It is New York City; an easy place to hate. It’s no special thing to find it overwhelming. It is much harder to see it as voluptuous, full of ritual, rebels and roots. And the truth, plain as day, is that it functions as a hub. In the 500 miles from Boston to D.C. lies 100 million people. It is the only place on earth where these numbers exist in proportion. It’s a vortex more than a city, a motor more than a vessel. The Northwest’s environmental prerogatives are contingent upon it’s foundation. It’s kept clean because it started clean. Whereas New York has been a shit hole since the Western whites moved in–and so nothing has been lost under the trash and smoke: that is it’s truth. One of them.

It is commuter trains; have you ever taken a commuter train out of Grand Central? It’ll just kill you. Oh! You rise from the dredges of subway tracks and you’re suddenly in an alabaster atrium, wide and grand so that any poor man could walk in and feel exactly the same as any of the others. Down the tiled slope into the main concourse, the highest ceiling in the whole shifting city, and the ceiling: it’s thick sky blue with the zodiac painted in a string of constellations. And you could be in any time period now, like the poor man, the same as any others from 1871 to 2071. Nothing has changed. And if you stand by the commuter trains, you feel it more. You have to go underground and Oh my God, people have been doing this for 100 years, stopping for cold sandwiches, hot coffee, dizzied by the habit of arrivals, departures, to-and-from.

Sweeney and I rode the MetroNorth upstate recently. His younger brother fell into a bad way this past weekend and Sweeney had to drive up there quick, and we planned for me to follow later on the train by myself. When I got the station I was so googly-eyed and beside myself with romance (despite a family emergency; just me & Grand Central) that I went to the wrong terminal and almost missed my ticket.

The tragic. It is Woody Allen; never able to evade his own pitiful end, full of lack. Almost every one of his films asks the same question: We used to love each other, and now we don’t; how did this happen?” And there’s never an answer. He walks into this next movie, the same character with a different name and he asks it again. Again. Again. The day after Sweeney and I watched Annie Hall, Greg mentioned that he was in the mood for his 70s stuff, and I said, “You don’t say.” And thus the movies have continued.

After the family emergency, his little brother unmoved as ever, Sweeney and I sat on the Hudson’s banks in Sleepy Hollow, at a spot he often went to in high school. We ate tuna salad sandwiches we made. The air was clean and dry, and there were gusts of dead and yellow leaves, and it was freezing. The forest stretched brown and red for miles, and by four o’clock the sun slanted orange and there were shadows and it was time to go back.

That night, after he and Greg did book group, we made a three course meal: fresh pumpkin soup with curry sauce, spinach salad with kidney beans and baby button mushrooms; then boiled skinned Yukon Golds with fresh dill, spaghetti squash with parmesean cheese, and grilled salmon with peppers; finally, pomegranate seeds stirred into softened generic vanilla ice cream, and two .22s of gourmet Oregon beer. We ate the ice cream during a Corresponding Society meeting where we went through the slush pile for Correspondence No. 2.

The tragic. Right. It is using EZ-Wides to roll additive-free cigarettes. Oh. The tragic! It is the Williamsburg Bridge, walked across winding at night. The four Indian Restaurants stacked on top of each other respectively fighting for our business last Friday. Diner food. Economic recession. New York City. Commuter trains. Woody Allen. The tragic is not a sad thing, it is not a car accident or a lost cat (Phillip has found another family; Helen and Quentin remain implacable)–the tragic is hilarious, chaotic, burning, something you cannot look in the eye, something you can only get an aching sense from.

Not last night, but the night before, Amber was homesick. She said as much, and for this tough girl, for her to say it was more like a proposal. I said, “Here’s what you need. To immerse yourself in your current environment in a way that is so satisfying, your thinking of home remains but the sickness leaves.”

It was eleven o’clock at night. Jenny was working on a story, lying on the floor. She said, “Ok, put on your shoes! We’re going out!”

We looked around, uncomfortable like old people. Now? And so we left, and strolled in the mist around the East Village. Stopped at the Cake Shop for vegan moonpies and peanut butter pie. Jenny and I roared about the primordial unity, and someone said, “I’ve heard you two have this same conversation fourteen times,” but I didn’t remember even one. Then, on our way to the subway, we passed a narrow hookah bar on 2nd Ave and 1st St. We decided to stop there, too, an old man coughing violently on our way in to the darkened lounge. The whole parlor was made of beds: raised in front of the windows, on lofts, in corners. It was made of nests, pure nests, and we were the only ones in there until three in the morning, laying on our sides against pillows. Jenny said, “Let’s get two,” her decadent side always appearing in great, red, feathery flashes. Tragic! We smoked two at the same time, apple and cranberry, and I climbed into bed with sleeping Sweeney at five and got up for school the next morning like some song bird.

That picture from Time magazine after World War II ended, of a soldier tipping his working-woman on her heels (albeit, in a nurse smock and painted pantyhose seams) and kissing her hard on the mouth, gives me goosebumps every time I see it, and I saw it today in an advertisement and put my fist to my sternum, holding my breath. Why? The same reason that water rises in me when I walk by Maggie Brown’s sandwich sign: Come in for a burger, and welcome the NEW United States! Because it doesn’t really matter if the photograph was honest, if America was really all that happy when their sallow and shell shocked young men returned to shore, and it doesn’t matter if Barack Obama can deliver everything he promises, if he’s the antichrist or a saint. The true feat, that just makes my knees knock like some sore-bottomed Nationalist, is the moment of great spirit that our country–a country–was brought to, in both of these moments, weeping in front of the television.

Southwestern New Mexico is the most lightening-struck region in the country. We were driving between Glendale and Mogallon, and we could see a rainstorm clean, fifty miles ahead of us, though above us there was only clear blue sky. What must a region do to its inhabitants’ personality? In a land where you can have physical foresight, I imagine that it equips you with certain traits and skills and emotional abilities that are specific to the land. This was an old mining area as well. In the hills, we stopped in a town called Silver City to ask for directions to the San Francisco hot springs, and we came across a young, burnt, earthy couple standing outside a Montessori school with their kid. The woman was holding glass from a car window, amidst some kind of repair. We pulled over, and she sidled up to us and pretended to roll down her window. “What seems to be the problem?”

We asked her about the hot springs and she said, this time of year, we’d find mostly flats of steaming hot mud and no pools. We thanked them and drove down their narrow downtown, just a few blocks long: a coffee shop, a Mexican restaurant, a food co-op, a book store, a legal office. I said, “The difference between this and the West Coast is that people out here really had to work–there’s a sense of survival. This land couldn’t grow anything.”

Sweeney said, “Yeah. And the hippie couple we saw, looked like any other hippie couple except they looked worn out and had dirt on their face. Like hippie couples probably should.”

The road to the West was “paved in betrayal” (said Carrie Gormley, the night we had the part for the end of the world, when the scientists turned on the particle accelerator in August.) Our writer-in-residence, Susanna Moore, gave a lecture on Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, reminding us of the West’s nasty beginning. It was a crazy, cut-throat endeavor, trying to get out there, and even those generations removed from the conquest, still have it in their veins.

Though, Portland, Oregon may be exempt. We arrived mostly by boat.

For Halloween I was Woody Allen and Robert was Annie Hall. We simply had to trade clothes and make my eyebrows thicker, mopier. We staged spats at Rope, and sat in the back on a couch near the end of the night, wondering if the holiday would ever feel like the wild celebration it used to when we were kids. The bar was full, but everyone drank their drinks standing still. Where is the dancing? The pranks to put people on edge? This is a celebration of uneasiness!

Sweeney, Greg and I walked home and ran into a man asking for change, who proceeded to sing us a fifteen-minute medley of pop songs.

Oh, if the world were ours.

We saw the new Charlie Kaufman movie last weekend, Synecdoche, New York. It was brilliant, about a man, maybe, who tries to get as closed to infinity as he can. We exited the theater in the heart of Times Square at two in the morning, dazed, but in the perfect place. And we went to John’s place in Midwood the other night, to watch an old Vincent Price movie. I’d never been to Midwood. I forget, sometimes, that there are other places to live in Brooklyn. I stopped for a slice at DiFara’s Pizza (Avenue J & 15th St). Since I’ve lived here, I can count the number of times I’ve had real Brooklyn pizza–but this place, according to John, was historic. I can tell you what it was like, but I’ll never do it justice:

a very old man stands behind the counter, bent over fresh dough, slowly spreading sauce with a ladle, grinding the cheese, letting the water out of a package of mozzerella and placing the gob on the pie. Sometimes you have to wait thirty, forty-five minutes for a slice. When he takes the pizza out of the oven, he carries it to the patrons waiting at the cash register. He brings out a wad of basil and a pair of craft scissors and cuts the leaves over the surface, snip, snip, snip. He takes an old can of olive oil and drizzles it over the top. Then, as though the customers have just appeared, he says lazily, “OK, who wants a slice?” It was the best pizza I have ever had.

For a while my hair was getting so long that Sweeney had to help me brush the back every morning. Then Sophie sat me in her kitchen and trimmed the dead ends while I squealed and asked her to slow down, what are you doing, what are you doing? It’s just two inches. Yes, I know, but I was bald until I was four-years-old and my hair has never grown this long in my whole life; this is my dream. “It’ll be fine,” she said. “This is good for it.” And now, Sweeney helps me brush the back every morning out of habit.

If you are available, and are reading these posts from my hometown, you must go to this performance. She is a holy woman, a musician of time and space:

–

The UDLE will have the great good fortune of reading/performing in preface to a musical performance by the amazingly talented folk songstress Diane Cluck. This is happening atop a mountain in Portland, in an anti-igloo dug from the ground. There will be beer, cookies, and magic. When we say “once in a lifetime” — as though it didn’t apply to every moment of our lives — we particularly apply it to this night, doubtlessly full of unspeakable awe.

f.e.
y PRESENTS:

Diane Cluck & Anders Griffin
Malcolm Rollick
The Unwin-Dunraven Literary Ecclesia

October 29, 2008: 7pm
8335 NW Whitney Ave
Portland, OR 97217
Donations Appreciated

[Directions via public transit: Take the 17 bus to Sauvie Island. Get off on the stop right after the St. John’s Bridge which is Bridge and Springville. People will be driving people to the top of the mountain from there. They can’t drive people all night, so if you’d like a ride, try and arrive ‘earlier’ (the show’s around 7:30 PM). If you’d like to walk, it’s a 15 minute hike up hill. Take the first extreme left across from the old boat and continue on the main road until it turns into a gravel. **Please try to RSVP if you’re driving** so folks at the site know how many carspaces to clear — contact.fey@gmail.com. Show’ll be early enough that people to catch the bus back.

We were sitting on the patio when we heard our gate rattle. We looked up; Ray Ray was on the landing, saddling his bike. “This place sure has gotten old,” he said running his fingers through the fake cobweb. One of the plastic spiders jiggled to the ground from the decorations Chanelle and I had put up last week. Greg left the table to let Ray Ray in, and Sweeney looked up from Thoreau’s Walden to say hello, his feet propped next to his cooling lunch. I nodded from the damp garden patch, where I was hanging wet clothes on a wooden beam to dry–it’s Sunday, and the laundromat closed early, so I had to run across the street and stuff our dripping garments into a sack.

“I know you’re closing,” I said to the first face upon walking in. “I just have to grab my things.”

The woman sneered at me and said, “I ain’t got nothin’ to do with it,” and carried on folding her warm napkins. And a large, freckled woman standing by the detergent dispenser in the back said, “You do what you want. Your load was done a looong time ago.” She twisted her face and shook her head. My face flushed. I had mangled some kind of laundromat etiquette, a simple, social grace. My leg was bleeding from a deep scrape I got from taking the trash out this morning–a box corner sticking through the plastic bag–and I felt shame rise purple in my cheeks.

On the way home, I found a new-looking blender and a dirty crock pot on the curb.

Greg brought a loaf of fresh bread. He has been doing this every Sunday since August. I made yams and zucchini, pasta boiled in black bean soup with extra sweet corn, cooked kale. We put pumpkin butter on the bread, and had lunch on this Indian summer day. Greg said that in Russia, they call Indian summers, “old lady” summers.

About a month into school, I found myself rushing from place to place: my dorm-apartment with the girls in the old Willoughby projects, the Gates apartment to see Sweeney and Chanelle and Chris and Robi. I was leaving underwear here, and textbooks there, and in a hurry every morning from one place to get something from the other place before tumbling into class. In this blur, my bicycle was stolen, and I walked through the park with Sweeney that night over Italian ice, crying, and remembered as we spoke, that this was how I had lived most of my life, and consequently had sworn off upon moving to Brooklyn last year. Successful, I was for a time, and then it happened again. The bicycle breach was a symptom. This split was the virus; two homes.

The thing about homes is that you can never have too many. Hallelujah; home! However, a misplaced sense of loyalty and obsessive equalizing sometimes divides you into pieces too small to be present, helpful, or enjoyable at any of the homes. I remember feeling this way often, as soon as I reached this awareness, from the time I was twelve onward: rushing between my parents’ houses, friends’ bedrooms, and then boyfriends’ kitchens–always grieving a lack, crying, torn. All places were lacking, nowhere was I present enough. And there was always shit left behind, some place. So.

So I’m an adult now, and I can choose my home.

Sweeney and I walked back to Gates that night, and still weepy but laughing, I told him that if I was going to move in I had to a) have some space to disappear if I so please, b) a way to make some part of his room mine, or ours, and c) a mattress topper. Within a day, he’d cleared out an empty corner of the apartment and built himself a desk (hammer, nails, plywood) with three-tiered shelves, and emptied his old one for me, in a room with a door I can shut. Many days of quiet, centered work have followed: two separate ghost stories, a story of the old Italian woman I used to live across the street from, a house that changes shape, Making Skeletons Dance, scene-blocking for Robert’s and my play, letter-writing, daydreaming, poking at the Smith-Corona self-contained typewriter we found in the dumpster; reading Murakami, Sherwood Anderson, Kant, Alice Munro; laying in bed next to Chanelle, talking, watching movies together (most recently, The Enigma of Caspar Hauser by Herzog.)

Sweeney found a big, black dresser on the street, big enough for both of our things. Oh, the romance. All the cats sleep with us on the new memory foam mattress pad. We bought it from Target last Sunday evening, clawing through the crowds of Hassidic post-synagogue shoppers and ghetto girls. “I guess we have to make this kind of trip once a year. Just once,” I said. For tape measures, packaged Halloween web, underwear, Band-Aids. And we sleep deeply, sometimes too late, in our new home.

I sat down with Lily, Allie and Lyndel over lunch and a bath, and they understood. I will keep some of my things there, be there for coffees, dinners, long talks, desires.

It is whippet cold, now. Already winter. Greg and I left the Diana Cluck concert while Sweeney was talking to an old friend, and we walked through St. Mark’s Place to the last AutoMat on Earth, for hot cookies and ice cream. We talked about bloated culture of sexual assault, the responsibility that has abandoned many women in times of process. I said, “It feels like it should snow.” And it wasn’t the temperature, it was the mood.

On Arthur Rimbaud’s birthday, Chanelle made a feast of of winter soup, pork chops, okra and fresh, warm baba ganoush on whole wheat rolls. Rimbaud turned one hundred fifty-four-years-old. We drank brandy, red raspberry tea, and read his poems and passages from his biographies around the table.

Maggie Brande was the first person I ever knew who loved Rimbaud so–she’d read the dramas of he and Verlaine, keep his books under his bed. I talked to her that night, an arm’s length across the country, California. She was celebrating a birthday, too. In fact, the birthday of the young man she is marrying, up in the mountains, in their Airstream. Drunk, she said, “Everything is meant to be!” And is it? After all of this time, in her tempered and loving community, she still has a little bit of wholly rude, face-spitting, dreamy, horny, violent Arthur Rimbaud following her around.

“Novel”

1871

Everyone got sick at the same time. It’s like a giant ball pit, all of us spreading germs. The first night it came on, I took a hot bath and then put on socks, sweaters, leggings, hats, and climbed under the blankets with a twig of bear root in my mouth and burned the bug right out of me. I fevered, and in the morning felt weak but well.

It has gotten so cold, we can’t sit out in the courtyard any more. Down to the 30s. I’ve been taking midterms and going to sleep early with Sweeney. Reading Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy in which he asserts that Greek society couldn’t begin to think about the tragic until their society was at its most secure and powerful point–that is, until they were farthest removed from tragedy as they could be. I think this is what it’s like for most places, most people. I met a lot of friends at Joe’s Pub to see Diane Cluck play her beautiful songs. She sold ginkgo nuts at her merch table, which she had purchased from the Fort Greene farmers market earlier that day at the same time Sweeney and I had been there, poking at the kale and eating apple cider donuts. Oh! it’s damn cold. We have to sit at the picnic table outside to pick up the Internet, and it’s bright, wild blue but sterling cold. I can’t feel my toes.

Lily and I walked to downtown Brooklyn to the new Trader Joes, and walked back with four full bags, joyously (and defensively) in the evening bluster. Lily and Allie hosted a fall potluck. One girl brought a pecan-pumpkin pie, still soft from the oven. Ray Ray invited us up to his rooftop to watch the 1963 Lord of the Flies projected onto the side of the building next door. Chanelle, Sweeney and I burrowed under a blanket. The clouds swept by, silvery against the black sky and the once-full moon, moving fast. Ray Ray’s neighbor, Carol, a Ruth Gorden-like middleaged woman made so hallucinatory by alcohol you can’t make heads or tails of anything she says, came as well. She gave Chanelle lemon balm that she grew in her garden. She brought organic tomatoes and goat cheese. She talked through the movie. She asked who accrued the film projector, and a guy named James said he did. And motioning up, Carol said, “And, James, did you have anything to do with the clouds goin’ on up here?”

Wedged high up in the Apollo Theater last week, I looked down at Jenny Lewis [from Rilo Kiley, The Watson Twins, Cursive] kicking around the stage in her denim jumpsuit and black cowboy hat, and was reminded of the marriage. My marriage to her, or her marriage to music, or the marriage between presentation and the thing being presented. Every time I see her perform, and it’s been five, six times now, its like seeing her for the first time, because I realize I’ve forgotten her lessons and need to learn them over.

Her lessons: The Mexican serape spread over the top of her piano, the lion mask hanging on the guitar rack, the Mona Lisa mural on the amplifier, and the Christmas lights, everywhere–these are objects she seduces us with. Her wardrobe, the slight dance of her hips, and her best-friend band–these are the things we come to understand her by. By which point, engaged and subsumed by the way she treats the audience as family, we find we’re already wound in her music, lost in it longer than we’d noticed.

We had a reading for Correspondence in the top floor of the school library, the oldest one of Brooklyn (glass floors, wrought iron tempered by Tiffany) and it went fine; we sold books, met a few new people, and shared the journal with some professors, but the form is unforgiving. Why does music get the energy brimming at the sage, and not writing? Writers like Michelle Tea get the energy–make it! and so does Ariel Gore: feeding the audience cookies at a formal panel, inviting fire breathers for a book tour of a carnival story, fueling cross-country literary sideshows, reading at bars and selling flatware and handmade clothes. Readings and writers are often mutually exclusive–it is hard to get even students excited about r.e.a.d.i.n.g.s. The word doesn’t even sound alive: so what do we do? We do like Jenny.

I love Jenny Lewis. Maybe this alienates some people from my point. Think of someone else: Frank Zappa, Gershwin, Garrison Keilor, The Rollingstones used to, when they had more energy, like Rock and Roll Circus. And think of Barack Obama–it’s his baritone, measured voice, patient and condescending to the politicians he doesn’t like; language like “alternative energy” and “I inhaled frequently; that was the point” [in response to being asked whether he smoked pot in college], and before you know it, you’re standing knee-deep in his policy, wearing his buttons, a sort-of crush–even if the media has not posed any seriously challenging questions for either candidate in the recent debates, and even if he hasn’t proved himself any more competent than the other guy.

The other guy does not give us things to understand him by. No baritone. (He also talks a lot about the war, the war, the war.)

Regarding “the marriage:” I do not mean gimmicks, bright lights, smoke and mirrors. I mean treating the audience like a living organism, feeding them, acting as though they’re kin, inciting them. Like a circus. Without a trapeze. I mean a marriage of the presentation and the work itself, so that it becomes one, delicious thing. What do I mean? If I knew, I’d be out there already, in my bus, inching across the country picking up stories in one town and carrying them to the next. I do not know yet; do you?

My mother is here. We’ve been walking around the neighborhood, she’s been walking to and from Redhook. “This city is so energizing,” she says. We sat on the steps in Fort Greene Park the other day watching girls from the Walt Whitman Houses project across the street practice a stomp dance one one of the crypts. She came to The Salon and sat in the smoke. She was relaxed, willing, would sit through a thousand Salons if she had to, and pet the cats if that was all there was. We went to Long Island City and saw a giant warehouse called Five Pointz, covered in graf[fiti]. There were fire escapes to climb, wrapping all around, and dragons and letters and tags and thug faces. Some kids were filming a music video on the sidewalk next to the walls.

She played chamber music with her friends in a bakery this morning. They set up in a corner (flute, viola, violin, cello) and played Hadyn and Mozart while people came for their morning coffee, their sweet potato pie. Robi, Chanelle, Sweeney and I came and watched until lunchtime. Chanelle has fallen back in love and he lives in Connecticut. Her teepee has been empty often.

The economic crisis is here. The elections! it’s like a sitcom. What do they say?–that national crisis means big banking for broadcasting stations? I do not have money. Maybe this alienates some people from my point. What did Annie Dillard say about the 1929 crash?–  “..were they surprised when paper money turned out to be only paper money? What did they think it was made out of?”

At the end of August, we high-tailed it to Cape May for the blessing ceremony of Robi’s brand new niece. Sweeney had a pinched nerve in his gums, I had a cracked rib, it was the middle of the night but we took the trip anyway. We slept in the open air on his in-law’s back lawn when we arrived, and headed to the ceremony in the morning:

FLASHBACK!

“…the priestess said to mom and dad: Aradia has been with you since the day you met! Chanelle and I cried, and then everyone, barefoot, led by the great-grand-parents, paraded to the ocean and dipped Aradia in (to her quivering dismay), and then we all jumped in and swam.”

It got cold, real quick. Sweaters-and-stockings cold, like a quick “get off the porch and come inside” whip on the ass, risin’ up like wind between my bare legs–after all these years: put on some pants, fool! Cold, and I still don’t want to dress with the season, don’t want to stuff my pinafores under cumbersome coats or bulk my feet in boots. Hell, no! Old leather teacher kicks and sleeveless dresses. It is beautiful here, the prettiest strange place during most seasons. Dustin visited last October and we walked for bagels one morning, out the campus gates and I said, “There’s nothing like a New York morning!” while Rhapsody in Blue played from a cheesy, divine boom box, and Dustin said, “Oh, come on. You could say that about anywhere.” I am not partial to one region, at home in many–and he was wrong. There is nothing like the whiskey-sharp flick of this city’s dawn.

After New Mexico, Sweeney said, “I guess I’m just partial to the East Coast weather on the grounds of familiarity,” and I said, “Hogwash. I am, too, but I was raised in a Western valley,” and he said, “You’re implacable.” And OK! I got sweaters from the Salvation Army, three blocks South on Classon Ave. in the fourth floor of an unmarked warehouse: brown lambswool, orange-red 100% cashmere from Saks Fifth Avenue, 1986, and a twelve-year-old’s hooded sweatshirt that smells like shampoo. I promised Lily I wouldn’t ignore winter this year.

Lily was so happy tonight (connecting with Sweeney over lentil soup and joining the conversation, if-you-will) she even realized that “ecstasy” is not synonymous with “joy:” It’s more of a senselessness, she said. She yelled, really, jabbing her cigarette like a wand. She said, My brother would choose County [jail] over the stars. We absolutely create our own circumstances–and not subconsciously, but very directly! Ah, she said. He didn’t want to be some pile of nerves floating in the universe, so he built a house around himself.

The Karrot is going through hard times. I take home lots of expired milk and eggs. Radhames met John McCain when he was out to dinner with his diplomat buddy, and McCain swept his friend away to make deals for the votes of Dominican-Americans. Radhames was incensed. McCain didn’t look Obama in the eyes at the debates–in New Mexico, Sweeney and I watched the clean-up on CNN in wide hotel bed on our last night. Also, we are about to enter some wild economic depression.

So shall we build pirate ships? Squat on land; whoever pees on it first, wins? Sweeney and I were already talking about buying a sail boat, two years down the road, big enough to sleep on and store bananas and bicycles. Our economy’s framework is built in a way that prevents 1929 from happening all over again–so that narrows it down to anything else.

In class, we’ve been reading a lot of German transcendentalist philosopher, Immanuel Kant. It’s been a Kant bootcamp. In his book, Groundwork for Metaphysics and Morals, he said “…if an unfortunate man, strong of soul and more indignant about his fate than despondent or dejected, wishes for death and yet preserves his life without loving it, not from inclination or fear, but from duty, then his maxim has moral content.” Sitting around a table of candles last spring with Lyndel, Robi–and Sweeney telling us that the thing that kept his father alive that July, in the darkest moment his brother found him all balled up and sallow, was that his own framework was there to break his plunge.

The trick is to know what you believe in so fully, that when the shit hits the fan, your ethics hold you up without your thinking about it, by the armpits even, like a dead-drunk. You look silly, maybe, with your maps and diagrams and kids you have to fix nutritious lunches for, on the brink of a breakdown, but those tasks, that framework, tides you over until someone finds you in your bathrobe on some sad, hot morning.  And this thing Kant calls “duty” is the closest thing he can find that explains acting out “morals,” and that “all so-called moral interest consists simply”–that’s right, friends, simply–”in respect for the law.”

Alisdair and I got fancy cheese and proschiutto at a tapas bar we stumbled on the other night. It had been a long time since we’d dined together, and he said I’d changed his life, that Jack’s 99 Cent Superstore in Manhattan sold Presidente brie. We talked about the things of our days, the ones we loved. Told him Sweeney and I were going to New Mexico, and on the way to the train he bought a shiny potted plant from a street vendor in the dark.

Sweeney and I went to New Mexico, on a shotgun-whim with free tickets anywhere in the continental United States. We flew into Albuquerque, stayed on Route 66 in an old motel, got Auyervedic breakfast with Lindsey, the apple of Robi’s eye while he was on the road this summer: she happened to be in town. We drove into the desert and did back country camping in a white gypsum missile range, slept in rock formations and on a landscape like the one from The Little Prince. We found the ghost town where Butch Cassidy used to hide, two-hours into the mountains and nothing but abandoned shafts and a broken theater. We drove through plains, antelope, crickets the size of cell phones. We hiked through old silver mine catwalks, and could see rain storms from a hundred miles away. We bought Gershwin, Miles Davis’ Blue, Etta James and Leonard Cohen’s New Skin for Old Ceremony and that’s all we listened to for days. Nothing could have fit the landscape more: eerie, wide, high above sea level. We drove as deep into the Trinity Site as they’d let us. What the hell were they thinking–confusing The Father, The Son and the Holy Ghost with the atomic bomb? We thought of erecting a school somewhere South on the Rio Grande. Silver City was the coolest town, and Sante Fe was the lamest.

Land is cheap out there, but land that is wounded and forgotten. Land does not let you forget that you abandoned it as soon as you depleted its resources. They don’t call ‘em ghost towns for nothing; full of spirits that haven’t been freed.