Well Enough: Alone or Not?

What is the well enough we can't seem to let alone?  How many times have you seen or heard the question raised or delivered in some diatribe or performance review?

You have heard the description levied against you both in the active sense and its breach; you have thus been seen as tinkering with a thing long past its use-by date and someone who abuses protocol by not doing anything even though something is called for.  But in defense of those charges or rather in explanation of them, you believe that most individuals are tinkerers, fidgeters, fussers, wanting another shot at the improbable attainment of perfection, optimistic really that one can always do better.

You have yet to come to complete terms with doing better; the process of revision and perhaps even restructuring could possibly lead to a better effort.  This doesn't mean you in large measure coast at, say, eighty-percent level; you feel pretty comfortable that your efforts are at high quality.  Some of "well enough" goes back to yesterday's blog posting as it had to do with time and priority.  You would rather do fewer things well than more things at, say, seventy-five percent level.  

Indeed, you find your not being able to leave well enough alone responsible for it taking you to write such things as letters to the damn Bank of America, attempting to find out why they see fit to charge you $19.80 some months after you cancelled a checking account there, then becoming involved in an additional exchange in which they are on the cusp, or so they threaten, of reporting you to a financial reporting agency.  By your account, you have already invested twenty-five dollars worth of time on the matter, meaning if you knew how to pay the $19.80 and what it was for, you could have left well enough alone and remained free of contact with the damn Bank of America by paying the $19.80.  A phone call to the customer service provoked a long series of push-button responses that led to you leaving a message that provoked a return call that resulted in a shouting match that began after being told this conversation might be recorded for quality control purposes, to which you asked if you could record the conversation for the Small Claims Court.  You have learned that it is not easy to deal with customer service applications based in India.

India does have its problems but you happen to believe that India and Brazil, rather than China, are strong representations of the future.  They are for the moment well enough and although you have some interesting ties to India, particularly some of its culinary dishes, and are equally fond of a Brazilian restaurant on 45th Street in Manhattan, you are willing to ascribe a state of wellness enough to India and Brazil and leave them.

The true answer to all this, in your best understanding of William Hazlett's approach to the essay, is the fact of you becoming a contrarian, which is not necessarily crankiness although it reserves the right to be cranky when the occasion warrants.

Most days, you are content to let well enough alone, as well allowing sleeping dogs the opportunity to remain asleep, to defer the turning of most stones until later, and to avoid the necessity to mind much less pay any attention at all to your p's and q's.  The days of movable type being fond relics, you do not think you have any p's and q's; you are concerned with persons and things that matter and can scarcely find the time to stay current with them, and you are not--repeat, not--willing to let them alone.

Fraught

It is considered a sign of success in life even more significant than amassing large sums of money or property or of having some extensive collection when you have achieved the ability to do what you wish it, when you wish to do so.  Taken that way, success can also mean reaching a point where you specifically don't have to do things that are abhorrent to you; you are more or less free to choose.

 Thus success translates more to your ability to manipulate time, specifically time where you have the opportunity to do things related to maintaining health, curiosity, read, and consider narratives where scenarios of your creation seep forth.  You frequently find yourself caught up in the observation of and participation in such scenarios, caught up in the dazzle of a smorgasbord of ideas, each tempting you with its urgency, reminding you in a kind of irony how time manipulates you as much as you manipulate it.


Time had a slower tempo when you were younger, more or less waiting for ideas to settle in so that you could chose which ones you wished to investigate.  It seems to you that you had to put up with a good deal of boredom, waiting for things to gel, but that was then; you believe now that things have gelled because you were ready to take the necessary step of setting your own priorities, discovering what kind of life awaited you under the circumstances of you following priorities that may or may not have the best recommendations and experiences but which are nevertheless your priorities.


Sleep has become particularly fraught. You think to retire early, say eleven or possibly twelve, feeling the near smugness of a day well spent and well worked, but your dreams and between the acts of dreams seem sped up, dashes of images and sounds, clamoring for your attention, the attention you'd removed from your list of priority.  Before you know it, morning light bleeds in through the drape and it feels as though you'd not so much slept the deep sleep of forgotten dreams so much as you'd been writing reports of segments of dramas going on about you, wanting the restraint of editorial order.  Story is, of course, an imposed order upon the chaos of life and reality; in dreams, chaos wants its chance to break free and have its say.  As a result you are sometimes running or swimming or driving great distances through desert and coastal landscapes, and for some reason not yet clear, seeing the countryside from the window of a train rushing from Heathrow  to Paddington Station.


The day then becomes a rest from the intense chaos of sleep and the thrilling pull of your sleeping narrative voice.  But of course the day has plans of its own, time has plans of its own, reality certainly has plans, most of which have no role for you.


And so you sit in various venues, before your computer or a note pad, trying to make sense of some detail that has presented itself to you with a whispered promise that it has just told you something it has never told another.

Proof of Intent

Something is wrong with the server hosting your blog, causing it to operate at the moment in a read-only mode meaning you can read other blogs, but cannot post new material on your own.

Something similar has come to pass over the years you were with this practice and this format, earlier versions causing you a sense of desperation at the thought of a break in your consistency.  Over the years, the despair has turned to anger, reminding you of the times when events prevented you from taking your daily run and, later, your daily swim.

Habits of active construction are hard come by, the more so because you realize how important it is to you that certain of your habits be exercised daily.  You have written a good deal today, but like the fact of your animus toward Blogger dot com simply because it threatened to interrupt your habit is an animus that pleases you because it serves to ratify who you are and what you do; the outer world has nothing to do with it—this is you for yourself.

At some point, your server will be open and you will be able to post this and you will be able to fiddle with the time of posting so that it will appear to have been posted within twenty-four hours of yesterday’s brief essay-for-blog.  You did not fiddle with the date on this, which is your revenge because you have figured the way how to not let a little thing such as a server being incapacitated interfere with your own internal rhythms and whims.

Knowing how to manipulate the system in this manner is a matter of some comfort to you; it is proof of your growing habit of letting nothing stand in the way, of seeing not only priorities set into habit where you hope they will gel, but of taking your pleasure in them as they continue to define you.

First-Draft Life

You would be hard pressed to recount with any hope of accuracy the number of times an individual within your hearing had uttered the fabled words of regret and of self-exculpation, "If I had only known."  No telling, as well, how many times those words came soaring from your own mouth, filled with the need for some form of absolution for the particular error or otherwise wrong move you executed.  Or not.  Because this moan and wail also relates to not doing things that, in retrospect, would have been better done than not.

Fact is, even as advanced along the index of control freak command of the situation--any situation--as you are, it is better for you not to have known then--whenever then was--what you know now.

For one thing, we are still not completely unwired from the thralldom of our beginnings as gleaners, hunters and gatherers; we glean information--or should--from every transaction, filing it away into the cabinets and hard drives and recesses of--well, of us and who we are.

In a lovely kind of biologic justice, we are wired to forget anniversaries, our manners, and sometimes even our morals.  We start out with some, but not enough knowledge, causing our parents consternation if they love us or a kind of morbid fascination, waiting to see what will happen next, if they don't love us.  We do not always have a woolly mammoth or deer in sight; sometimes our spears and arrows miss and we starve.

If we knew everything with the certainty that water, if heated to 212 Fahrenheit degrees at sea level would boil, we'd likely become smug, more conservative and Puritanical than we already are, boring and, of course, bored.  Bored silly.  Smug as we are now, we would become even more smug because we know, and have a strong set of statistical credentials to ratify our knowledge.

What would be the point of reading a story if we already knew how it would end?  What would be the point of writing the story in the first place because the lesson of it would already have been learned, the discovery inherent in it would have been discovered.

And as long as we're in a writing mode, we would already know what the final draft would be like at the outset, obviating the need for revision and editing.

But the sad and wonderful truth remains:  If there is indeed a god, she is a writer, urging us all, as you have so often urged beginning writing students, to get it all down first, before considering revisions.  No matter how much we attempt to reverse the trend, life is lived first draft.  We can go home again to do what we now know better to do, but home isn't there the way it once was.  We can clone Rover or Rex or Fido, and they will break our hearts for looking exactly the way the original Rover or Rex or Fido looked, but they will be busy living their own first draft lives.

When you think about all the unanswered questions that haunt you, the mind boggles--because you like that word and any reasonable opportunity to use it--and in the bargain reels.  How many others are there out there, like you in some degree, perhaps asking even more questions than you do, all the while you thinking this is epic proof they are brighter stars than you?  Of course this, too, is a question.  Perhaps your choice of vocation has to do with the number of questions you ask, but there is also--isn't there?--the likelihood of you being what you are because you were not satisfied with the answers you got and wish to provide more dramatic and elaborate answers than the ones you feel are available.

What are you, then?  How should you fill out this particular form from this particular publisher? It makes some sense to say that you are a writer, an editor, and a teacher.  You might ask, as you mother did on frequent occasion that you are a mischief, or, as has been suggested from time to time, a troublemaker.  It makes no sense to say, when asked of your profession, that you are an asker of questions and a questioner of answers.  Even you, who could also list your occupation as a smart ass, could answer that such an answer sounds too smartassy.

You are caught in the grind of pairs of opposing forces, the chomping jaws of attempted reason; you are mugged and left without your wallet by the thugs of urgent need--for what thug ever has time on his side?--and the bureaucracy of filing a report so that the forces of justice may set forth to redress the crime.  But  your difficulties in describing your muggers reflect not so much your lack of observation powers but rather your preoccupation with your own, inner world.  Unless you know your attacker, as in, that was Fred, from the office, you are every bit at risk of getting your description wrong.  He was, you might say, a small, nervous person who spoke in a tone I found disrespectful and unpleasant.  Could you please be more specific, sir?  Well.  He kind of looked like Fred.  From the office.  But no way was he Fred.

Days later, Fred confronts you at lunchtime.  For fuck's sake, why did you tell the cops the dudes who pounded on you reminded you of me.  Now, they want an alibi, and I can't give them the real one because I promised I'd stop seeing her, so now I gotta go find a new alibi just because some mean ass dudes remind you of me, when I'd never done the slightest rude thing to you.

You apologize buy telling Fred that you said the first thing that came into your mind, which does not in any way satisfy or mollify Fred, who, because of you, is now a person of interest in the sense that not only you think the dudes who jumped you are reminiscent of him but in your confusion, you've got them thinking so, too.

Of course the entire mugging was a metaphoric one, including your wallet, which was not in fact taken but nevertheless represents your comfort zone, your sense of personal confidence in a world gone dangerously lunatic.  And now.  Now, the cops think of Fred when they think of these forces, which allows you some insight into how such things as racial and social profiling are nourished.

Everything, including questions, has consequences.  It is your fate as a graduate of UCLA, editor in chief of a number of book publishing ventures, teacher at a number of crazy universities, to be caught up in a particular batch of these consequences.  Just as it is possible in the eyes of the law to be considered a party to a conspiracy, which is by most accounts a felony, it is possible that your consequences make you a co-conspirator in a Kafka-like concatenation of events that may be best described as writing.

Household Gods

As you sit before your computer at your work area, your hands are resting on the edge of a table common enough in many branch libraries you've visited, but this particular table has been with you for years, making the trip north from Santa Monica when you moved to Santa Barbara; it has become your desk.  It was given you by your father.  Directly to your right is a two-shelf book case with sliding glass doors, a gift from the remarkable English anthropologist, Hilda Kuper.  Sitting atop the book case is an elaborate china pitcher, alive with figures of asters ranging from pinkish red to a full-blown red.  This pitcher and a series of delicate tea cups were much favored by your mother.  You have never taken tea from the cups nor used the pitcher for anything until last week, when it became the perfect vase for an ambitious bunch of red tulips you found at the Gelson's market.  Directly across the room from you is a five-drawer dresser of some period also beloved of your mother, while to your left is a four-drawer cabinet of the same era, also a reminder of your mother.  Living as you do now in a pleasant-but-small studio and large kitchen combo, space is an issue, particularly since the one closet, generous in proportion to the overall dimensions of the room, is nevertheless not what you have been accustomed to in past years.  When you moved in, your landlord in fact offered you a larger piece of furniture that would have picked up the functions the closet has had to delegate to other arrangements.  Thankful as you were, you refused the generous offer because, well, because the four-drawer dresser, while it could have gone entirely, or been stored, was after all, your mother's.

Only this afternoon, you went at an afternoon snack, a brioche from Reynaud's Patisserie, served up on a salad-plate-sized dish of thick clay, glazed in an umber glaze, its perimeter an imaginative display of brown and white dots arranged to suggest daisies.  You know nothing of the dish's provenance; you acquired it for ten cents at a sidewalk sale as you parked on the street next to the Trader Joe's on Milpas Street, its parking lots filled to capacity.

When the time comes to consider such things, you will offer any and all of these things to your nieces, but there is no telling which--if any at all--of these things they will want because it is not yet clear what if any meaning these things have for them.  Your youngest niece does in fact still have and use a waffle iron also much beloved by your mother.  She has as well a crock pot and electric skillet you used as a bachelor.  She also has an eclectic and diverse silver setting for four removed by you piece by piece from various New York hotels.  She has placed a "tibbs" on a set of thick, long-handled serving bowls from the now defunct Broadway Chowder House in San Francisco, a gift to you from a woman you loved enough to contemplate marriage with, secured by the gift of six fat marijuana cigarettes to a busboy at the Broadway Chowder House.

Things are only things until they become mementos, relics, artifacts.  A large basket, filled with shards of broken pots, have meaning to you not for their individual textures or patterns but because you came upon them one night when you lost your way walking about on the Second mesa of the Hopi Reservation.  A shaving brush once belonged to one of your dearest friends.  A Navajo carving is an inevitable reminder of an old pal who gave it to you.  The pencil sharpener in the shape of a Royal upright typewriter is a birthday present from a group of students you have not seen in over twenty-five years.

Many of your books are gifts from their authors or persons who knew of your fondness for the authors' work.  You are surrounded by mementos, relics, and artifacts, all of them in their separate way being of especial value to you because of some association beyond the beauty and/or usefulness of the thing.  Two of your favorite polo shorts, seriously frayed at their collars, were gifts from your sister.  You could get an unrusted hammer from a hardware store but prefer in stead the one given you by your sister.

The list of associations grows; so many of the things you are so close to on a daily basis are imbued with the spirit of a person, place, or event, even down to the faux marble paperweight in the shape of a book, commemorating your leaving Sherbourne Press to run the Los Angeles office for Dell Publishing, the two-foot rendering of F. Scott Fitzgerald, complete with a hip flask and a Princeton pennant, given you by Barnaby Conrad after he realized he'd already done one for inclusion in a large mural in a local bookstore.

These items are your lares and penates, your household gods, your fetishes and icons, binding you and caressing you within a world and home of your own making.  The presence of these things keeps you not merely from being lonely but from the unconscious awareness of loneliness; they remain constant reminders of your connectedness to a world about you.



Only yesterday, you heard from Thomas Sanchez, he of Rabbit Boss and The Zoot-Suit Murders, whom you'd not seen nor heard from for minimum twenty years.  Somehow he, in Paris right now, had seen something of yours and thus the exchange of words and a hoped for reunion.

There does come a time in life--the sooner, the better--where words and things and persons and events merge into artifacts and lares and penates, filled for a time with the energy of their current person.  They are the curios and mementos and relics of what it is to be alive and to reach out; they are the most precious things of all.

Trapped

Your strategy for readings, performances, and lectures may be called the cynic's approach or even the curmudgeon's approach because you are surely blood relatives to both, although in the case of readings, performances, and lectures, you like to think of your strategy as one reflecting self-preservation.  Not too long in the past, perhaps a month, you'd accordingly positioned yourself in the back row of a theater, where a screening was to begin in a matter of moments, smug in the fact that you were, indeed, mere feet from the rear door.

The only problem.

Just before the lights dimmed, your hostess saw you and said in these very words, "Are you sitting in the back row in case you have to make a getaway?"

Indeed, not ten minutes into the film, you did make your way under the cover of darkness into the resuscitating dusky light of evening, into fresh air, and a restorative Aloha Burger next door at The Kahuna Grill.

This past week, you deftly avoided a front-row seat saved for you at another venture, positioning yourself within access to an escape route.  Except that one of the principals saw you and sat next to you, dooming you to ninety minutes more audience time than you would have wished, during the course of which, you were rescued, not by a Kahuna Burger but by voices.

It is your belief that writers are either "hearers," meaning they hear their material, either dictated to them by some detached, mellifluous voice or by the ensemble voices of the characters they have created; or they are "seers," visualizing the events and in some cases, subtitles, such as those applied to foreign language films.  You are a hearer.  When you heard these particular voices of rescue, you thought with some amusement that they were real voices, speech everyone about you could hear.  But it soon came to pass that these detached voices were your own, doing their best to keep you looking attentive, alert, perhaps even interested in the material being presented about you.  They were lead-ups to arguments or confrontations of the sort characters in fully realized drama have when there is to be some important rhetorical explosion, a discovery or epiphany.

In general, you are supportive of live performance, of readings, poetry slams, plays, even lectures.  In general, you are also conservative with your cynicism and curmudgeonly mien, saving those for dealings with truly impossible adjuncts of bureaucracy, thus the welcomed appearance of these voices to help out.

When the going gets tough, the writer hears voices.