologetic response to her, along with a historical note, completes the story.

Mata Hari tells her story with the indignation and wrath of a woman victimized first as a young girl by cruel and callous sexual abuse and later, in the colonial far east, by an aloof, abusive and unloving husband. Forced to abandon her children, she returned to Europe determined to earn a reputation for herself--which she amply does, in the Paris of the gay nineties and the period of art nouveau, by scandal. She becomes notorious both for her exotic dancing, in which she exuberantly sheds all seven of those proverbial veils, and for her uninhibited promiscuity with men of wealth, position and power.

Her career as a performer and courtesan does not survive the start of the "war to end all wars". Her name sullied, her body losing its appeal, she becomes increasingly desperate for the security that cynical male attention seemed to bring her; signs up to spy for the Germans and ends up back in Paris, where she volunteers immediately to French authorities as a counter spy.

By this time, though, she's in deep trouble. Those men of wealth, position and power don't want to to know, and don't want it known they ever knew her. She becomes a pawn in the political and military power game and a useful distraction from catastrophic events on the front lines. Accused of spying, she has no means to defend herself and no allies to help her.

In Coelho's telling, Mata Hari's story is the saga of an exploited woman who dares to assert her own independence in the only way she knows how--the only way, really, that is open to her: with her body. Her downfall is the work of the devious and cowardly men who use her shamelessly and discard her pitilessly when she becomes a burden or embarrassment. His story suggests she should be as much of a hero in the long, slow tale of women's liberation as her contemporaries who chained themselves to the fences of official male power and threw themselves in front of buses. Aggressive, demanding, determined to be seen and heard, unashamed of her sexuality and refusing to be tamed in the expression of her emotions, she was a threat to very fundaments of the patriarchal social order of her day.

And for all this, a thorn in the flesh of society, she was quietly eliminated.

THE PISTOL

I had this dream. We were living in a kind of fortress. For some reason our neighbors Marjorie and Damian were living with us, and a number of young men seemed to be hanging out. The "garden" was a central courtyard with high, steeply sloping flowerbeds on all sides planted mostly, it seemed to me, with succulents.

I had made the (for me unlikely) purchase of a pistol. (Okay, folks, sometimes a cigar is nothing more than a cigar!) It was a strange, odd-shaped, black electronic thing with multiple LED lights. The box it came in was filled with and array of electric connecting cords and chargers. I decided it was time to unpack the pistol, charge it up, and learn how to assemble all the parts and use it.

I looked around for the electric outlets I'd need to get the various components charged, but failed to find one. This was strange because there had seemed to be so many of them. I recall Marjorie joking that there must have been "three thousand of them." I searched everywhere without success. Then I thought there might be one at the top of one of those high walls, but the thought of scrambling up the steep slope was discouraging. I asked my long-ago son-in-law, Alistair, if he would do it for me.

Fortunately (for everyone!), I woke before I was able to fire the gun.

(My own sense is that the dream is about vulnerability and the feeling of the need for protection in a world of increasing technology, in which I feel disempowered and disconnected...)

TRUMPY

We watched "The Irishman," the new Scorsese movie, on our television monitor, courtesy of Netflix. I know, I know, you shouldn't watch movies on your TV screen, but I was happy I had not spent the $20 or more (that's senior rates!) for us to see it in the theater. Could not have sat for the full 3 1/2 hours anyway: for we seniors, the males at least, the aging bladder makes that problematic.

But I was happy for a different reason. I wouldn't argue that this as not a "good movie"--in the sense that it was expertly directed, that the acting was superb (if unsurprising: De Niro, Pacino, Pesci, the old gang), and so on. And even for three and a half hours, it was compelling. It kept us glued. I was left at the end with only one question: why?

When I asked my daughter, Sarah, what she thought, she had exactly the same comment, the same single word: why? Why devote all that talent, all that money, all those other resources, to making a film that she described--accurately, in my view--as "Trumpy."

When a film has a start-to-finish narrator, as this one does, he tends to set the tone for the movie's values. He's what the French call the "raisonneur," the one who holds the center. Frank Sheeran, the character played in "The Irishman" by Robert De Niro, is portrayed as the obedient servant of organized crime and corrupt union bosses (specifically, here, the powerful Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa.) A doting family man at home, he's a crook and a ruthless killer--the kind we're all supposed to love when he's played by the screen icon De Niro. (We actually kind of love them all because they're so familiar to us--Pesci, Pacino--and they have an unquestionable screen charm).

The problem, as I see it, is that all these characters are totally unrepentant, unremorseful, and they can do anything they want and get away with it. The film holds them unaccountable. Throughout. This is what my daughter describes as "Trumpy." It's power appropriated by corruption, and exercised with no accountability. It could be argued, I suppose, that the acts are presented as vile and reprehensible, but they're shown to us in the guise of a "good film" and we're invited to buy into them as a part of the enjoyment of a movie that brings us along with its slick narrative, seductive images, and engaging characters.

The "why," for me, is about the production of such a film particularly at this moment in history when it seems to celebrate the very values that are undermining our culture and our political life. We have a "godfather" president whose whims are treated as commands by those who catch the mere whiff of them, and whose only interest--aside from the crass appeal of money--is in maintaining the reins of his own power at all costs; a man who lacks the slightest human compassion or remorse; in a word, a sociopath.

Given the actor De Niro's very public disgust the president--which I assume is shared by others who contributed to the making of "The Irishman"--I guess we are supposed to experience the film as the indictment of Trumpism and Trumpy values, of shameless corruption and abuse. Unfortunately, it plays out as the opposite. Scorsese has always seduced us with the spectacle of the adroit perversion of American values represented by the mob. The appetite with which we slate the hunger for his fare suggests complicity.

Morality play, or exploitation of the dark side of our nature? I'll agree that it's debatable. But my own queasy feeling as I watched the conclusion of "The Irishman" suggests the latter.

BRRRR...

A cold day in New York. I was out early in search of a Saturday New York Times--for the hard copy crossword, really; I could read the rest online, but I'm not fond of digital crosswords. Give me pen and paper... Lazed around a while before heading south on Lexington to Grand Central Station, where we had spotted a nice gift to take home with us on Sunday. Stopped there for a cup of coffee and a bite of breakfast before heading back uptown to see the Ernst Ludwig Kirchner show at the Neue Galerie. (No pictures, please...) A fine exhibition, spanning his entire career, from pre-World War I days through the time of his suicide on the even of the Second World War. A sad story of depression and addiction, one affecting too many of our creative people. I was reminded of the energy and vivacity of his paintings, particularly those depicting the louche society of Berlin in the 1930s--a time when Christopher Isherwood was there, escaping the strictures of conventional England. New to me, though, were the lush green landscape paintings from the later years of Kirchner's life, spent in a chalet in picturesque Davos, Switzerland.

We have eaten good German/Austrian food on past visits, but the line this time was too long and our time too short, so we headed out and stopped on Madison Avenue for an egg salad sandwich, which we munched hurriedly in the cold on the steps of the Met. No New York visit is complete without a walk through the park, however, so we braved the cold and strolled down the paths closest to Fifth Avenue, past the big pond where toy boat enthusiasts sail their yachts...



After a while, however, we gave in to fatigue and hailed a cab to take us back to our hotel, where we enjoyed a welcome hour of rest before venturing out again for dinner and theater.

We had arranged to meet Ellie's nephew--well, our nephew--Danny and his wife at Chez Josephine, a French restaurant named after the great African-American singer/dancer who was the toast of Paris in the 1920s. Our table was placed beneath an eye-popping giant portrait of the scantily-clad legend, and we enjoyed the excellent products of true French cuisine. Great to catch up with family and share the stories of our very different and yet deeply connected lives...

Which was the theme, really, of The Thin Place, the play we saw at Playwrights Horizons, the off-Broadway theater right next door to the restaurants. Staged on a stark set, completely unadorned save for two arm chairs, with a cast of four characters, it examines "the thin place" where the membrane between the individual mental spaces we inhabit seems stretched so thin as to become transparent, even penetrable. Whether through trickery or illusion, we imagine ourselves and we find ourselves "communicating"--with each other, with the dead--in unsettling ways that defy rational explanation. I happen to think that the aesthetic experience--the play, the picture on the wall by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner--can be precisely that "thin place" where we come to share mysteriously in the reality of a human being like ourselves in so many ways, and yet so different, so distant, so unreachable.

It was raining again after the theater let out, and Danny worked some magic to hail a cab for us. Our goodbyes were too hasty, but we were grateful for the comfort of a ride back to our hotel.