Common Pointless

I wonder if I’ve really scrutinized this experience like you’re supposed to have if you can type —Frank O’Hara, “For the Chinese New Year & for Bill Berkson” I was born in Tennessee. I was raised on ideas. Now I fall down as a person in bodily emulsion. But spiritually speaking? I’m not suffering. I’m looking at nine pictures on a light blue wall in black frames with white matting. In one the Secretary of Defense walks through Iraq in a suit and boots, surrounded by a thick white line. If it wasn’t like this I wouldn’t care, which is not to say I wouldn’t mind. Some find this layering of thoughts within the ever-diminishing moment to be a complete defense to the charge of privilege, but surely more is expected, and there is no defense; we commit crimes and show ourselves and each other unbelievable mercy. To be meticulous is to give up in a way still marked by effort, which for many is the one, true art. What did the New Critics think about plagiarism? Repetition as a form of time travel? Conservatives prefer repetition in service of an incantatory mourning for a lost world, but one plagiarizes the self in the commission of boredom. Maybe it’s the difference between new meanings and a complex weave of old ones, or those who hold no new meanings are possible. Or maybe all that’s possible is a new ordering of priorities within experiences. A sensibility and its chosen course are what matter most to me. The present calcifies into interlocking crystals, leaving so much gratuitous precedent to be lined up in the narrow hallway of one’s attention that a trajectory could be plotted to anywhere. You go through each room and remove a single wall, but only in your mind, and still the house collapses. It wasn’t built to last. What kind of imposition would that have been anyway? Words on a page and a bare molecule of intentionality coming through this pinhole of sensation and time. My face, lit by screens and angled penitently towards coffee, withers like a democracy under its loudest features. Sometimes it’s hard to watch, I know. Not at all like yours, or yours, presences to which my life is a distracted vigil, having found no higher calling. Certainly not this, which could happen or not and all that's at stake is whether I’ve told you. You drive us through the rain in Virginia after taking me to see my 93-year-old grandfather in Nashville. My dad and I went to his hospital room at night, where he told me about the Korean man he’d met at the church he built in Nagoya who had to hide from police after becoming a suspect in the kidnapping of a local teenager. He hadn’t kidnapped her. Years later they learned she’d run away in the middle of the night to avoid an arranged marriage. But prejudice against Koreans ran high in late forties Japan, so my grandfather’s friend became the target of an investigation whose misguidedness ensured its longevity. I forgot to ask my grandfather, whose name is Ernest, what Nagoya was like in the late forties, after a quarter of the city was incinerated by American firebombing that Robert McNamara, who also lived to see 93, later conceded was a war crime. A few weeks after the Korean man disappeared he called Ernest and asked to meet at a popular restaurant in town. Ernest arrived at the appointed time and found the restaurant packed with people. A hostess, upon learning whom Ernest was meeting, directed him to the restaurant's second floor, which he found completely empty except for his friend who sat alone at a table at the far end and waved Ernest over as soon as he came up the stairs. They talked for a couple of hours, during which time the man explained that he was innocent, but, given the conditions in Nagoya, he would have to remain out of sight, at least for now. He thanked Ernest for his friendship and went on to explain that he owned the restaurant they were sitting in, as well as a couple of nearby hotels, and he was actually quite wealthy. A few years later, Ernest’s job as a missionary was moving him to Tokyo, and apparently his friend learned he was leaving because he called Ernest again and asked to meet at ten the next night, this time at an address my grandfather recognized as being in the industrial section of town, mainly warehouses and the like, with few stores or restaurants and probably no people around so late. With some trepidation, Ernest went to the address at ten and waited. The streets were empty except, after fifteen or twenty minutes, a yakimo man whom Ernest heard a couple of blocks away. Yakimo men drive carts around at night selling sweet potatoes—yakimo—that are roasted over charcoal on the cart itself. You can hear them at night bellowing out, "Yaaakiiiiiiiiiiiimooooooo!" Eventually the yakimo man came right up next to Ernest, then stopped his cart and said, in Japanese, “It’s me.” It was his friend, who explained that this was one of several disguises his circumstances unfortunately required. He said he’d heard Ernest would soon be moving, and he just wanted to see him again to thank him for his friendship. They spoke briefly, and then my grandfather's friend rolled his cart away, occasionally calling out, "Yaaakiiiiiiiiiiiimooooooo!" And now you and I are driving through Virginia again, the sky a further gray. I woke up this morning with you in Roanoke, thirty-five years old for the first time, in love and astonished. I jogged three miles while listening to “The Weight” seven times in a row and thought the song could be a pacifist anthem: you righteous people go on and kill each other; all us sinners will be here, living in peace and mutual assistance. The feeling vanished, or perhaps deepened past visibility, when I heard about the acquittal. Bastille Day. A wary sun bided its time in the drowsy grad school of an overcast sky, and then, finding its moment, delivered a bleaching intensity to the reading glasses resting on the dashboard of our financed Acura under a dewy windshield, casting bleary water shadows through the double lens of windshield and glasses across the car’s front seat, the deep blue fabric of which was brushed into dark and light patches working crossways from the sun cast complexly through fat leaves of the adjoining yard’s many hardwoods. A single leaf shadow bobbled over the plastic lid of a day-old coffee cup sitting in the center console next to the gear shift, white and blue-gray mixing over the still black hole of the spout, a small, circular cinema. Doubled, tiny threads of dust on the rearview glowed in a stripe of light reflected from the trunk forward, trembling minutely as the air inside the Acura warmed, circulated, and gained humidity, seashells of fog developing from the bottom of the windshield at the defroster’s vents. Spots of dew on the roof shrank as they dried, leaving concentric trails of pollen and air dirt in a yellow-brown haze against the car’s light blue exterior, sediment at the level of microns building glacially over weeks of quickly warming summer mornings. Seatbelts and downward seams in the upholstery lent no sense of vertical logic to the interior. The passenger side buckle rested papally on a pile of folders and papers in the seat. The silver tip of the buckle breached the edge of a pie chart printed on the piece of paper at the top of the pile. The chart was in grayscale and demonstrated striking productivity. Before the dewdrops on the windshield dried, the bumpy shadows of four of them fell evenly along the rounded edge of the chart’s largest triangle, giving the edge’s black line the appearance of growing darker as it travelled through the dewdrop shadows. Up very close, the paper itself was a thicket of rough fibers, a cotton ball flattened, and the black line of the chart’s edge was a dense, black dust resting on the thicket, containing to one side a far less concentrated swarm of black particles.